This was a productive week for me. I’m surprised. I accomplished many things that have been on my to do list for weeks. How did I manage this great feat? Simple. I stopped thinking so much. Don’t get me wrong. Thinking is important. More people should do it. But I think too much. I suspect…
I’m reading The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman. It’s a pragmatic view on how to achieve peace of mind. I’m only on chapter 3, so I can’t review the book yet, but I’m enjoying it so far. I’ve been mulling over one of the lines from the book:…
“It’s the good advice, that you just didn’t take And who would’ve thought it figures?” Alanis Morrissette A year ago, my brother suggested that I make a Kindle version of my book Laund-o-mat at the End of the World. (The typo in the title is deliberate.) It’s a collection of three of my one-act…
It’s the day after the night before and I survived the play reading. It went better than expected. People laughed. Which is good when the play is a comedy… Even if it’s a dark comedy. The actors did a great job reading all of the excerpts! But it still felt weird. I sat in the…
Next week, Theatre Aquarius puts on its Reading Week. The artists in the various programs that Theatre Aquarius supports during the theatre season will get a chance to present an excerpt from the piece that they’ve been working on. My turn is on Wednesday (June 19). It’s always good to get your work in front…
Woo hoo! I just completed 30 days of writing a daily blog post. I haven’t written 30 consecutive, regular posts in a year, let alone in a month. That’s why I like 30 Day Challenges. It’s long enough to be difficult but not long enough to be daunting. You can stretch yourself but there is…
Is there such a thing as talent? Does it exist? The more I think about it, the less likely I think it is. There’s definitely skill acquisition, but I think talent is a myth. I think we call people talented because we see the result of their hard work and perseverance. And because we see…
At the end of 2014, I started what I called the Genius Project. The idea was to explore the concept of putting in 10,000 hours of work and using deliberate practice towards my playwriting to achieve mastery or become a “genius” in that realm. For just over a year, I kept track of the activities…
In 2015, I read How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams. One of the main ideas from the book was “goals are for losers and systems are for winners.” Since that time, I’ve been trying to find a system that would work for me. A system is a set…
Austin Kleon, the author of Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work has a new book out: Keep Going. Like the other books, it’s full of great advice, easy to read, and fun to look at. His books can be consumed in a single sitting but I tried to savour the experience by reading…
peter gruner 