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Minimalism isn’t about getting rid of things. It’s about doing things with intentionality.

What are you doing that has no intention?

What art are you doing (or not doing) that is flailing?

Intentional art is sticky.

By Brendan O’Meara

Lately I’ve been a bit down on my work as a whole.

Then something sorta clicked.

I remember when I first wanted to be a writer, I wanted to fuse my love of Hemingway and Vonnegut into something all together my own. The leanness of Hemingway with the wit of Vonnegut.

Then I started to make my voice sound too much like other things, too much like what I thought other people might want me to sound like.

I came to try and write “pretty,” and I hate “pretty,” lyrical writing. It’s not me and, frankly, I don’t like to read it very much. I hate when people try to sound overly literary, and that’s what I was finding with my own work.

So I’ve been writing ugly. I remembered why I started.

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.