Serving freelancers, interims, gig workers, independents and those with a sovereign and professional mind-set.
Tom Albrighton, on ABC Copywriting, reflects on the freelancer’s dilemma:
While freelance work will come again (touch wood), each precious summer will never come again. We may only have a handful of whole-family summers left, and to wish them away is ridiculous. Memories matter more than money.
All too true. Read Tom’s full piece, here.
Photo by Adrien Tutin on Unsplash
One cannot attain a life free of anxiety if one is too concerned about prolonging it…
For fear of the final hour makes all our other hours uneasy.
Seneca (4 BC – AD 65), Moral Letters to Lucilius (1.4)
Think of the totality of all Being, and what a mite of it is yours; think of all Time, and the brief fleeting instant of it that is allotted to yourself; think of Destiny, and how puny a part of it you are.
Marcus Aurelius (AD 120 – 180), Meditations (5.24)
I also quite like the Gregory Hays’ translation of this:
Remember:
Matter. How tiny your share of it.
Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it.
Fate. How small a role you play in it.
Steve Layman has a couple of pointers to the work of Joseph Campbell.
Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.
and…
Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.
Kurt at Cultural Offering points us to this 1991 Paris Review interview with Tom Wolfe. fascinating. Worth a read.
I realized instinctively that if I were going to write vignettes of contemporary life, which is what I was doing constantly for New York, I wanted all the sounds, the looks, the feel of whatever place I was writing about to be in this vignette. Brand names, tastes in clothes and furniture, manners, the way people treat children, servants, or their superiors, are important clues to an individual’s expectations.
Amuse-bouches for the brain: a fresh batch of random thoughts from Execupundit, including:
- Meetings favor people who do not like to read.
- Secret worries far outnumber the open ones.
- A good guide can turn an old trail into a new path.
- Those looking into a room often see more than those who are seated.
Read the rest, and search for older thoughts, here.
Photo by Alice Pasqual on Unsplash
Nicholas Bate with sound advice for those kicking their heels and waiting for university to start:
1.Decide your timetable. Work time, play time. Be time. Creative time. Writing time. Schedule it. Timetables work.
5. Read more than the reading list. By definition, that’s a minimum. Make it a habit not to do the minimum.
6. Stop playing with your phone when you should be working.
8. Clean up your fountain pen. And write more long-hand. There’s a stack of benefits in the hand-eye-brain connection, the aesthetics of hand-writing and a break from the key-board.
9. Thank great teachers. It’s nice to be appreciated.
Make it a habit not to do the minimum. Sage advice.
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
