Remember the scene from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where Professor Lupin introduces his class to the boggart?
A boggart transforms into whatever the person facing it fears the most.
Read More“Follow the spiders? Why spiders? Why couldn’t it be ‘follow the butterflies?’” — Ron Weasley
In 430 BC, the second year of the Peloponnesian War, Greek general Pericles led a fleet of over 100 ships towards the enemy island.
As they were charging ahead at full speed, suddenly, a solar eclipse cast the entire fleet into darkness.
Unaware of the scientific nature of this unexpected and shocking event, panic befell the soldiers and sailors. But not Pericles.
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“You are all a ‘génération perdue!’,” the garage owner shouted at the young mechanic, who couldn’t fix Gertrude Stein’s car fast enough.
“That is what you are. That’s what you all are … all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”
Stein later told the story to her dear friend, Ernest Hemingway, who’s largely responsible when historians today refer to those born between 1883 an 1900 by said name.
What Hemingway alluded to in The Sun Also Rises isn’t lost in the sense of gone, missing or forsaken, but “disoriented, wandering, directionless — a recognition that there was great confusion and aimlessness among the war’s survivors in the early post-war years,” as Samuel Hynes points out in A War Imagined.
When I look at my generation of fellow millennials, I can’t help but feel as if history is about to repeat itself.
Hence, this open letter.
Read More10 minutes, ha! I’m going to show you not one, but six things that will change your life — and we’ll do it with time to spare.
After this, you’ll feel calm, prepared and ready to take on the world, like this:
Let’s go!
Read MoreI don’t have to teach you to think like a genius. You already are.
A genius is by definition someone who’s wrong a lot so they can be very right about one, usually extremely specific thing, way before everyone else is.
But what if that’s not a special trait of geniuses? What if we’re all geniuses?
I mean, you and I are wrong a lot, aren’t we? And sometimes, we get to say “I told you so” to our friends.
All we do when we call someone a genius is elate them to this status in hindsight.
But in order for us to be able to do that, a genius has to do one thing first, and it’s the only thing that really makes them different: when they know they’re right, they speak up and do something about it.
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I’m a writer. As such, I’ve always written to the best of my ability and with the purest of intentions. You might think that’s the most natural thing in the world, but just recently I learned that many writers don’t consider these two items – which are really just the right thing to do – part of their job description.
As part of my quest to learn more about writers, who inspire me, I decided this year I would get all books from one author I like, read them in chronological order, and look at how they and their style have evolved. I started with Ryan Holiday.
