Month: May 2019

The fastest and easiest way is to simply suck it up and set your alarm clock an hour earlier and get out of bed. Have a task of some kind ready to go the minute you wake up otherwise you’ll default to sleep.

But if you have time, a more painless way to get up an hour earlier is to set your alarm five minutes earlier than it is now for one week.

For Week 2, set the alarm for five earlier than Week 1, and so on.

By the time 12 weeks is up, you’ll be up an hour earlier without even knowing it.

What will you do with that extra hour?

By Brendan O’Meara

Well, I’d say a curated book of letters written by a cherished author, even if that cherished author isn’t always a savory figure.

This is great for three reasons:

1. You’ll find that they have the same hangups you have, the same insecurities and the letters are so honest and, if we’re being honest, reading them is sorta invasive.
2. They’re dead! With all the wisdom we try to seek from the living through podcasts or YouTube videos to how-to books, letters, memoirs, and biographies of our dead “heroes” is quite possibly the best trove of wisdom we can find.
3. It’s etched in stone and they can’t talk back anymore.

I like this idea as books as mentors. And when those books are letters, it’s an even greater dive into who they are and how they work.

By Brendan O’Meara

You keep working.

It means you’re probably in the hard part of the project, the place where most people give up and move on to the next shiny thing.

The other option is to quit, but this is the easy road. You’ll start something new and that will get hard and you will hate it and you’ll be right back here all over again.

The more you hate it, the more you need to finish it, so you can move on with a clear conscious.

By Brendan O’Meara

There’s this great quote from William Faulkner, who admittedly I’ve never read, where he says:

“Read, read, read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!”

I love that he even says read trash, though we should be spending most of our time reading the great writers. Imitating them. Playing with them. Having conversations with them.

It’s through this process that you find your voice, but asking yourself why Jesmyn Ward focused so strongly on the white pit bull mother in Salvage the Bones, or why Dave Eggers wrote his characters in the way he where he did in The Parade.

Because art is intentional and the finished product is a document full of decisions, what to leave in and what to leave out.

So read and pay attention to all the decisions.

By Brendan O’Meara

So, this entire project started as a daily micropodcast. And over the past the several weeks it has largely been just that.

But the past few days, maybe the past 10 days or so, I’ve been slacking.

I’m sorry.

I did am not holding up my end of the bargain.

I said it would be daily and it has not been daily of late.

I will do better and see this thing through to the end.

I’m very sorry if my missing my daily pod let you down.

And so we move on…

Okay, it means you probably are.

I know I am, and it hurts to admit it.

I’m reaching a point in my writing life where I look like the pathetic junior varsity kid who is still delusional that he thinks he can play varsity despite ALL evidence to the contrary.

Eventually, he’ll get his bat blown out of his hands by a superior fastball, but ultimately he must come to the conclusion on his own that maybe this isn’t for him.

But until then, we go after it because there’s a hunger and an itch, no matter how average we are.

By Brendan O’Meara

When I see my favorite musicians getting after it on the big stage, I often think to myself, “Man, what must it be like to be good at something, like, really good at something.”

What you don’t see is that lead guitarist, when he or she was coming up the ranks and had their first guitar, they were playing six, seven, eight hours a day. Unless they were like Eddie Van Halen, but we must avert our eyes in the face of true genius.

Hours and hours of bad notes and buzzed fret boards. And then, maybe, they reach the big time and we see them and wonder how they make it look so easy, the way their hands and fingers magically land on the perfect spot along the fret board.

Eight hours of practice is a bit much and not realistic for most working adults, but how many wasted minutes were on your schedule today? How many of those minutes could’ve been spent writing bad words, buzzing the fret board? Do a time audit. The TRS—the time revenue service—comes knocking. They want to know where your time went and how you can account for it.

What will you tell the TRS? Can you look the TRS in the eye and say you spent it on the right path? Are you squared up? I’m not. But I’m working on it. Better today, better tomorrow, win the hour, win the day.

So on we go.