Periodically I revisit this short clip of Julia Child flipping a potato pancake, “a daring thing to do” on her ’70s television show where flubs and mess-ups were left as-is. Child ad libs essential wisdom that applies to any daring endeavor, and life itself.
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Artsy’s Alexxa Gotthardt combed through interviews with legendary abstract expressionist artist Lee Krasner for her insights into “how to be an artist”, with three essential lessons.
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We found a lovely, simple way to reframe those big existential questions everyone seems to ask themselves about whether they are enough…
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Hold Still, A Memoir with Photographs, by legendary photographer Sally Mann reads like an epic novel shot through with photographs and remarkable insights about the creative process, and embracing the “limitations of the ordinary”.
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This 2-minute video is the perfect guide to meditation for beginners and the meditation-averse. It gives a simple method and the science of why meditating for five minutes daily will change your life. And unlike anything else in your life, in meditation, ‘failure’ is actually success.
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(Video link here.) One short minute of perfection: Herbie Hancock recounts the BIG life lesson he got by example from Miles Davis, when Hancock played what he thought was a seriously WRONG note during a gorgeous riff.
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(Video link here.) Really funny and totally sweet, this teeny film by 3rd year film student Jalabert Camille will make you feel just fine about just about any misstep, mess-up or irritant you encounter today. It takes Samuel Beckett’s famous lines about failure to an extraordinary place…
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I spend a lot of time trying things and…failing. Hmmm. Is failing even the right word? I spend a lot of times trying things and having them not go as expected.
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At the height of a recent crisis a few months ago, our friend Chris Eldredge send me this note: I’ve been reading Jack Kornfield’s “A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life” and saw this. I thought it might interest you. ( I changed a bit of the wording where…
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For the past couple of months, we’ve been participating in Essex Farm’s innovative CSA experiment. Curious about its origins, we’ve been reading The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love, ex-journalist/city girl Kristin Kimball’s tale of her unexpected transformation into a farmer and partner of Mark Kimball, whose vision drove Essex from the start. He is a man after our own hearts (and hers, after some wild adventures)…
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Good Life Project‘s Living Creed contains all sorts of bits to inspire your week. (Click on the image to embiggen. To keep it up on your screen, click here.) Our favorite principles from the list are at the heart of ‘improvised life’:
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Maria Robledo sent us this very wise quote from Oprah whose ‘Fail at it. Try again.’ echoes Samuel Beckett’s great ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better‘. We especially like Oprah’s spin on it:
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(Video link here.) Buckminster Fuller is on our list of people we would have loved to have met and talked to. The one-of-a-kind American architect, engineer, systems theorist, designer, inventor, and futurist was most famous for his invention of the geodesic dome. We love his Dymaxion house, above, designed in 1946. Dymaxion was a Fuller design principle: designs…
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We recently ran a New Yorker cartoon showing Noah’s Ark filled with only giraffes. The suggested caption was “Mistakes were made.” Now The New Yorker has compounded its mistakes with Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece The Gift of Doubt. It totally convinces us that in order to find the right path, you often have to take the…
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When the wise, inventive, not-terribly-technological Christoph Niemann tried to create an app, it became pretty “interesting. He documented the process in the New Yorker recently and in doing so, a wonderful distillation of the creative process and struggle: I explored countless (but crucial) dead ends, and it all came down to the most important struggle…
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(Video link here.) We don’t remember how we stumbled on this video by Kathleen Hanna, a New York City-based artist best known for her groundbreaking performances in the seminal 90′s punk band, Bikini Kill, and her more recent multimedia group, Le Tigre. She made it to accompany the song Let’s Run. We find it curiously uplifting: a…
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We found this to be a swell sign unto itself… Then when we looked into it, it turns out to be part of a marketing campaign the CocoCola Company did around its soda OK Cola. Trying to market to Gen X and Y markets, Coke Cola tried to create “a counter-intuitive advertising” campaign that intentionally…
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One of the big fears (and realities) that can keep us from trying things out, taking them to the next step, or persevering with an idea, has to do with failure. We can judge ourselves like crazy for having failed at something in the past OR be terrified that we will fail in the future;…
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