Betty Ming Liu Quits Her Job: Liberated Time Management in Action!

If your job is not central to your mission, but simply a way to earn money, then one of the profoundest acts of self-liberation you can make is to reduce your hours or (even better) quit. Blogger Betty Ming Liu just quit her job, and her list of goals for her next stage is awesome:

– I want to self-publish a book. If you’ve been with me for a while, you know that this is an on-going yearning. Maybe not the most practical solution for making money, but crucial for personal fulfillment. The rough first draft is done and I’m ready to rock this dream!

– Expanding my YouTube presence. There’s not much up right now but look for more. During recent One-to-One training lessons at the Apple Store, I’ve learned to use Final Cut Pro X. Now it’s my chance to put those skills to practice in editing my own how-to videos about all kinds of things. Stay tuned!

– Spend time with my daughter. She is now a college-bound, young woman. If you’ve been through this stage with a kid, you know that part of me wants to scream. So much going on, on multiple levels. Major transitions in our relationship. There’s also the fun ahead of prom and graduation. Really glad that I now have the time to fully engage in the moments ahead.

– Start dating again. It’s been nearly two years since I’ve been in a relationship. With a full-time job, I was married to my work. But maybe there’s a chance for a shared life ahead. I’ve grown up a lot over the past two years and am much more willing to risk the vulnerability and intimacy required to be with a significant other.

– Start painting again. The easel and my oils have been calling to me. Over the past year, I’ve also been ripping out stuff from the newspaper in hopes of collaging with newsprint someday. Well, maybe “someday” is on the near horizon.

– Jump start my teaching career. I left a great teaching career for the adventure of being a digital journalist filing daily stories online. And every day, part of me missed being around young people. Even though all the colleges that I taught at said that they’d love for me to return one day, most of my gigs are gone. But I do have one assignment for the fall: I’ll be teaching food writing to undergraduate journalism majors at NYU.

– Catch up on home repairs. My sweet little house could be in much better shape. It really bothers me that the screen on my front porch door has been busted for the past year. My deck posts are rotting away and need to be replaced. Yes, this means dipping more into savings. But I can’t let my house fall apart. It’s my main asset and needs to be maintained.

– Catch up on my sleep. Yesterday morning at around 9 a.m., my daughter knocked on my bedroom door and hollered for me, sounding worried. She wanted to know if I was sick because I’m usually up very early. Helloooo, can’t Mommy sleep in on a Sunday morning? Haha.

I love how defined her list is, and admire how she’s adroitly balancing professional and self-care goals. And I’m particularly glad she’s working on her art because, as you can see, her art is awesome! Love the bold, fearless brushstrokes and colors married to simple forms and mundane subject matter. (Reminds me of Pablo Neruda or William Carlos Williams poems.)

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Dave Grohl on The Truth About How to Succeed in the Music Industry

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If You’re Going to Ponder, Ponder With a Pink Feather Pen

Ponder this way:

Not this way:

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Sleep Deprivation and Early School Starts May Be Driving Your Teen Crazy

What a mess. Poor kids.
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Yoga Can Help With Creative Block

This article recommending yoga as a solution for creative block makes a lot of sense.

First, as the article points out, a lot of creative endeavors, including even writing, can tax the body:

As a yoga teacher, Bobowicz was concerned about the repetitive stress that plagues artists as they work.

“Jewelers can hammer over and over again, painters use their hands and wrists to do brush strokes, and writers crouch at their desks and type — stress that builds up on important parts of the body can become a block so the creative force can’t flow through,” Bobowicz said. “We want to keep these body parts open and healthy. I see this as occupational therapy for artists.”

For writers and others who are sedentary, that’s also a big problem.

Beyond that, getting passionately involved in yoga or any other endeavor can take the pressure off your writing.

Finally, physical exercise is a great catalyst for creativity, and many people (including me!) get useful ideas or fresh perspectives while walking or exercising.

So…good idea to incorporate yoga or another physical activity throughout your day.
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Enid Blyton: Prolific Writer

The Guardian reports on a new exhibit on famed British children’s writer Enid Blyton. She produced more than 700 books, mainly for young readers, and was very disciplined both in her writing habits and her bookkeeping and business management:

But grown-up visitors will be intrigued to see how little editing Blyton’s manuscripts needed. She would cross out the odd word, insert an adjective here and there, but what was published was more or less what she battered out with two frantic fingers on the typewriter, also on display in Newcastle.

During a 50-year career, Blyton rattled off an astonishing 700-plus books, as well as 4,500 stories. The exhibition also reveals that she did her own accounts. A pencil-written ledger from 1926 entitled “work paid for” showed Blyton, then 29, earned £189, nine shillings and 11 pence in January alone. “It’s fascinating to see how organised she was,” said Kate Edwards, chief executive of Seven Stories. “She was such a shrewd businesswoman.”

Also on show in Newcastle are diaries Blyton wrote that reveal a woman with a Stakhanovite work ethic before the Russian miner had become the patron saint of grafters the world over. “Worked all day till 4.30,” she notes tersely on 25 October 1927. “Did 6,000 words today, a record for me.” In 1931 she writes: “Did story for my Page [the welcome page she wrote for each edition of her magazine]. Went for long walk with Nurse. Rested till tea. Knitted till bed.” The next day, Seven Stories adds as a postscript, Blyton gave birth to daughter Gillian.

Enid Blyton’s Account Book

If you’re a perfectionist, you might read the above and chastise yourself for not being similarly dedicated, or you might even aspire to match her productivity. It’s okay to dream big, but make sure you understand how she achieved her productivity. She obviously had a flair for spinning prose that didn’t need a lot of editing; at the same time, however, let’s not forget that she wrote children’s books, which tend to be shorter than adult ones, and also efficiently created series in which she re-used the same characters and settings. It also probably helped that there was a robust market for fiction back then–actually getting paid for one’s work is a huge motivator. But Blyton was also pretty monomaniacal about her work:

“Writing trumped all else in her life, relegating world events to a footnote. “Worked all day,” she wrote on 2 September 1939. “Germany invaded Poland today so I suppose we shall be at war tonight.”

Reminds me of something I read once about Mozart, that in all of his hundreds of letters to his father and others–letters that, in some cases, were filled with minutiae about music– he never once mentions his generation’s major upheaval, the French Revolution.

As for Blyton, if you’re not able or willing to duplicate the conditions for her prolificness, then don’t worry if you’re not able to match it. Instead, figure out what you ARE  able to reasonably achieve, and focus on that. Remember that comparisons are frequently misused in a perfectionistic way.
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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.”

Link

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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What Procrastination Looks Like

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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