Jennifer Senior on a New Script for Parents

The one mantra no parent ever questions is, “All I want is for my children to be happy.” And don’t get me wrong: I think happiness is a wonderful goal for a child. But it is a very elusive one. Happiness and self-confidence, teaching children that is not like teaching them how to plow a field. It’s not like teaching them how to ride a bike. There’s no curriculum for it. Happiness and self-confidence can be the byproducts of other things, but they cannot really be goals unto themselves. A child’s happiness is a very unfair burden to place on a parent. And happiness is an even more unfair burden to place on a kid. […]

Absent having new scripts, we just follow the oldest ones in the book – decency, a work ethic, love — and let happiness and self-esteem take care of themselves. I think if we all did that, the kids would still be all right, and so would their parents, possibly in both cases even better.”

Jennifer Senior

Alan Watts on Wiggly, Straight & How We Make Things

The physical world is wiggly. Clouds, mountains, trees, people, are all wiggly. Only when human beings get to working on things-they build buildings in straight lines & try to make out that the world isn’t really wiggly. But here we are, sitting in this room all built out of straight lines, but each one of us is as wiggly as all get-out.”

Alan Watts

Robert McKee on Going There

You have to go there, you know. You have to take your character to the place where he just can’t take it anymore. You’ve been there, haven’t you? You’ve been out on the ledge. The marriage is over now; the dream is over now; nothing good can come from this.”

Robert McKee


Reading through Don’s Million Miles in a Thousand Years in preparation for a talk I’m giving. Such a fun book to read.

Eugene Schwartz on the 2 Reasons

Every product you work on should offer your prospect two separate and distinct reasons for buying it. First, it should offer him the fulfillment of a physical want or need. This is the satisfaction your product gives him. And second, it should offer him a particular method of fulfilling that need, that defines him to the outside world as a particular kind of human being.”

Eugene M. Schwartz