From:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/22/ray-bradbury-day-at-night-1974-interview/
Ray bradbury:
On the misunderstood, and often dismissed, value of the fantasy genre:
The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive, and the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow.
On the scope-expanding quality of science fiction, something
Isaac Asimov has attested to as well:
The great thing about growing up with science fiction is that you have an interest in everything.
On the formative influence of
fairy tales and
Greek myths
My aunt and my mother read to me when I was three from all the old Grimm fairy tales, Andersen fairy tales, and then all the Oz books
as I was growing up… So by the time when I was ten or eleven, I was
just full to the brim with these, and the Greek myths, and the Roman
myths. And then, of course, I went to Sunday school, and then you take
in the Christian myths, which are all fascinating in their own way… I
guess I always tended to be a visual person, and myths are very visual,
and I began to draw, and then I felt the urge to carry on these myths.
If I’m anything at all, I’m not really a science-fiction writer — I’m a writer of fairy tales and modern myths about technology.
I discovered very early on that if you wanted a thing, you went for it —
and you got it. Most people never go anywhere, or want anything — so
they never get anything.
I never went to college — I don’t believe in college for
writers. The thing is very dangerous. I believe too many professors are
too opinionated and too snobbish and too intellectual, and the intellect
is a great danger to creativity … because you begin to rationalize and
make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth
— who you are, what you are, what you want to be. I’ve had a sign over
my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads “Don’t think!” You must
never think at the typewriter — you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.
On how the warping of that dynamic exposes
the relationship between creativity and dishonesty, and why
emotional excess is essential to creative work:
The worst thing you do when you think is lie — you can
make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did, and what
you’re trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself — find out
who you really are, and try not to lie, try to tell the truth all the
time. And the only way to do this is by being very active and very
emotional, and get it out of yourself — making things that you hate and
things that you love, you write about these then, intensely. When it’s
over, then you can think about it; then you can look, it works or it
doesn’t work, something is missing here. And, if something is missing,
then you go back and reemotionalize that part, so it’s all of a piece.
But thinking is to be a corrective in our life — it’s not supposed to be a center of our life. Living is supposed to be the center of our life, being
is supposed to be the center — with correctives around, which hold us
like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not a
way of life — the way of living is the blood pumping through our veins,
the ability to sense and to feel and to know. And the intellect doesn’t
help you very much there — you should get on with the business of
living.
On
finding your purpose and
avoiding “work” by doing what you love:
[I love my work] intensely — I wouldn’t be in it if I
ever stopped loving it, I would shift it and go over into something
else. … I don’t think life is worth living unless you’re doing something
you love completely, so that you get out of bed in the morning and want to rush
to do it. If you’re doing something mediocre, if you’re doing something
to fill in time, life really isn’t worth living. … I can’t understand
people not living at the top of their emotions constantly, living with
their enthusiasms, living with some sense of joy, some sense of
creativity — I don’t care how small a level it is. … I don’t care what
field it is though, and there’s gotta be a field for everyone, doesn’t there?
Steve Jobs:
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way
to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the
only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found
it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart,
you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just
gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you
find it. Don’t settle.
Neil deGrasse Tyson,
modern-day philosopher and eloquent
cosmic sage, knows that
truly fulfilling work never feels like
“work”:
If everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly
what they love, we would all be ranked as visionary and brilliant. … If
you got to spend every day of your life doing what you love, you can’t
help but be the best in the world at that. And you get to smile
every day for doing so. And you’ll be working at it almost to the
exclusion of personal hygiene, and your friends are knocking on your
door, saying, “Don’t you need a vacation?!,” and you don’t even know
what the word “vacation” means because what you’re doing is what you
want to do and a vacation from that is anything but a vacation — that’s the state of mind of somebody who’s doing what others might call visionary and brilliant.
Gaiman echoes the sentiment with laconic self-awareness:
We get to look good because we get to do what we want.
Autistic Artist Stephen Wiltshire who made it big:
Do What Comes Naturally:
This is so simple sounding, but how many of us truly put it into
action? For Stephen, speaking didn’t come naturally but instead of
brooding over his inability to communicate verbally, he found an
alternative way to relate to the world and honed those skills. “Taking
art from a hobby to a career was never a decision or a choice for
Stephen,” Annette shared. It was intuitive.
Many of us have childhood interests that we ditch in favor of more
socially acceptable, practical or lucrative options. Stephen never let
questions such as, “Am I good enough?” or “Can I make a living as an
artist?” stop him from turning his passion into a career. He is living
proof that if you enjoy doing something, you’ll be more inclined to work
at improving your skills and rise to the top in a respective industry.
From
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/23/how-to-find-fulfilling-work-roman-krznaric:
“If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment,” wrote Dostoevsky,
“all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.”
The desire for fulfilling work — a job that provides a
deep sense of purpose, and reflects our values, passions and personality
— is a modern invention. … For centuries, most inhabitants of the
Western world were too busy struggling to meet their subsistence needs
to worry about whether they had an exciting career that used their
talents and nurtured their wellbeing. But today, the spread of material
prosperity has freed our minds to expect much more from the adventure of
life.
We have entered a new age of fulfillment, in which the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning.
Two key afflictions of the modern workplace — “a plague of job
dissatisfaction” and “uncertainty about how to choose the right career”.
Never have so many people felt so unfulfilled in their career roles, and
been so unsure what to do about it. Most surveys in the West reveal
that at least half the workforce are unhappy in their jobs.
There’s plenty of cynicism and skepticism to go around, with people
questioning whether it’s even possible to find a job in which we thrive
and feel complete.
There are two broad ways of thinking about these
questions. The first is the ‘grin and bear it’ approach. This is the
view that we should get our expectations under control and recognize
that work, for the vast majority of humanity — including ourselves — is
mostly drudgery and always will be. Forget the heady dream of
fulfillment and remember Mark Twain’s maxim. “Work is a necessary evil
to be avoided.” … The history is captured in the word itself. The Latin labor means drudgery or toil, while the French travail derives from the tripalium,
an ancient Roman instrument of torture made of three sticks. … The
message of the ‘grin and bear it’ school of thought is that we need to
accept the inevitable and put up with whatever job we can get, as long
as it meets our financial needs and leaves us enough time to pursue our
‘real life’ outside office hours. The best way to protect ourselves from
all the optimistic pundits pedaling fulfillment is to develop a hardy
philosophy of acceptance, even resignation, and not set our hearts on
finding a meaningful career.
I am more hopeful than this, and subscribe to a different approach,
which is that it is possible to find work that is life-enhancing, that
broadens our horizons and makes us feel more human.
[…]
This is a book for those who are looking for a job that is big enough
for their spirit, something more than a ‘day job’ whose main function
is to pay the bills.
He also notes a thing about women in workforce!
Within just fifteen years of its invention in 1955, over twenty million
women were using oral contraceptives, with more than ten million using
the coil.
By gaining more control over their own bodies, women now had
greater scope to pursue their chosen professions without the
interruption of unwanted pregnancy and childbearing. However, this
victory for women’s liberation has been accompanied by severe dilemmas
for both women and men as they attempt to find a balance between the
demands of family life and their career ambitions.
Another culprit
Krznaric points to in the stymying of our ability to find a calling is the industrial model of education:
The way that education can lock us into careers, or at
least substantially direct the route we travel, would not be so
problematic if we were excellent judges of our future interests and
characters. But we are not. When you were 16, or even in your early
twenties, how much did you know about what kind of career would
stimulate your mind and offer a meaningful vocation? Did you even know
the range of jobs that were out there? Most of us lack the experience of
life — and of ourselves — to make a wise decision at that age, even
with the help of well-meaning career advisers.
Krznaric considers the five keys to making a career meaningful — earning
money, achieving status, making a difference, following our passions,
and using our talents — but goes on to demonstrate that they aren’t all
created equal. Money alone is a poor motivator:
Overwhelming evidence has emerged in the last two decades that the
pursuit of wealth is an unlikely path to achieving personal wellbeing —
the ancient Greek ideal of eudaimonia or ‘the good life.’ The
lack of any clear positive relationship between rising income and rising
happiness has become one of the most powerful findings in the modern
social sciences. Once our income reaches an amount that covers our basic
needs, further increases add little, if anything, to our levels of life
satisfaction.
We can easily find ourselves pursuing a career that society considers
prestigious, but which we are not intrinsically devoted to ourselves —
one that does not fulfill us on a day-to-day basis.
Krznaric pits respect, which he defines as
“being appreciated for
what we personally bring to a job, and being valued for our individual
contribution,” as the positive counterpart to prestige and status,
arguing that “in our quest for fulfilling work, we should
seek a job
that offers not just good status prospects, but good respect prospects.”
Rather than hoping to create a harmonious union between
the pursuit of money and values, we might have better luck trying to
combine values with talents. This idea comes courtesy of Aristotle, who
is attributed with saying, ‘Where the needs of the world and your
talents cross, there lies your vocation.’
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his
work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his
education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply
pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and
leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself,
he always appears to be doing both.
a significant culprit in our vocational dissatisfaction is the fact that
the Industrial Revolution ushered in a cult of specialization, leading
us to believe that the best way to be successful is to become an expert
in a narrow field. This cult robs us of an essential part of being human: the
fluidity of character and our
multiple selves:
We each have multiple selves. … We have complex, multi-faceted
experiences, interests, values and talents, which might mean that we
could also find fulfillment as a web designer, or a community police
officer, or running an organic cafe.
This is a potentially liberating idea with radical implications. It
raises the possibility that we might discover career fulfillment by
escaping the confines of specialization and cultivating ourselves as
wide achievers … allowing the various petals of our identity to fully
unfold.
“Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is
soulless, life stifles and dies,” wrote Albert Camus. Finding work with a
soul has become one of the great aspirations of our age. … We have to
realize that a vocation is not something we find, it’s something we grow — and grow into.
It is common to think of a vocation as a career that you somehow feel
you were “meant to do.” I prefer a different definition, one closer to
the historical origins of the concept: a vocation is a career that not
only gives you fulfillment — meaning, flow, freedom — but that also has a
definitive goal or a clear purpose to strive for attached to it, which
drives your life and motivates you to get up in the morning.
Yet fulfilling work doesn’t come from the path of least resistance.
What man actually needs is not some tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.
Marie Curie summed up her philosophy of work:
“Life is not easy for any of us,” she
said. “But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all
confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for
something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”
About her obsession with researching radioactive materials:
What really occurred was that this goal quietly crept up on her during
years of sustained scientific research. … Her obsession grew in stages,
without any Tannoy announcement from the heavens that issued her a
calling. That’s the way it typically happens: although people
occasionally have those explosive epiphanies, more commonly a vocation
crystallizes slowly, almost without us realizing it.
From http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/12/14/how-to-avoid-work/ :
“There is an ugliness in being paid for work one does not like”.
Much the same thing happens when you take a person and put him in a job
which he does not like. He gets irritable in his groove. His duties soon
become a monotonous routine that slowly dulls his senses. As I walk
into offices, through factories and stores, I often find myself looking
into the expressionless faces of people going through mechanical
motions. They are people whose minds are stunned and slowly dying. Without being aware that a chance is taking place, he is gradually lulled into unconsciousness.
To my mind, the world would be a much pleasanter and more civilized
place to live in, if everyone resolved to pursue whatever is closest to
his heart’s desire. We would be more creative and our productivity would
be vastly increased.
Altogether too much emphasis, I think, is being placed on what we
ought to do, rather than what we
want to do.
The greatest satisfaction you can obtain from life is
your pleasure in producing, in your own individual way, something of
value to your fellowmen. That is creative living!
When we consider that each of us has only one life to live, isn’t it
rather tragic to find men and women, with brains capable of
comprehending the stars and the planets, talking about the weather; men
and women, with hands capable of creating works of art, using those
hands only for routine tasks; men and women, capable of independent
thought, using their minds as a bowling-alley for popular ideas; men and
women, capable of greatness, wallowing in mediocrity; men and women,
capable of self-expression, slowly dying a mental death while they
babble the confused monotone of the mob?
For you, life can be a succession of glorious adventures. Or it can be a monotonous bore.
Take your choice!
Echoing Alan Watts’s litmus test of
what you would do if money were no object, Reilly suggests:
No matter what your age or condition or experience, the
sooner you find out what you really want to do and do it the better, for
that’s the only way anyone can avoid work.
[…]
Try this approach. Suppose you were financially independent and were
perfectly free to do anything you wanted, what would you do, if
anything?
If your inclinations are at all definite, the answer to this simple
question provides at least a general definition of the field which you
would enjoy most.
As an enormous believer in making time, rather than finding time, for what matters:
Without Time nothing is possible. Everything requires
Time. Time is the only permanent and absolute ruler in the universe. But
she is a scrupulously fair ruler. She treats every living person
exactly alike every day. No matter how much of the world’s goods you
have managed to accumulate, you cannot successfully plead for a single
moment more than the pauper receives without ever asking for it. Time is
the one great leveler. Everyone has the same amount to spend every day.
The next time you feel that you ‘haven’t the time’ to do what you
really want to do, it may be worth-while for you to remember that you
have as much time as anyone else — twenty-four hours a day. How you
spend that twenty-four hours is really up to you.
Thomas Edison’s stringency of his 18-hour-workdays dedication to success:
The only difference is that you do a great many things and I do one. If
you took the time in question and applied it in one direction, you would
succeed. Success is sure to follows such application. The trouble lies
in the fact that people do not have one thing to stick to, letting all
else go.
Purpose should come before making a living financially, but can be followed by it:
Money never comes first in self-expression of any kind.
Study the biographies of those who have built great fortunes, and you
will learn that money came to them after they had produced or discovered something.
[…]
In a world marked by constant change, where the rich of today are
often the poor of tomorrow, due to circumstances beyond their control,
the only security is your ability to produce something of value for your
fellow man, and your only guarantee of happiness is your joy in
producing it.
True happiness lies in the pursuit of your goal, achievement in your
chosen field. This must always remain primary. Whenever money becomes
primary, you are on treacherous ground.
You will neither venture anything nor achieve anything if you permit
yourself to be unduly influenced by others. . . . Remember this. Only
one sound mind is needed to create an idea.
From
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/02/27/purpose-work-love/ :
“Find something more important than you are,” philosopher Dan Dennett once said in discussing
the secret of happiness,
“and dedicate your life to it.”
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/17/the-meaning-of-life/
We are all here to witness the creator's creation.
We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice
each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each
mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice
the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to
bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to
praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and
our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to
an empty house.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart.
Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are
here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract
this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the
universe comes out even.
We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We
must construct these answers ourselves — from our own wisdom and ethical
sense. There is no other way.
I have been asking myself why I’m here most of my life. If there’s a
purpose I don’t care anymore. I’m seventy-four. I’m on my way out. Let
the young people learn the hard way, like I did. No one ever told me
anything.
Science fiction writer
Arthur C. Clarke:
A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of
play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and
Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that
will be a bonus?
If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.
What we beyond doubt do have is our
instinctive intellectual curiosity
about the universe from the quasars down to the quarks, our wonder at
existence itself,
and an occasional surge of sheer blind gratitude for
being here. (Well some people have more curiosity than the rest of us, and hence end up as scientists, philosophers or astronomers or artists).
Another good one:
Thinking About One’s Career
We can see in all people that there is first the struggle,
and then the outright fight, and then the inevitable resignation to
sadness. Because such is life: Happiness is the vacation, but sadness
the occupation.
