Never Give Up

Remarks by Naval Admiral William H. McRaven, ninth commander of U.S. Special Operations Command at the University of Texas at Austin Commencement on May 17, 2014:

Start each day with a task completed.

Find someone to help you through life.

Respect everyone.

Know that life is not fair and that you will fail often, but if take you take some risks, step up when the times are toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden and never, ever give up—if you do these things, then next generation and the generations that follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today and—what started here will indeed have changed the world—for the better.

Keep Yanking

Excerpt from How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams:

The success of Dilbert is mostly a story of luck. But I did make it easier for luck to find me, and I was thoroughly prepared when it did. Luck won't give you a strategy or a system—you have to do that part yourself.

I find it helpful to see the world as a slot machine that doesn't ask you to put money in. All it asks is your time, focus, and energy to pull the handle over and over. A normal slot machine that requires money will bankrupt any player in the long run. But the machine that has rare yet certain payoffs, and asks for no money up front, is a guaranteed winner if you have what it takes to keep yanking until you get lucky. In that environment, you can fail 99 percent of the time, while knowing success is guaranteed. All you need to do is stay in the game long enough.

This Bungled Joy

"Infinity Mirror Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life," by Yayoi Kusama

Afterlife
by John Burnside, from Gift Songs 

When we are gone
our lives will continue without us

— or so we believe and,
at times, we have tried to imagine

the gaps we will leave being filled
with the brilliance of others:

someone else gathering plums
from this tree in the garden,

someone else thinking this thought
in a room filled with stars

and coming to no conclusion
other than this —

this bungled joy, this inarticulate
conviction that the future cannot come

without the grace
of setting things aside,

of giving up
the phantom of a soul

that only seemed to be
while it was passing.

Strategic Patience

Art and architecture history professor Jennifer Roberts requires her students to write a twenty-page research paper on a single work of art. Before they begin the research, however, they are expected to spend three hours in front of the actual work. No electronic devices. No distractions. They have to rely on their vision, curiosity, and skills of observation to navigate the slow passing of time.  

John Singleton Copley, Boy with a Squirrel (1765), oil on canvas.

"Just because you've looked at something doesn't mean you've seen it. Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness. Or, in slightly more general terms, just because you have access to something doesn't mean you have learned it.What turns access into learning is time and strategic patience…

For me this is not just a lesson for people who are going to become art historians or go to museums. It's a key lesson for students to see the value of critical attention, patient investigation, and—I think most crucially—it's a lesson in being skeptical about immediate surface appearances. And I can't think of very many skills that are more important in the twenty-first century than that."

~ Jennifer Roberts, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching 2013 conference on "Essentials"

How To Be Creative

Whatever we can do to expand our capacity for uncertainty,
that is wonderful preparation for creativity.

"Creativity has always been essential for our cultural growth, but there are still many misconceptions about this elusive process. Not the left-brain/right-brain binary that we've come to believe, being creative is considerably more complex, and requires a nuanced understanding of ourself and others. Being a powerful creative person involves letting go of preconceived notions of what an artist is, and discovering and inventing new processes that yield great ideas. Most importantly, creators must push forward, whether the light bulb illuminates or not."