chapter 16

"Beneath some paper stored for kindling beside the fireplace I found a big volume, without covers and in fine type. It contained Campanella's City of the Sun, More's Utopia, Machiavelli's Discourses and The Prince, as well as long selections from St. Simon, Comte, Marx and Engels. I don't recall what ingenious person made this collection, but it certainly was a whopper. Two days it rained, and I was sunk in it while wet wood tried to burn and I tossed in whole bundles of resinous ocote to try to make a blaze. It was too wet to fly Caligula. I stood upon the toilet seat and fed him through the hood, pushed the meat on him in order to get back as quickly as possible to the book. Utterly fascinated I was, and forgot how I sat on my bones, getting up lamed, dazed by all that boldness of assumption and reckoning." Saul Bellow


7 focus and discipline
nothing is going to get done until you do it, so sit down and get to work! organize yourself, always have a gameplan and work systematically, diligently; do one thing at a time. and do things with intensity! twyla tharp talks about habit, animators about trusting the process; in both cases it's the same: do whatever necessary to get into the zone and then respect those natural processes. you really should value, maintain and practice them, and know that when you feel like giving up, you're probably just about to learn something...