On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

In his recent release, Hidden Potential, organizational psychologist and best-selling author Adam Grant shares the character skills and motivational structures that can help people realize their potential. Here’s a thought-provoking excerpt:

Character is often confused with personality, but they’re not the same. Personality is your predisposition—your basic instincts for how to think, feel, and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.

Knowing your principles doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to practice them, particularly under stress or pressure. It’s easy to be proactive and determined when things are going well. The true test of character is whether you manage to stand by those values when the deck is stacked against you. If personality is how your respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.

Personality is not your destiny—it’s your tendency. Character skills enable you to transcend that tendency to be true to your principles. It’s not about the traits you have—it’s what you decide to do with them. Wherever you are today, there’s no reason why you can’t grow your character skills starting now.

Source: Hidden Potential by Adam Grant, pp. 20-21

On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

Entrepreneur Shane Parrish shares insights about overcoming unconscious reactions and making better decisions in his recent release, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results. Here’s an excerpt:

While no one chooses difficult circumstances, adversity provides opportunity. The test isn’t against other people, though; it’s against our former selves. Are we better than we were yesterday? When circumstances are easy, it’s hard to distinguish ordinary people from extraordinary ones, or to see the extraordinary within ourselves. As the Roman slave Publilius Syrus once said, “Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.”

The path to being exceptional begins when you decide to be responsible for your actions no matter what the situation. Exceptional people know they can’t change the hand they’ve been dealt, and don’t waste time wishing for a better one. They focus instead on how they’re going to play the cards they have to achieve the best result. They don’t hide behind others. The best people rise to the challenge—whatever it is. They choose to live up to their best self-image instead of surrendering to their defaults.

One of the most common mistakes people make is bargaining with how the world should work instead of accepting how it does work. Anytime you find yourself or your colleagues complaining “that’s not right,” or “that’s not fair,” or “it shouldn’t be that way,” you’re bargaining not accepting. You want the world to work in a way that it doesn’t.

Failing to accept how the world really works puts your time and energy toward proving how right you are. When the desired results don’t materialize, it’s easy to blame circumstances or others. I call this the wrong side of right. You’re focused on your ego not the outcome.

Solutions appear when you stop bargaining and start accepting the reality of the situation. That’s because focusing on the next move, rather than how you got here in the first place, opens you up to a lot of possibilities. When you put outcome over ego, you get better results.

Source: Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish, pp. 49-50.

On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

In a recent post on the Writer Unboxed blog, novelist Lisa Janice Cohen shared thought-provoking insights about hope and fear. Here’s an excerpt from that post:

I recently watched a documentary about Molly Kawahata, a young climate activist who is also an ice climber. It’s called The Scale of Hope. As she talked about the challenge of climbing a steep ice wall in Alaska, it felt as if she were talking to me about writing a novel. One of the things she says in the documentary is this:

“You don’t try to climb something that’s literally impossible. You have to know that you could get to the top.”

That’s hope. And yet, her time on the ice is always tempered by fear, by the knowledge that failure is a possible outcome.

Those of us who write are scaling mountains of a different kind. Writing, like climbing, has its own technical skills and to persevere is to believe you can get to the top.

Kawahata brings that same sensibility to her work as a climate activist. And even more challenging is her personal history of living with a mental illness. She is very frank about her own mind being both her antagonist and her protagonist.

Regardless of our specific neurochemistry and limitations, we all bring our full selves to the table in the act of creation. The only way to get to the top of that particular mountain is to first know that it’s possible.

There is one additional aspect to Kawahata’s climbing experience: preparation. As writers, our preparation includes craft and community, research and practice. We would not even attempt to climb without having the right gear, the appropriate training, backup, and knowledge. Communities like Writer Unboxed, conferences, craft books, writing groups, and beta readers are some of our essential tools. However, all the preparation in the world can’t eliminate the fear; it only gives us the resources to draw upon when the work challenges us.

The mountain we set out to climb when we begin a novel isn’t a sheer cliff of ice, but it’s just as slippery and difficult to maintain traction and balance. At any given point, we are looking up to see how much of the face we have left to climb and looking down to see how far we’ve come. It’s all too easy to let fear leave us clinging to the ice, unable to move. But, if we rely on our preparation and equipment, understand that fear is necessary, we can set our toeholds and keep climbing one sentence, one word at a time.

Reach higher. I believe in myself and I believe in you.

What are you climbing?

What fears do you face?

How do you harness your joy to keep moving through the fear?

Source: Writer Unboxed

On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

A long-time fan of bestselling authors and coaches Marc and Angel Chernoff, I look forward to reading their emails and blog posts. Here’s an excerpt from a recent post:

Coping certainly isn’t an easy practice and I’m not suggesting that it is. What I am suggesting is that it’s worth your while. With practice, effective coping allows you to find better ways of managing life’s continuous stream of unexpected and uncontrollable events. For example…

*A task is harder than you expected it to be. — Instead of running from a daunting and overwhelming task, you can accept it and see what it’s like to feel uncomfortable and overwhelmed, and still take action anyway. Writing a book, for example, is daunting and overwhelming, but you can still write one even with those feelings rolling through you

*An interaction with someone you love angers or frustrates you. — Instead of lashing out at a loved one when you’re upset with them, you can sit quietly with your difficult feelings and just be open to what it’s like to feel them. And then, once you’ve had a moment to breathe, you can see what it’s like to deal compassionately with someone you love who you’re also upset with. To try to understand them instead of just judging them at their worst.

*Unhealthy cravings overwhelm you out of nowhere. — You may be inclined to indulge in unhealthy cravings like alcohol and sweets for comfort when you’re feeling stressed out. But you can sit with these feelings and be open to them instead, and then gradually build positive daily rituals for coping in healthier ways — taking walks, meditating, talking with someone about your feelings, and journaling.

*You are forced to deal with a loved one’s death. — When someone you love passes away the loss can seem overwhelming. At that point, it’s incredibly easy to succumb to unhealthy ways of alleviating the pain. But you have to practice doing the opposite — to give yourself compassion, to sit with the powerfully difficult thoughts and feelings you have, and to open your mind to what lies ahead. Gradually it becomes evident that death isn’t just an ending, but also a beginning. Because while you have lost someone special, this ending is also a moment of reinvention. Although deeply sad, their passing forces you to reinvent your life, and in this transition is an opportunity to experience beauty in new, unseen ways and places.

And of course, we’ve merely just scratched the surface of a deep pool of possibilities for effective coping. The key thing to understand is that by learning to internally cope more effectively, you are better equipped to handle anything life throws your way. Because in the end the world is as you are inside — what you think, you see, and you ultimately become.

Note: I highly recommend subscribing to Marc & Angel’s website.