An Inspiration Drink

You are told that the system works a certain way. What does this mean to you? It means little to me. I have my own knowledge, my own education. I’ll learn the best way, not the way to do things. You see that most people life their life a certain way. This too means absolutely nothing. Most people are miserable, self-loathing and passive. No thanks.

When I was a 19 year old college dropout with no experience in the field I was operating in, out-working and out-producing people twice my age, I realized something.

- Total Commitment

 ... All dead. All trod upon by you and I today.

Take comfort in that fact. That decade earlier, a century earlier, a millennia earlier, someone just like you stood right where you are and felt the same things you feel, struggled with the same thoughts. They have no idea that you exist, but you know that they did. Embrace the power of this position and learn from it. It is an exhilarating moment, let it propel you.

Go and put yourself in touch with the infinite, because it helps you reconcile yourself a bit better with the mundane. Realize how much came before you, and how only wisps of it remain today ...

- Go and stand on the hallowed ground

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive.
And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.

-Howard Thurman

I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

- Thomas Merton's Prayer (quote found at elsie's collection of favorite quotes)

Another Quote:

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.

The professional, Steve Pressfield writes in The War of Art, sometimes has to “throw down a 360 tomahawk jam from time to time, just to let the boys know he’s still in business.” The boys in this case are those little doubts you get in your head, the ones that tell you that you don’t have what it takes, that the project isn’t worth it, that you’re not up to the task.

Go out and remind the crowd why you’re in the arena. Do what you have within you but take for granted or are saving for later. Silence them by doing it.
Remind yourself.

As I struggle with confidence in my own life and on my own projects, it’s helpful to think of this. It is replenishing, a little bit more each time.

- from On Confidence by Ryan

You know you've got a great taste. And you follow it. But you get caught up in a situation where the things you create aren't the way your heart wanted them to be. But this is absolutely normal. This is indeed a great sign that says - Keep going, you'll do it for sure.

There is this feeling you get when you’re driving a friend’s car or staying in a hotel. It is less stressful, easier.
All the things and baggage you’ve allowed to accumulate in your actual life don’t seem to be there.
You don’t look at the gas gauge and care.
The things that bother you about your car don’t bother you in this one.
You sleep better in the hotel. It feels nicer than your house.

. . .

These glimpses are helpful because they remind us what we could have if we just got out of our own way. If we stopped minding the gas tank and caring whether it cost $3.59 or $4 a gallon to fill up. If we remember that we can move or, more realistically, rearrange the inside of our own house whenever we get tired of it. If a certain kind of blanket feels better, get it and be done with the issue. They remind us that all the things we say weigh us down are ours by choice.

Sometimes a quick shift in our environment forces us to focus entirely on the present–it doesn’t allow us to muddle up the situation with our thoughts and pessimism and worry. And the instant of lightness we feel when it happens, well, that’s what we could have all the time if we wanted to and worked at it.

- from The Present Moment by Ryan

It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly...who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

- Theodore Roosevelt
(quote found at elsie's collection of favorite quotes)

Two years had passed and someone is feeling out ideas I’d been begging them to try back then. I wanted to get angry. After all, what [terrible situation] is it where you’re getting pitched your own pitches and asked if you think they’ll work?

Then I realized that the real awful thing was the notion that I apparently only liked my ideas when I thought I was going to get credit for them.
And my instincts were more inclined to let everyone know I’d been there first than to relish an opportunity to put them into action.

- Ideas by Ryan

When I sit down to write, nothing comes out. When I start to design, I stare at a blank canvas. My ability to create things does not meet my own ridiculously high standards of quality, so I get stuck in endless loops of making decent things, throwing them away, and then starting over from scratch. I've been floating around in despair, in a creativity limbo, which has nearly destroyed me.

. . .

My "taste" exceeds my own ability. It's interesting that the source of my internal battle lies buried in something as innocuous as "taste". For most people, taste is just the basis of opinion. It describes the point at which something flips from being "not good enough" to "ok, decent".

But for creative people, it's something different. Taste is everything. It is what drives us. It is the definition of success, the ceiling of what is possible, and the source of everlasting internal frustration.

- excerpts from Dustin Curtis's post.