How Olympians Stay Motivated - Olga Khazan
Mindfulness, self-talk, and an obscure chunk of the brain help elite athletes get through the training grind. Until the 1990s, Olympic figure skating included a segment called “compulsory figures,” in which athletes would slowly trace precise, intricate shapes into the ice, and judges would inspect the resulting swirls and loops to determine much of the skater’s overall score. These “figures” gave the sport its name, but they were gradually phased out because not even the most ardent skating fans would watch the tedious process on TV. Today's competitive figure skaters only do what their predecessors called the “free skating” portion—fast-paced programs set to music, packed with jumps and dance moves. When American figure skater Dorothy Hamill won gold in the ladies’ single competition in 1976, compulsory figures were the first event. They played a decisive role in whether the skater would medal. “The same thing, day in and day out,” she said. We can’t all be Olympic athletes. 1. 2. 3.
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How to Make Wealth
May 2004 (This essay was originally published in Hackers & Painters.) If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That's been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. Startups usually involve technology, so much so that the phrase "high-tech startup" is almost redundant. Lots of people get rich knowing nothing more than that. The Proposition Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Here is a brief sketch of the economic proposition. Like all back-of-the-envelope calculations, this one has a lot of wiggle room. If $3 million a year seems high, remember that we're talking about the limit case: the case where you not only have zero leisure time but indeed work so hard that you endanger your health. Startups are not magic. Millions, not Billions If $3 million a year seems high to some people, it will seem low to others. Money Is Not Wealth The Pie Fallacy Notes
Dance in a Year
Steampunk Art, custom metal art decoration like indoor lamps, clocks, bowls and outdoor garden lights etc.
Notes Essays—Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Stanford, Spring 2012
Peter Thiel's CS183: Startup - Class 10 Notes Essay Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 10 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine. Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, joined this class as a guest speaker. Class 10 Notes Essay—After Web 2.0 I. It all started about 40 years ago with ARPANET. The Mosaic browser launched in 1993. “Web 1.0” and “2.0” are terms of art that can be sort of hard to pin down. Relative usage patterns have shifted quite a bit too. II. The Internet has felt a lot like the Wild West for last 20 years or so. Over the last 40 years, the world of stuff has been heavily regulated. Some big-picture Internet developments are on everyone’s radar. III. No one knows for sure when the future will arrive. Villemard's 1910 prediction of what schools would be like in 2000. Just a few decades ago, people were predicting chemical dinners and heating houses with radium. IV. V. And then it worked.
Oprah Winfrey: "Align Your Personality With Your Purpose and No One Can Touch You."
Oprah Winfrey was so young when she started working as the late-night anchor on WLAC-TV in Nashville, Tenn., she still had an 11 p.m. curfew at home. Yet she was so successful at reciting the news on camera at age 19 that she quickly received an offer from a television station in Atlanta that would have quadrupled her salary, bumping it to $40,000. Her manager in Nashville tried to keep her: “You don’t know what you don’t know,” he told her. Winfrey stayed — not because she was afraid to take on a new challenge, she says, but because “I could feel inside myself … that he was absolutely right.” That included figuring out that she was better at chatting up ice cream vendors than covering murder and mayhem, knowing that she would not win a discrimination suit she considered filing early in her career to fend off a boss who was “drunk with power,” and realizing that, after 25 years, it was time to end her wildly popular daytime talk show and start her own network.
The Stories That Only Artists Can Tell | Daniel Grant
Here is a pitch for artists to write their own stories, their autobiographies, because there aren't many fine artists who have done so. A handful have -- including Thomas Hart Benton, Man Ray, James Rosenquist, Leroy Neiman, Larry Rivers, Margaret Bourke-White, Eric Fischl, Anne Truitt (if you count her published diary entries), Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali (neither of whose books were intended to be revealing, so they hardly count at all) -- and occasionally some artists have written essays for catalogues (usually about their art). However, the most important artists of the past century or so have been content to let others write about them. Why does that matter? A couple of reasons: First, it seems to me that artists talk about different things when describing themselves than do their biographers and commentators. The second reason is that art students need role models for their own careers. Stefan shot me a leveling look.
The Power of 'I Don't Know'
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. My friend Alicia likes to mock me by mimicking the tone of online comments on my writing, affecting the snarky hauteur that is the Internet’s default: “Kreider makes the audacious claim that his cat is more attractive than all other living cats,” she’ll say. “According to Kreider, pie is a perfectly acceptable breakfast,” or “Kreider would have it that pants are purely optional.” She’s making mild fun of my sporadic blips of Internet celebrity, but I think she’s more heavily amused to hear commenters citing her feckless goofball friend as though I were some eminent authority, solemnly parsing my passing opinions as though they were official policy statements. Alicia’s an artist, too, and understands how audiences tend to ascribe magisterial intention and control to artists, when more often we’re just making it up as we go, doing the best we can by deadline. Jim Stoten Thucydides says: “Ignorance is bold, knowledge reserved.”
