Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
I washed up in New York a couple of decades ago, making twenty bucks a night driving a cab and running away full-time from doing my work. One night, alone in my $110-a-month sublet, I hit bottom in terms of having diverted myself into so many phony channels so many times that I couldn't rationalize it for one more evening. I dragged out my ancient Smith-Corona, dreading the experience as pointless, fruitless, meaningless, not to say the most painful exercise I could think of. For two hours I made myself sit there, torturing out some trash that I chucked immediately into the shitcan. That was enough. I put the machine away. I went back to the kitchen. In the sink sat ten days of dishes. For some reason I had enough excess energy that I decided to wash them. The warm water felt pretty good. The soap and sponge were doing their thing. A pile of clean plates began rising in the drying rack. To my amazement I realized I was whistling. It hit me that I had turned a corner. I was okay. I would be okay from here on. Do you understand? I hadn't written anything good. It might be years before I would, if I ever did at all. That didn't matter. What counted was that I had, after years of running from it, actually sat down and done my work. Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against true healing. We all need it. But it has nothing to do with doing our work and it can be a colossal exercise in Resistance. Resistance loves "healing." Resistance knows that the more psychic energy we expend dredging and re-dredging the tired, boring injustices of our personal lives, the less juice we have to do our work.
The War of Art
Steven Pressfield
The politician Tip O’Neill once said something along these lines: If you want to make someone your real friend, ask them for a favor. As we forged along, the band made an art out of asking for help—from our housemates, from our friends, from our fans, from our family, from anybody who’d give it.
The Art of Asking
Amanda Palmer and Brené Brown
The terrorists of today and tomorrow may no longer have to worry about struggling to obtain access to controlled pathogens and biological agents from government labs. With the advent of synbio, they can just download the genetic sequence blueprints and print these deadly viruses themselves. The full-length genetic codes of some of the world’s deadliest pathogens including Ebola and Spanish flu are freely available for download in the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s DNA sequence database.
Future Crimes
Marc Goodman
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise