“Once we hit the studio, it was just all focus on the music. All focus was one hundred percent on the music. There were rules: no Twittering, no e-mailing, no blog-watching – no stupid questions. All of this stuff is posted all over the walls. A wall of questions, for inspirations. ‘What would Mobb Deep do?’ All types of stuff.”
—Pusha T (née Terrence Thornton) on working with Kanye West on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
“Almost everything I’ve done in my intellectual life that I now value I did because I was unconcerned about the approval of any officially designated authorities.”
Posted in academe, inspiration, quotes, work
In 1903, William James began the process of trying to decide whether to retire from Harvard. His diary for the fall of 1905 reads:
October 26, “Resign!”; October 28, “Resign!!!”; November 4, “Resign?”; November 7, “Resign!”; November 8, “Don’t resign”; November 9, “Resign!”; November 16, “Don’t resign!”; November 23, “Resign”; December 7, “Don’t resign”; December 9, “Teach here next year.”
He eventually retired in 1907.
Source: Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club
“When I was a kid, I studied jujitsu, and then, much later, karate. Jujitsu is interesting because opponents come at you, and you use their energy to overwhelm them. You take the energy that they supply to the event to contain them, and I find that’s true in creative working, too. You can sometimes turn those kinds of assaults in the working relationship to accept the challenge and then take charge of it, so to speak, using the energy of the people who are trying to mess with you.”
—Frank Gehry
(Via Unbeige.)
Posted in infographics, work
Dave Itzkoff calls attention to a blog post by Lil Wayne wherein he describes his daily prison routine:
Wake up around 11AM. Have some coffee. Call my kids, and my wonderful mother. I then shower up. Read fan mail. Have lunch. Back on the phone. Read a book or write some thoughts down. Have dinner. Phone. Pushups. Then I listen to ESPN on the radio. Read the bible, then sleep. That’s my day.
Wayne (née Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr.) is currently serving a one-year prison sentence at Rikers Island for attempted possession of a weapon after a gun was found on his tour bus in 2007.
Last month, he literally phoned in a verse he wanted appended to Drake’s “Light Up.” Best lyric: “Behind bars, but the bars don’t stop / Recording over the phone / I hope the call don’t drop.” Indeed.
(Via.)
Related posts: “100-Year-Old Master,” “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Daily Routine,” “Donald Trump’s Daily Routine,” and “John Waters’s Daily Routine.”
Not only in the “slow and steady wins the race” sense, but in the “help others when they’re (upside) down” sense as well.
(Via.)
Posted in endorsements, video, work
“The lunch he prepared for us was perfect: homemade vegetable soup, tuna-salad sandwiches on chunks of suspiciously healthy-looking bread, and a dessert of berries, followed by coffee. He doesn’t drink, except on Friday nights, when he tends to have fun in biker bars. Mr. Waters’s life is otherwise disciplined. He gets up at 6 a.m. and is usually in bed by 10 p.m. or so: ‘I’m a Swiss person trapped in an American’s body. I like a very orderly life.’ He’s a meticulous man, too. His library of some 8,000 books is carefully catalogued. He’s a bookworm. ‘Nothing is more important than an unread library,’ he says. Formerly a heavy smoker, he showed me the record he carries of the number of days since he quit. He was on to Day 2,634.”
—John Heilpern, “Uncharted Waters,” Vanity Fair, June 2010.
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