“Your habits reflect your identity, so if you struggle to change a particular habit, re-think your identity.”
Gretchen Rubin
more infosource: pre-publication notes for her forthcoming book Better Than Before; more info here
category: growth, habit, identity, routine
medium: author website
“Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.”
Richard Diebenkorn
more infosource: One of his ten rules for beginning a painting.
category: erase, failure, growth, mistake
medium: List
“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
André Gide
more infosource: The Counterfeiters: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2012), 353.
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category: discovery, growth, perspective, risk, school of life, unknown
medium: Fiction
via: Kathleen Buescher-Milligan“Here is my theory: I am all the ages I’ve ever been. You realize this at some point about your child—even when your kid is sixteen, you can see all the ages in him, the baby wrapped up like a burrito, the one-year-old about to walk, the four-year-old napping, the ten-year-old on a trampoline.”
Anne Lamott
more infosource: Grace (Eventually) (New York: Riverhead, 2007), 78.
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category: aging, childhood, growth, parenting
medium: Essay
“Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces—what Dr. Seuss calls ‘the waiting place.’ Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference—the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals—but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.”
Bruce Mau
more infosource: “Incomplete Manifesto for Growth” (1998), more here
category: collaboration, creative process, empty space, growth
medium: Manifesto
“For the first time in my life I see that I have grown an inch and I believe that I may in ten years be a poet. It is wonderful.”
May Sarton
more infosource: January 15, 1939 letter to Virginia Woolf, in May Sarton: Selected Letters 1916–1954 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 150.
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category: creative process, growth, poet
medium: Letter
“What a discovery I made one day that the more I spent the more I grew, that it was as easy to occupy a large place & do much work as an obscure place & do little…”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
more infosource: April–May 1846 entry, Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 351.
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category: creativity, discovery, growth, school of life
medium: Journal
growth