Editors Pick Archives - Page 15 of 15

How To Beat Futility

It really doesn’t matter who you are, Sarah Silverman is pretty funny.

And, although her memoir The Bedwetter started out kinda slow, it’s getting good because she’s talking about how she started developing her act, her voice. This is the part I love to learn about.

Here’s the setup: At this point in her life, Sarah was just starting out – young, eager, hopeful, chumming about with other comedians working on their acts in NY (people like Luis C.K., Ray Romano, John Stewart). One sentence jumped off the page at me: (more…)

John Cleese On Creativity

Very interesting John Cleese video on creativity. Here’s some notes:

There’s a part of our mind that helps us be more creative.
The most dangerous thing when writing is to be interrupted.

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Do You Love What You Do?

An amazing video, this. I encourage you to full-screen it in HD… because you will be different afterwards.

Viktor Frankl – Why To Believe In Others (video)

Viktor Frankl wrote Man’s Search For Meaning, an incredible book. Simply incredible (more on the book below). Here is a video of Frankl speaking at a conference in Toronto in 1972. It’s simple and humble, but when he made his point it was a paradigm shift for me.

Man’s Search For Meaning

From Amazon.com:

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl is among the most influential works of psychiatric literature since Freud. The book begins with a lengthy, austere, and deeply moving personal essay about Frankl’s imprisonment in Auschwitz and other concentration camps for five years, and his struggle during this time to find reasons to live. The second part of the book, called “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,”describes the psychotherapeutic method that Frankl pioneered as a result of his experiences in the concentration camps. Freud believed that sexual instincts and urges were the driving force of humanity’s life; Frankl, by contrast, believes that man’s deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. Frankl’s logotherapy, therefore, is much more compatible with Western religions than Freudian psychotherapy. This is a fascinating, sophisticated, and very human book. At times, Frankl’s personal and professional discourses merge into a style of tremendous power. “Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is,”Frankl writes. “After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”

Self Discovery & The Enneagram: Find Out You

be who you are. the enneagram can help I used to be a bit of a personal development nut. Through my late teens and twenties I spent an ungodly amount of time in coffee shops reading through spiritual classics, self help books, Kahlil Gibran, and The Inquirer. I also spent an even ungodlier amount of time writing in a journal… good ol’ paper and pen and writing till the answer came out.

I don’t know what I had up my butt, but I felt a good deal like the universe was some swirling mess of possibilities and I wanted to figure out what bits of it which concerned me. My dad told me at the time life doesn’t work like that, that you have to just dive into the workforce, get wet and figure things out as you go. I believe him now, but at the time there was too much magic in all the dreaming. (more…)

An unbelievably touching letter: Richard to his dead wife

My friend @jaethan turned me onto this… a letter that Richard Feynman wrote to his wife Arline who had been dead two years at the time of the writing. It was written in 1946.

It is a bludgeon and plume of hearty life, and will affect you deeply… especially if you are a husband… living in a world of distracting gadgets and careers and ideas. Read it where it was originally posted, or I’ve reprinted it below.

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