Tag Archives: inspiration

Heather Havrilesky’s solid work advice

Posted on by jqr

And let’s be honest, it’s harder to be a real person in real time than it is to live in a fantasy world. The real world takes real risk. You have to show up instead of distracting yourself with your whimsical, sexy imaginings. You have to get out of your own head. You have to work really fucking hard at things that don’t seem to matter at first, and you have to work really fucking hard to figure out what things might seem to matter eventually.

From this Ask Polly column, which showed up today in my RSS feed.

Despite the salty language, this half-paragraph appears to be pretty good advice for the particular job I’m doing right now, which is personnel recruitment. It makes me feel like I’m going back to my old days doing marketing for my delivery business. What she says, especially the part about getting out of your own head, is kind of important. I feel as if I want to get my pitch down perfectly before calling people; if I screw up I would be shy about calling them again.

Setting yourself on fire takes time and requires you to look inward

Posted on by jqr

Setting yourself on fire takes time and requires you to look inward, and focus on rubbing your internal, invisible sticks together, and this is hard when bodywashes keep calling you out. But you must ignore the song of the bodywash. You must continue to look inward, and you must find a problem you can work on your whole life, a giant, almost-unanswerable problem, to set yourself on fire about. Once you do this, people will come, they must come, to warm themselves by you.

—Amy Fusselman

I took a course in Zine Publishing from Amy Fusselman. This is a pretty good paragraph, and a nice example of her writing on the McSweeney’s site to boot.