Houses of Cards

In the war of style vs. substance, sometimes I need to remind myself (or get reminded by someone else) of a few things:

Content first. OCD later.

Pretty simple. For the longest time, I’d get PISSED whenever someone would so much as bend a page in one of my books or magazines. Whenever I started a journal (and there were many of these “starts”), I would tear out the first page if it wasn’t some perfect intro to my soul. And then I’d be pissed about the tear marks on the side of the binding. No wonder I didn’t get any work done, I was too busy being perfect.

Don’t worry, not being perfect isn’t the same as accepting mediocrity.

Things are meant to facilitate experiences.

Not the other way around. You don’t need another rant on the CrackBerry–everyone knows gadgets are cool. So cool, in fact, that people even try to gadgetize tools as simple as pen and paper. There are entire websites devoted to tricking out your MOLESKINE NOTEBOOK. And entire forums dedicated to finding the RIGHT PEN to write in it. Have you read the history of Moleskine, on the little pamphlet inside every book?

I guarantee you Ernest Hemingway didn’t worry about hacking his notebook before writing masterpieces.

Systems only work if the underlying discipline is there.

Getting Things Done is supposedly pretty effective. If you’re not fucking lazy. There’s only one long-term solution for that: finding work you get to do. But if you’ve resigned yourself, if you won’t even bother with the finding anymore, then you’re fucked, plainly put.

Build a foundation, not a house of cards. It’s advice so obvious, in so many pursuits, that it shouldn’t require reiteration. But it does. Remind yourself.