The other day I was at the grocery store trying to buy some salad dressing. You’d think this would be a fairly straightforward task: pick the type of dressing (ranch, Italian) and the brand (Kraft, Newman’s Own) and put it in your cart. But as I stood there staring at the vast array of possibilities…
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Compiling a 100 choices list
Here’s an example of the “100 Choices” list I mentioned in my last post. The question I used to get things started was, How can I make money this year? (I did in fact leave off the illegal/immoral possibilities, such as selling crack cocaine from my living room): query my favorite magazine editors query magazine…
About the 100 choices list
When you’re trying to solve a problem, you have to ask the right question. For the 100 choices list I posted yesterday, I began by thinking about how all of us could probably use a few extra bucks about now. I posed the problem this way: How can I make money this year as a…
Paper or plastic?
I’m paying for a handful of groceries when the cashier asks, “Paper or plastic?” I open my mouth to answer when it occurs to me that the answer isn’t “paper” or “plastic,” it’s “neither.” I can carry what I have in my hands. This gets me to thinking about how often we set up our…
Choosing the path
When I began training in martial arts, it meant a whole new life for me. It meant I gave up smoking and cut back on drinking and watched what I ate and worked out every night. All of these were good things and I felt positive about them. It was just that sometimes I missed…
On choosing
The other day, I was complaining to a friend of mine that the problem with being a neurotic writer is that neurotics hate uncertainty – we’d rather hear “no” than “I don’t know yet” – and writers live in a constant state of uncertainty. You send your book or your pitch or your proposal out…