Alice Fredrickson

“When you take the time to sit alone with your thoughts, you can find who you want to be; not who your parents want you to be, not who your friends want you to be, and definitely not who some shyster on Instagram or TikTok wants you to be.”

Accomplishment: All too often our mediocrity is self-imposed. Go accomplish something. There’s nothing like the satisfaction of a job well done. Corny, but true.

One of my favorite examples of this "action above all" principle is something Jeff Tweedy, the frontman of [rock band] Wilco and a writer, explained about his own process. Like most creatives, he's felt stuck from time to time. His solution, as he describes it, is to "pour out" the bad ideas as though they're scum sitting atop a pond of fresh water. When he feels he can't write or compose, he'll actively try to write or compose bad songs or sentences, metaphorically pouring out the bad ideas to make way for the good. Sometimes those bad songs and sentences turn out to better than he expects, which is an added bonus, but even when they're not useful products themselves, they seem to liberate other ideas that sit beneath the surface of these inferior or unoriginal ideas.       

Another example: I copy passages of text that I like longhand in my notebook, and it not only helps me remember the texts, it makes me slow down enough so that I can actually read them and think about them, even internalize them. Something happens when I copy texts into my notebook that does not happen when I cut and paste them into Evernote or onto my blog.”

"The journal is not so much a way of diarizing one’s life, but a portable studio, a place where you can hang out, with your imagination, your intuition, your inspiration." -Paulus Berensohn

Or maybe what you need in life is more fun? In that case, the striver-toward-sanity will buckle down and grind harder – making life less fun – in order to make space for fun at some other time. Whereas the operator-from-sanity will make sure to do something fun, however briefly, today."