“One” is the best number

Please stop organizing meetings. Introverts need time to actually work. This is the plea that Alan Jacobs makes. And even though this post is a bit mean in its tone (and he’s wrong about the spelling, btw…), I still think he’s is repeating something that many introverts wish that our externally focus sisters and brothers would understand.

…So people I do not know will regularly send me emails: “Hey, I’ll be in your town soon and I’d love to have lunch or coffee. Just let me know which you’d prefer!” Notice the missing option: not being forced to have a meal and make conversation with a stranger. (Once a highly extraverted friend of mine was trying to get me involved in some project and said, cheerily, “You’ll get to meet lots of new people!” I turned to him and replied, “You realize, don’t you, that you’ve just ensured my refusal to participate?”)

Hey Extraverts: Enough is Enough

Rank amateurs

Chuck Close makes a mockery of our notions of “inspiration”:

Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.

[…]

I never had painter’s block in my whole life.

Chuck Close on Creativity, Work Ethic, and Problem-Solving vs. Problem-Creating

Beloved, let us love one another

This is the way to write music for the church.

While you’re at it, check out their previous album, Hope for a Tree Cut Down.