GTD: Lessons from Emerson

First post.  Word up!  These first few posts will be old news to some, and a lot of stuff I found recently on other blogs.  Just gonna get some posts up that I’ve been holding on to since I started thinking about starting this blog…

I’ll set it off with some old, but useful knowledge from one of my favorite people in history, Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson.  This (like most of his teachings) is still extremely relevant, if not more relevant as we all seem to be picking up momentum…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3 lessons in productivity:

1. Write everything down:  “Men are born to write… Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore commended to his pen, and he will write. In his eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported. ”

2. Eliminate Distractions:  “The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends, and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. . . Friends, books, pictures, lower duties, talents, flatteries, hopes, - all are distractions which cause oscillations in our giddy balloon, and make a good poise and a straight course impossible. You must elect your work; you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest. Only so, can that amount of vital force accumulate, which can make the step from knowing to doing.”

3. Keep moving: “Ah!” said a brave painter to me, thinking on these things, “if a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to success in our art, but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.”

This might seem obvious to some, but still good reminders.

Info found over at ZenHabits.

Saul Goodman.

~ by Jackson on July 22, 2008.