Seth Godin on Why You Shouldn’t Take Critics Too Seriously

“Have you noticed just how often the critics disagree with one another? And how often they’re just wrong?

“And yet we not only read them, but we believe them. Worse, we judge ourselves, contrasting our feelings with their words. Worse still, we sometimes think we hear the feared critic’s voice before we even ship our work out the door…

“Every single book I’ve written has gotten at least a few one star reviews on Amazon. Every one. The lowest possible rating, the rating of, “don’t bother reading this, in fact it never should have been written.” Not just me, of course. Far better writers, writers like Fitzgerald, Orwell and Kincaid have gotten even more one-star reviews on their books than I can ever hope to.”

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I will only add that if you have perfectionist tendencies, then your inner critic is probably the least reliable critic of all.
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Study: College Students Motivated by Intrinsic Rewards do Better Than Those Motivated by Money

The trouble is that many lower-income students don’t have the luxury of studying an unremunerative field just because they’re interested in it. According to this University of Rochester study, many choose a major more on the basis of whether they feel they can earn a living doing it than any intrinsic liking for it. This may be one reason why lower-income students as a group don’t do as well in college as upper income ones:

• The study found that students motivated by a desire for autonomy and competence tended to earn higher grades and show a greater likelihood of persistence than did other students. (The findings were controlled for academic background and various other factors, and were based on surveys of 2,500 students at a community college and a liberal arts college that were not identified.)…

  For instance, wealthier students appeared more likely than low-income students to achieve success based on their interest in studying certain subject areas. It’s not that low-income students don’t want to study various areas, but their motivation for enrolling in college may be more related to a desire to improve their financial situation, and that has a strong impact on their success.

Here’s how to use authenticity to catalyze productivity. Read more

Finals Week to Netflix (Procrastination Illustrated)

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Franz Kafka’s Writer’s Block

Mason Currey, author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, writes about three procrastinating writers, Edgar Allen Poe, William James, and Franz Kafka:

• “In 1908, Kafka landed a position at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, where he was fortunate to be on the coveted “single shift” system, which meant office hours from 8 or 9 in the morning until 2 or 3 in the afternoon. This was a distinct improvement over his previous job, which required long hours and frequent overtime. So how did Kafka use these newfound hours of freedom? First, lunch; then a four-hour-long nap; then 10 minutes of exercise; then a walk; then dinner with his family; and then, finally, at 10:30 or 11:30 at night, a few hours of writing—although much of this time was spent writing letters or diary entries.

  In his letters, Kafka complained that his day job was holding him back, but as Louis Begley argues in his excellent biographical essay on Kafka, this was really just an excuse. Begley writes, “It is rare that writers of fiction sit behind their desks, actually writing, for more than a few hours a day. Had Kafka been able to use his time efficiently, the work schedule at the Institute would have left him with enough free time for writing. As he recognized, the truth was that he wasted time.” [Highlighting mine-HR]

For the record, never refer to your reasons for not writing as “excuses,” “complaints,” or “whines.” First, because those are negative, moralistic labels that do not add anything to the conversation: they simply shame (and, thus, undermine) you. Second, people’s reasons for underproductivity are always valid. Always! 100%. I’ve been doing this work for more than a decade and I’ve never yet heard an invalid reason.

I don’t know what happened to Kafka. Was he exhausted after his job, was his family life stressful, did he have trouble coping with his lack of public recognition, or was he just afraid to keep visiting the darkness that so often appeared in his writings? According to Wikipedia, “Kafka finished none of his full length novels and burned around 90 per cent of his own work,” which suggests a whopping case of perfectionism.

A sad case, all around. Read more

Writer’s Block is Universal

Sheldon Levine at Sysomos used his company’s social media analytics platform to see how often people mention writer’s block online, and who is mentioning it. He got some interesting results, including:

Of the 100 days I looked at, 54.7% of all the social mentions of writers block that I found came from the United States. People in China seemed to suffer from writers block the second most, but they only accounted for 17.9% of the conversation. Something interesting to point out is that the other countries that had a significant amount of chatter about writers block were also “Westernized” countries like the UK (8.5%), Canada (3.8%) and Australia (3.5%).

He also found women mentioning it more than men:

Pretty fascinating stuff, but even he admits this is nowhere like science. The high proportion of blocked writers in western countries may reflect that people in those countries feel free-er to write. (As opposed to those at risk for jail or worse.) Also, men still tend to seek out help for emotional problems less often than women, and that may account for the gender disparity.

In any case, rest assured that if you’re struggling with a block you’ve got plenty of company. Also rest assured that it’s the best people who suffer from writer’s block: those who care not just about their work, but those around them, society at large, and the planet. Selfish, exploitative, uncaring people tend not to get blocked: they just get the job done, not caring who they stomp on in the process. But it’s much harder to be productive and succeed if you’re trying to do it fairly and honorably, while meeting your more general obligations and responsibilities. So never feel bad about your block: work to eliminate it, but until you do recognize that it’s a symptom of the wonderful, caring, sensitive person you are.

Also, I wonder if the high number of hits in China reflects a preponderance of Tiger Momism. Read more

Scrivener Word Processor 50% Off at Amazon

Scrivener is an excellent word processor for long-form writing in particular. It was designed from the ground up with writing efficiency in mind, and harkens back to the golden age of word processing when we had speedy and versatile tools like Wordstar, WordPerfect, Textra (my favorite!), etc. It’s currently 50% off at Amazon – $20.

Not sure how long the sale will last, so get it soon.

If you’re not familiar with it, hop over to the Literature and Latte site, download a free copy, and do a quick trial of it first.

Some features:

Artist Sol LeWitt’s Productivity Advice: Create More by Focusing on the Work Itself

This short movie contains many F-bombs but offers valid productivity advice:

The movie’s text is an F-bombed version of a letter from Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, who struggled with self-doubt:

Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping,…Stop it and just DO!…

Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you – draw & paint your fear and anxiety…

You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO!…

Try to do some BAD work – the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell – you are not responsible for the world – you are only responsible for your work – so DO IT. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any preconceived form, idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be…

I know that you (or anyone) can only work so much and the rest of the time you are left with your thoughts. But when you work or before your work you have to empty you [sic] mind and concentrate on what you are doing. After you do something it is done and that’s that. After a while you can see some are better than others but also you can see what direction you are going. I’m sure you know all that. You also must know that you don’t have to justify your work – not even to yourself.

ht Michelle Aldredge at Gwarlingo.

Here’s an excerpt from The 7 Secrets of the Prolific” on the importance of focusing on internal rewards: Read more

David Foster Wallace: Perfectionism as Paralysis

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