What’s urgent are emails, texts, tweets, calls, and news.
What’s important is spending a thousand hours to learn a new skill that will really help you in your life or work. What’s important is giving your full undistracted attention to the important people in your life. What’s important is taking time to get exercise, or to collect and share what you’ve learned.
But none of these things will ever be urgent.
So you have to ignore the tempting cries of the urgent, and deliberately choose what you know is important.
— Derek Sivers on the meaning of life
Making films is all about — as soon as you’re finished — continually regretting what you’ve done. When we look at films we’ve made, all we can see are the flaws; we can’t even watch them in a normal way. I never feel like watching my own films again. So unless I start working on a new one, I’ll never be free from the curse of the last one.
— Hayao Miyazaki in his book Turning Point: 1997–2008
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
— Ernest Hemingway in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Previously: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time…”