“Indeed, the biggest danger of consulting may be that it gives you an excuse for failure. In a startup, as in grad school, a lot of what ends up driving you are the expectations of your family and friends. Once you start a startup and tell everyone that’s what you’re doing, you’re now on a path labelled “get rich or bust.” You now have to get rich, or you’ve failed.Fear of failure is an extraordinarily powerful force. Usually it prevents people from starting things, but once you publish some definite ambition, it switches directions and starts working in your favor. I think it’s a pretty clever piece of jiujitsu to set this irresistible force against the slightly less immovable object of becoming rich. You won’t have it driving you if your stated ambition is merely to start a consulting company that you will one day morph into a startup.”
— Paul Graham
The slow and powerful process of creation
I am probably reading one of my best book in the last years. “If you want to write – a book about Art, independence and Spirit” by Brenda Ueland.
Praise to art, creativity, imagination, life, works, and self. I have been astonished to read what is her way to create, to incubate ideas, to think without thinking about ideas that are true and imaginative:
“In the same way what you write today you thought and created in some idle time on another day. It is another day that your ideas and visions are slowly built up, so that when you take your pencil there is something to say[foot note] that is not just superficial and automatic, like children yelling at a birthday party, but it is true and has been tested inwardly and is based on something.
[foot note] Though remember this: you may not be conscious, when you sit down, of having evolved something important to say. You will sit down as mentally blank, godnatured and smiling as usual, and not frowning solemnly over the weight of your message. Just the same, when you begin to write, presently something will come out, something true and interesting.”
It is the exact process I used to create Talk Digger. It is the exact process I am using to create the next generation of Talk Digger; that will be release in the next 3 months. I know, since some years, that it is the way my mind works, it is the way I can create things and find solutions to my problems. I let the flow of information get into my mind, then I incubate it for weeks, months, even years and somewhere in the future, I know that a seed idea will pop-up in my mind and that that seed idea will flourish in something true, imaginative and useful (at least for me). The seed idea was the alpha version of Talk Digger (in fact I wrote Beta, but it wasn’t, my unconsciousness probably knew that it wasn’t, but my consciousness thought it was a beta version because he didn’t know what was coming); now the real Beta version is coming… something new, something true, and something imaginative (at least for me).
Richard Feynman
“I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.”— Richard Feynman
Maxwell Maltz
“We find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.”— Maxwell Maltz
Peter Borden
“Most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields.”— Peter Borden