End of last week going into this week has been super busy with packing and final wedding to-do list items! Last minute dress hemming appointments, facial, picking up Euros, and playlist edits – crunch time! Now that we are en route to DC (literally on the plane!), and United tracking assures me my bag was loaded – I’m slowly starting to decompress from the stress leading up.
Cooking | Nada this week – ate out almost every day!
Listening to | Song on repeat Makin’ a Move Lady Bri
Reading| How to do Great Work by Paul Graham
I get a Thursday newsletter each week and a quote from this essay was included. The quote made me curious so I decided to read the whole thing, it’s very thought provoking idea on how to do great work. It’s a long read, and I’m sharing a few quotes that really resonated with me below, but if you have the time, I highly encourage you to read the full essay.
“What should you do if you’re young and ambitious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who’ve done great work, it’s remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.”
“There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you’re trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion, fear, money, politics, other people’s wishes, eminent frauds. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you’ll be proof against all of them. If you’re interested, you’re not astray.”
“Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to.Trying to is affectation. Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is doing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and while you’re pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows in the work.”
“One way to tell whether you’re wasting time is to ask if you’re producing or consuming.”
This last one really struck me – especially in a social media, Netflix, info-at-your-fingertips world, we are ALWAYS consuming. Now I don’t consider getting lost in a book a bad thing – but I’m absolutely guilty of doom scrolling on my phone, binging Netflix, etc. Life is about balance and enjoyment, so all consumption isn’t evil. But if the majority of my time is consuming, it makes me question if my choices are balanced.