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Once you have come to terms with Mr Negative and have learned to accept fear as a friend, allow adrenalin the run of your body and don’t allow yourself to panic. Knowledge is power. By understanding your own body, by understanding the mechanics of adrenalin and fear you can learn self-control. Panic is catalysed by ignorance; by not understanding your own body or its workings.
Fear - The Friend of Exceptional People
Geoff Thompson
There is a kind of Don Juan—like quality to reading manuscripts–the next one, or the one after, might be the love of one’s life—but editing them is a slow, painstaking effort to patch up and make presentable what has already been botched and fudged. It is possible to spend hours unraveling someone else’s prose or trying to decide what he or she was trying to say and finding some way to make the words express it without starting from scratch in one’s own words. In editing, time becomes meaningless. A single page can sometimes absorb hours, like the most infuriating kind of puzzle. For most editors, there is no time to edit in the office, where they are caught up dealing with the problems of real live authors, talking to agents, being called to meetings, or trying to explain to the marketing people or the business people or the publicity people just what this or that book is about and why it’s important to buy it or print fifty thousand copies of it or reject it. This in turn means that editors do most of their serious work at night and over the weekends and explains why so many of the better ones eventually become publishers,
Another Life
Michael Korda
Either explicitly or implicitly, the goal you set is a proxy for an expected-value equation, balancing the benefits that you’re trying to gain against the costs you’ll bear to get them. This is all part of the process of setting the goal. But what happens to that calculus once you’ve set the goal and you’re pursuing it? After we set a goal, it becomes a fixed object. This thing that is a proxy for something else becomes the object itself. The goal is the thing we’re trying to achieve, instead of all the values expressed and balanced when we originally set the goal. The goal becomes fixed even as all the inputs that led to choosing that particular goal evolve. The conditions in the world change. Our knowledge changes. The weights we attach to the benefits and costs change. Our preferences and values change. As these things change, if we were to rerun the cost-benefit analysis, the output would surely be different. But we don’t rerun it. To achieve the things we want to achieve, we have to be responsive to the way the world is changing around us and the way that we ourselves are changing. That would mean unfixing our goals, but we don’t naturally do that. In combination, the pass-fail and fixed nature of goals causes us to just keep on toward the finish line, even when the finish line is no longer what we should be running toward. Inflexible goals aren’t a good fit for a flexible world.
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