Maria Popova is the person behind the “Brain Pickings’ website. She started it as an experiment for friends, delivering five stimulating things to learn about each week. Well it grew, eventually blowing up to the point that it’s now in the Library of Congress digital archive of “materials of historical importance” and is read by millions of people.
Maria compiled a list of seven things she learned over seven years of working on her project. Here’s the full article, and below is my briefer version of her list. Enjoy.
1) Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. We often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or borrowed ideas, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors for our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
2) Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. “Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night, often distracting and detracting from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
3) Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Remember there’s a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.
4) Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting, instead try letting the fragments of experience float around your unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.
Get enough sleep. It’s a creative aphrodisiac, affects our every waking moment, and even mediates our negative moods. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But that’s a profound failure of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity.
5) When people tell you who they are, believe them, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those who misunderstand you reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
6) Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Our culture measures our worth by our efficiency, our earnings, and our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but it can rob us of the capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — because “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
7) Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time. is something fundamental yet impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.