I'm reading Salvador Dali's Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, his 1948 book about creativity. A lot of it is as crazy as you would expect. Beethoven with his
From Annie Dillard's The Writing Life: How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one,
An important message from a storefront in London, seen this evening: I’m in England for a few days for archival work and interviews, and yes, some rest. It’s
The Wall Street Journal has a funny-not funny piece about a memo circulating on Wall Street claiming to offer advice to summer interns on how to survive their
"Rest, with nothing else, results in rust," Wilder Penfield wrote in his great essay The Second Career: "It corrodes the mechanisms of the brain." The essay was an argument against
Advice from Alain Connes (from the Princeton Companion to Mathematics) on being creative: Walks. One very sane exercise, when fighting with a very complicated problem (often involving computations),
From Ariana Huffington's Vassar commencement address: [In the past] Vassar students were given the emblem of an acorn to display on their doors when they did not wish
Heidi Wachter sings the praises of doing nothing in Experience Life. In our always-busy culture, doing nothing carries a stigma — one that some people will do anything
Santiago Ramón y Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator (translated by Neely Swanson and Larry W. Swanson, and published by MIT Press) has some great stuff about research, rest, and
Jason Lengstorf warns that if you're working crazy hours, "You’re no longer a free member of society. You’ve been lured into the Overkill Cult." The insidious thing about