Chuck Close on Creativity, Work Ethic, and Problem-Solving vs. Problem-Creating
brainpickings.org
brainpickings.org
I'm one of the odd developers that doesn't obsess over tools. I worked with four different editors, last year - vico, vim, sublime, and eclipse - and I can't say that I'm attached to any of them. I don't complain when I can't use my favorite vim or sublime shortcuts (I don't even know a lot), and it doesn't phase me when I have to hack some code on my 13" MBP instead of my 24" monitor at work. Contrary to what most think, a developer that obsesses over their tools doesn't necessarily make them a good developer.
"Show up and get to work."
More importantly, Linux on an old laptop could still support Dropbox. I would have lost a lot of work to a dead hard drive just last week if not for that. It only takes one leak or one energetic puppy to destroy a paper manuscript.
Please watch your costs here. My writing still hasn't covered the costs of the netbook I bought for my first novel, drafted back in 2008, and I paid only $500 for that one. A hundred sales counts as serious success for a brand-new author, and that likely won't bring in a grand on even self-published eBook royalties (70%).
Editorial and other services (layout, etc.) shouldn't cost you anything close to that first estimate, either. Dean Wesley Smith (http://deanwesleysmith.com), a 30-year industry veteran, has more to say on these points.
My 400,000 words of novel-writing (and counting) might only contain a few gems, but it contains far more than the empty page of someone still waiting for inspiration to strike.
Sitting down and pounding out whatever you can for an hour or two a day will make you a successful writer faster than anything other than actually writing.
I think the general 10,000 hours theory suggests that for the first ~2,000 hours of a new skill, all practice is deep practice (exact # of hours depends on the skill, of course.) That means that for the first few years, quantity of practice is more important than anything else. You'll eventually hit a plateau and need to practice in a different way to continue improving, but that will only ever apply to a few skills throughout your lifetime.
One might need those 8,000 additional hours to level-up into the next Tennessee Williams but - as emphasized in 4-Hour Chef and elsewhere - just 2,000 hours puts your far beyond 95% of the world.
Anyway, I'm a fan. It cured me of all inspiration-seeking behavior.
* http://www.amazon.com/The-Creative-Habit-Learn-Life/dp/07432...
This website has everything that book has, and more, without the awkward self-help spiritualism that's so popular:
http://gapingvoid.com/2004/07/25/how-to-be-creative/
Also, if you're "busy" reading /r/getmotivated and books like these you're not actually doing work. You're reading about doing work. These advice guides are traps and time wasters in themselves. Good in small doses, but after a point, they're just as bad as watching TV.
I read Turning Pro first after this excerpt on 99u and loved it; The War of Art was cool too but kind of cringey & self-helpy in places.
http://99u.com/articles/7192/Are-You-Trapped-in-a-Shadow-Car...
I read Vonnegut's biography, And So It Goes. He'd been developing his novel about Dresden for nearly two decades before it became Slaughter House Five. He wrote most every day, just like any other job.
For instance, he's done a zillion self-portraits. He thinks his face is uninteresting, so he can explore pure technique. (Also, I guess he's always available as a model.)
Perhaps this is all part of making creativity a predictable thing - he doesn't get lost in infinite options.
If you want to become an excellent engineer or artist then you will probably be better served by getting educated, and logging many hours in progressively more difficult jobs, than procrastinating and dithering.
Anyway, most people don't have the luxury, and will only get anything interesting done if they put in serious focused effort.
'he did not contribute anything new...' The truth is much of his work was lost and/or only discovered later, so by the definition of 'contributing' to the direct development of particular fields, it wasn't nearly as impacting as it could have been. I don't see how that reflects on his 'genius' in any shape or form. Instead it demonstrates ignorance and it's a point that someone who actually is just a little read up on Da Vinci wouldn't make.
We only have a fragment of his work documented today, and just on that alone, his brilliance in the many fields he was interested is clearly observable.
'he was an excellent illustrator'... That's like looking at his anatomical drawings and concluding he's a great illustrator without really understanding what he was drawing.
Only fairly recently has it been discovered exactly how well Da Vinci understood the workings of the aortic valve and blood flow. He used similar methods of flow visualisation that researchers used to make similar findings about the working of the heart in the 1990s (source http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00348-002-0478-8...). It took over 500 years for the field to catch up in that respects.
He figured out why the sky appears blue (requiring understanding in optics and physics), the cause of heart disease, created some of the first robotics. If Da Vinci's work was accepted and published out in the open during his time, his impact on several fields would be highly influential.
'Hardly any of his engineering worked' For a better appreciation of his engineering prowess, maybe check out some of the many attempts to replicate his machines. Granted some sketches (which is what we're left with) don't work as is (if that's what you're expertly judging), but as is the case with engineering, you learn by iterating designs and testing real models, a luxury not given to Da Vinci for each of his many projects.
(And I wonder why people keep replicating his work if he was such an ordinary engineer)
A lot of those experiments to replicate have been made into documentaries and are good fun to watch. Here's an interesting attempt to reproduce his diving suit design http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjzZ1-Plgjs.
FYI my six year-old can also draw machines that can't actually fly.
It seems like he doesn't care about when he works, but he has long uninterrupted work times, which is great, and it's what most developers ask for.