I am overdue in continuing the “Monday Motivation” posts, so I thought it’d be an opportune time to note that sometimes it’s good to just do what you’re doing and keep on doing it. Especially for those of you in the middle of the slog that is NaNoWriMo: just keep truckin’. Don’t edit, write! As “they” say, the first draft is always garbage anyway and editing is another month. One thing I thought of in…
Some of my past few Monday posts on motivation have been a bit on the grimmer side, so I wanted to share something that was more in the “You Can Do It” vein. On Scriptnotes a couple weeks ago, John August’s One Cool Thing was a physics paper about the power of dominoes to topple bigger dominoes. In fact, the domino the size of a sliver can start a process by which dominoes the size…
Continuing my series of Monday posts about motivation, I wanted to share another favorite post about staying motivated by Terry Rossio from the inestimable resource that is Wordplay. It arguably builds off the tough love/cold water of The Speech two weeks ago. And while I’m going to focus on writers and motivation, I have observed (and been told) that this sort of motivation (and procrastination) is something that all creative folk encounter. But back to writers. There’s a notion…
Continuing the last few Monday posts I’ve done about motivation, I figure it’s time to add in a link to something that serves as cold water in the face: a wakeup in both ways. Mark Evanier, whose series on rejection is one I’ve referenced, has a certain speech he’s delivered on occasions to fellow writers and creatives… and occasionally he’s needed to hear it himself. Maybe you need it because it’s Monday. Perhaps you’re just wondering…
Since I wanted to cover motivation for the next few Mondays, as I mentioned last week, I figured it was important to bring up procrastination. One of the most entertaining articles about the subject was written by Tim Urban on his longform blogging site, Wait, But Why. In fact, the procrastination article is actually several articles, but well worth delving into. Now, I enjoy Wait, But Why quite a bit, but what if some of…
I realized that I have a number of potential posts that relate to motivation, so for at least the next few weeks, I’ll have Motivation Mondays! Because that sounds like exactly the kind of engagement program corporate HR would institute. Anyway, I came across a pair of articles by Melissa Dahl in New York magazine. One is about how to motivate yourself to work when you don’t want to, which provides an intro to the…