“In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field and border on the religious.”
“The mark of a free individual is that they do many things throughout their life. This requires them to learn how to learn, how to think, and how to earn. Writing checks the boxes of all three. Schools and jobs tell us what to learn, hinder our ability to think, and prepare us to earn within narrow boundaries. Writing is how you solidify understanding of your studies, mold your thoughts in physical form, and create something worth paying for”
- Dan Koe
“Ten years or so later, after I’d sold a couple of novels, I discovered “The Night of the Tiger” in a box of old manuscripts and thought it was still a perfectly respectable tale, albeit one obviously written by a guy who had only begun to learn his chops. I rewrote it and on a whim resubmitted it to F&SF. This time they bought it. One thing I’ve noticed is that when you’ve had a little success, magazines are a lot less apt to use that phrase, “Not for us.”
- Stephen King reflecting on when he submitted his old works (that were rejected by publishers when he was young and a nobody). As he got famous, they were accepted even though they were the same stories. Previous success and fame can influence an outcome more than the objective value of a product.
“If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems (environment).”
“I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.’ I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that—but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried.”
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