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i've been waging a war against the square community for almost a decade now, and it's starting to feel like the squares are winning. they're making me bland. i'm conforming to their lackluster desires. i'm wearing their lackluster clothing and following their lackluster schedule and letting their pathetic hopes, dreams, fears, comforts, and existence seep into mine.
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i need to move to an abandoned warehouse in the country.
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i need to know what claude monet and rainer maria rilke did besides paint and write.
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these 2 writings are helpful:
1) Failure is the best thing ever because it broadens your horizons and equips you in ways success never could - an article in Men's Health (as posted in someone else's blog). Excerpt:
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Maybe failure isn’t the problem. Maybe expectation is.
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After I was fired from my TV show, I was certain I’d never work in television again. I’d been given a great opportunity and blown it. The studio and network were out millions of dollars. But then the phone started ringing, with studios and networks asking whether I’d consider doing TV again. What had changed?
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Nothing. I’d simply forgotten what folks working in TV take as a given: Most shows fail. Every spring, the networks introduce new products to replace the fall and winter die-off. When a show tanks, they don’t spend weeks wondering why. They put a new show in its place.
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They expect failure, and are delighted when it doesn’t come.
In the case of Tom, my hunch is that he’d become stuck in an expectation loop. He’d spent years carefully mapping out his ascent: student-body president, law-school review, a great internship. He expected to succeed - we all should - but he hadn’t considered alternate paths to success. One misstep sent him scrambling, questioning all his other assumptions. Of course, it’d be wrong for me to write Tom off. Maybe his latest failure will force him to reassess his expectations. Maybe it’ll be what finally propels him to success.
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Most of us will never run a TV show or run for elected office. But we will all fail, repeatedly. Failure is a universal condition. We lose our jobs; we lose our marriages; we lose to the dealer’s flush in Vegas.
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When these traumas happen, we generally find ourselves on the familiar Kübler-Ross stages of loss: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But how we cope is less important than how we remember the experiences afterward. The best failures aren’t forgotten; they’re incorporated into our life’s narrative.
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My D.C. debacle, as miserable as it was to live through, has become a cherished memory. It’s a small scar that invites a big story, with big personalities. At first, I framed myself as the innocent victim in the drama, but over the years I came to view the whole thing as more of a hurricane that we all weathered together.
The great thing about surviving a storm is that you’re much better prepared the next time the winds start kicking up. You recognize the early warnings. You stock up on essentials. And, most crucial, you go in knowing that no matter what happens, you can always rebuild.
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Failure makes you ready in ways that success never could.
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The next time I found myself pitching a show, I had a much clearer idea of what I wanted. I knew what I was good at and what I was better off delegating to others. I knew that as much as I believed in the show, if it all went south, I’d be okay.
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Because I’d failed, I wasn’t afraid of failing. And that enabled me to push a lot harder for what I believed in.
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The movie is unconventional and questionably commercial. In its wildest success, it might play festivals and arthouses before hitting DVD. Given all these risks, why do it?
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Because even in failure, I knew I’d grow from it. There were things I needed to learn about movies - and myself - that I wasn’t going to learn from writing another script.
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It’s just like weight training, really. You push yourself until your muscles fail. That’s how you grow stronger. Likewise, in life, unless you seek you’ll never mentally develop beyond that scrawny kid from high school.
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That’s why you have to drop to one knee and propose to the girl you’re pretty sure you love. That’s why you have to send out your résumé, even though your job is just fine. That’s why you have to climb that 14,000-foot mountain. It won’t always work out. You may get divorced. Or fired. Or frostbitten. But the alternative is a life of vague disappointment.
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When that nagging little voice pops up, wondering what’s going to happen if you fail, just ignore it. Yes, it’s hard. As humans, we’re programmed for loss aversion. But money is just money. Your job is just your job. Your life - the adventure of your life - is all you really have that’s yours.
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When things go wrong, when you’re sliding toward an unavoidable crash, don’t panic. In those long seconds before the impact, look around and figure out how you entered into this mess. Think about how you’ll frame the story a year from now, over a few beers. Can you come up with an honest version that ends, “So in a funny way, it was the best thing that ever happened to me”?
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Perfect. Then brace yourself.
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2) Perhaps it's time to take a leap instead of muddling through - Passion Ave & Conformity St, a blog post about making a choice when faced with crossroads. Not all that insightful in and of itself, but it does have that great title and these quotes that make me restless and keep me questioning work, my job, money, life, etc.:
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Work is necessary: “Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.” —Albert Camus
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Stupid 401k: “Chase your passion, not your pension.”— Denis Waitley
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Don't settle: “Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?”—Friedrich Nietzsche
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Need to love the work: “With out passion you don’t have energy, with out energy you have nothing.”— Donald Trump
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The time is now: “Waste no more time talking about great souls and how they should be. Become one yourself!”-Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
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You have to try: “Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.”-Oprah Winfrey
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