On Generosity

I'm currently reading Dale Carnegie's How To Make Friends And Influence People (the version revised to match with our modern, tech-obsessed world), and am finding it truly interesting!



In it, there's a chapter talking about 'sharing the credit' for all the successes you encounter, and doing so genuinely gratefully, for then will you reinforce your relationships with people. They then use a homily to beautifully illustrate this fact:








The Sea of Galilee is teeming with fish and life. The Dead Sea is dead and devoid of life. They are both fed by the sparkling water of the River Jordan, so what's the difference? The Sea of Galilee gives all its water away. The Dead Sea keeps it all for itself. Like the Dead Sea, when we keep all that is fresh and good for ourselves, we turn our lives into a briny soup of salty tears.

How To Create A Successful Business According To Walt Disney

"I knew if this business was ever to get anywhere, if this business was to ever grow, it could never do it by having to answer to someone unsympathetic to its possibilities, by having to answer to someone with only one thought or interest, namely profits.

For my idea of how to make profits has differed greatly from those who generally control businesses such as ours. I have blind faith in the policy that quality, tempered with good judgment and showmanship, will win against all odds."

~Walt Disney

Incidentally, I believe that the slump Disney felt after its "Second Golden Age" (the era starting from The Little Mermaid though The Lion King) may be linked to a loss of this particular vision, and trying to go for speed and the search for ever greater returns over the one for greater storytelling and art (which also led to many disgruntled artists). 

I believe that since around the time of Tangled, Disney has been trying to get back to its previous standards

by focusing on the story as opposed to immediate profits, and its bottom line has subsequently increased (with their latest, Frozen, having been an amazing hit with over $300 million grossed, beating the record that had been held by The Lion King 20 years ago!).

Success

Nike, goddess of Victory offering the champion a wreath. 

"Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses."

~George Washington

How Many Noes Does It Take To Make An Author?

To those of you who have had their work (or proposals) rejected, here's a short list of some famous authors who got their work denied:

• James Baldwin (1924-87) -- Giovanni's Room was called hopelessly bad.
• Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) -- Submissions said to be "utterly untranslatable."
• Pearl Buck (1892-1973) -- Pulitzer Price-winning The Good Earth was rejected because Americans are "not interested in anything on China."
• William Faulkner (1897-1962) -- Of Sanctuary, which Faulkner claimed to have "deliberately conceived to make money," his editor said, "Good God, I can't publish this.  We'd both be in jail."
• Anne Frank (1929-45) -- The reader found Frank's diary to be "a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances, and adolescent emotions," commenting that it wouldn't sell due to a lack of familiar or appealing characters.  "Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely," the reader wrote, "I don't see that there would have been a chance for it."
• Tony Hillerman (1925-2008) -- Hillerman was told by an agent to "get rid of all that Indian stuff."
• Jack Kerouac (1922-69) -- "His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation.  But is that enough?  I don't think so."
• John le Carré (1931-) -- A publisher sent his submission to a colleague with a note:  "You're welcome to le Carré--he hasn't got any future."
• Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-) -- The Left Hand of Darkness was "endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable."
• Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) -- Lolita was considered "...overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian... the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy.  It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream... I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years."
• George Orwell (1903-50) -- Animal Farm was declined because it is "impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A."
• Sylvia Plath (1932-63) -- 'There certainly isn't enough genuine talent for us to take notice."
• Marcel Proust (1871-1922) -- One editor said in response to the tome In Search of Lost Time (aka Remembrance of Things Past), "My dear fellow, I may be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may I can't see why a chap should need 30 pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep." 
• Dr. Seuss (1904-91) -- And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street... was rejected by publishers 27 times before Vanguard Press agreed to publish it.  His subsequent success as a children's author didn't make him immune to rejection, though.  Random House rejected Seuss's proposal for a book on how to write for children in 1949, saying, "Some of them would feel an author-artist of picture books could hardly qualify as an expert in the field of juvenile writing."

 So what does this tell you?   That rejection isn't personal for the author, but rather for the reader.  And though one may say no, with over 7 billion people in the world, there's really no need to be discouraged :)

Taken From:  I Used to Know That: Literature

Talent—Innate or Developed?

Author and journalist Daniel Coyle did a study on three places around the world that develop top of the class performers to find their secret sauce.  This is what he came back with:

1.       Deep practice—slow down your “play” (be it music, sports, or something else) or decrease your playing field so your errors become blatant.  Reason?  This practice increases the production of myelin in your brain, which helps to “exponentially increase the rate at which we learn.”

2.       A model of one who’s already broken the mold, that inspires others—“If they can do it, so can you.”

3.       Master coaches—ones who, like Yoda, know how to properly assess their protégés, communicate with them and keep them motivated.

I feel this can also be applied to writing (or any other practice, really):  you need to slow down from time to time in your endeavor to make sure your story’s tenable, then break down your story in parts to make sure each one’s well-written and strikes the right chords; inspiration is what’s helped me stay motivated (in my case, I’m motivated by anyone who’s succeeded via hard work and dedication, despite the odds stacked against him/her—like Jo Rowling); and someone who can open your eyes to your writing and tell it how it is (advance readers—is there such a thing?—and editors).

But really, this is to say to everyone out there with a big dream they’re afraid they can’t accomplish:  don’t give up.  It may take you a long time to get there (aka: Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours), but if you keep at it, work hard on honing your skills, you will break through!

PS:  I don’t believe in “overnight wonders.”  Maybe they seem like it to us, the public, but in reality, it took a lot of hard work and dedication for those people to get recognized.

Source and full interview:  SuperConsciousness Magazine

War Of The Writers

No matter how hard you work, how many hours you spend honing your art... even if you are considered a great writer by many (critics included), you'll still manage to get some people to hate your writing (and even yourself).  There's no escaping it.

Here's an extract from I Used to Know That: Literature that shows what some great authors thought of some of their compatriots:

• "I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer." --Ayn Rand.
• "Poor Faulkner.  Dow he really think big emotions come from big words?  He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words.  I know them all right.  But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."  --Ernest Hemingway, having been informed that William Faulkner believed Hemingway "had no courage" and "had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary."
• "That's not writing, that's typing." --Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac's On The Road.
• "This is not at all bad, except as prose."  --Gore Vidal on Herman Wouk's The Winds of War.
• "At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman.  Once she gets on top, it's over.  Fall in love, or be asphyxiated."  --Norman Mailer, on Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full.
• "No more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school."  --Norman Mailer, on J. Salinger.
• "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."  --Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman.
• "The characters are nearly indistinguishable.  A man in a wheelchair cannot just be a man in a wheelchair; he must be a vehicle to help a lame metaphor get around.  Such is the method of the Well-Crafted Short Story."  --Colson Whitehead on Richard Frost's short-story collection A Multitude of Sings (Two years later, Ford responded by spitting on Whitehead).

So you see, don't get discouraged.  However, by no means cease to try to improve your craft either...  Yeah, I've got loooooots of work ahead of me still.  Le Sigh. 

Rebounders

A certain Mr. Rick Newman's just come up with a book, Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success, in which he describes the results of his research into what ties 12 successful people from different backgrounds. And yes, one of the people mentioned is none other than Jo Rowling herself.

So really, what are the points in common between all those people? Well, it's all common sense, really, but it's nevertheless a great reminder to go over them:

1.  They accept failure (and can recognize their own mistakes)
2. They compartmentalize their emotions (they don't internalize bad feelings)
3. They have a bias toward action (responding aggressively to a challenge)
4. They change their minds sometimes (the need to discard old thinking and reprogram a dream)
5. They prepare for things to go wrong (rebounders are not necessarily optimists)
6. They're comfortable with discomfort (they're willing to accept inconveniences as long as it leads them closer to an important goal)
7. They're willing to wait (overnight success is deceptively untrue)
8. They have heroes (rebounders set and meet higher standards when inspired by others)
9. They have more than passion (success requires drive too)

And of course, may the odds ever be in your favor ;)



Thanks to yahoo for the article!