people & performance / strategy & solutions
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, October 1842:
Thou shalt read Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Proclus, Jamblichus, Porphyry, Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch, Apuleius, Chaucer, Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Jonson, Ford, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Bacon, Marvell, More, Milton, Molière, Swedenborg, Goethe.
There are 120,000 excess deaths per year attributed to ten workplace conditions and they cause approximately $190 billion in incremental health care costs. That makes the workplace the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. — higher than Alzheimer’s, higher than kidney disease.
Both articles report the findings published by Jeffrey Pfeffer in Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It.
I have not read the book yet, but I definitely will.
When my friend Xavier took an interest in my master’s thesis –that was a few years ago ;)– he started suggesting books and journal articles that he thought might be useful to my research. Soon thereafter I started doing the same whenever I bumped into something I thought might be useful to his doctoral dissertation (and later to his research and classes).
I also began doing this to other friends and colleagues. It had been (and still is) a great experience for me and I wanted others to experience the same.
This has been going on for decades now. Of course, paper cuttings and photocopies have become emails with links and attachments.
I am thinking it is time to broaden the circle. And that is why I am creating a monthly newsletter.
The content of the newsletter will follow my consultancy practice and intellectual pursuits: leadership development and executive coaching, that is, people managing themselves, others, their team, and their organization.
My hope is that as a subscriber to the newsletter you will also become a contributor of material that might be interesting to other subscribers. Please send your suggestions by replying to the newsletter email you receive – subscribe here.
Happy reading!
Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one’s own writing.
The first step is to become a slow reader. No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work with the standing of literature.
Writers perforce read differently from everyone else. Most people ask three questions of what they read: (1) What is being said? (2) Does it interest me? (3) Is it well constructed?
Writers also ask these questions, but two others along with them: (4) How did the author achieve the effects he has? And (5) What can I steal, properly camouflaged of course, from the best of what I am reading for my own writing? This can slow things down a good bit.
More here.
These are readings Hemingway recommended to a young person aspiring to be a writer. The whole story here.
Links for the book will take you to Project Gutenberg.
Je lis chez Desbiens (Ainsi donc):
L’abondance des notes, en effet, et la dimension de la bibliographie ne m’impressionnent plus. (…) En outre, je suis gouverné depuis longtemps par l’idée qu’il faut résoudre en soi et pour soi les plus grandes questions.
Cette pensée rejoint celle d’Ortega y Gasset: lire moins et penser davantage (leer menos, pensar más).
Au lecteur qui se demande comment reconnaître si cette résolution est faite et est sienne, je propose ceci: demande-toi si tu peux donner raison de tes plus profondes convictions.
Information and parody. Well done!
Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons.
How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself?
I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would definitely have been different.
More on the importance of talent, focus and endurance in writing from the author of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running at 99U.
Q: What is the best training for writing? Courses in writing? Or what?
William Faulkner: Read, read, read! Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad; see how they do it. When a carpenter learns his trade, he does so by observing. Read! You’ll absorb it. Write. If it is good you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.
via This Recording.
Mucho se equivocan (…) quienes afirman que una tableta electrónica borrará el libro de papel de las necesidades humanas. Porque un libro no sirve sólo para leer.
Sirve también para que su peso tranquilice las manos lectoras, para subrayar y ajar sus páginas con el uso, para regalar el ejemplar leído a personas a las que quieres. Para ver amarillear sus páginas con los años sobre los viejos subrayados que hiciste cuando eras distinto a quien ahora eres. Para decorar -no hay cuadro ni objeto comparable en belleza- una habitación o una casa. Para amueblar una vida.
Bien dicho, Arturo.