#focus and discipline

[burning-beneath]

The Battle of Building a Dream

“It’s hard to stay focused on the task at hand.”That sentence sums up the battle I’ve been facing daily. My mind doesn’t walk—it races. It jumps ahead to the next phase of the project before I’ve even completed the one in front of me. One moment I’m planning the immediate step, and the next, I’m off thinking about alternative approaches, better strategies, ways to make it more effective, more…

[icytrusova]

𝔴𝔢𝔢𝔨𝔩𝔶 𝔴𝔬𝔯𝔨𝔬𝔲𝔱 𝔯𝔬𝔲𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔢

monday - 1 tuseday - 2 wednesday - 3 thursday - rest friday - 1 saturday - 2 sunday - 3

[ungiorno-nellavita]

A Day in Apolo Ohno’s Shoes

Daily writing promptIf you could be someone else for a day, who would you be, and why?View all responses Have you ever thought about who you’d be if you could step into someone else’s shoes for a day? Not just for the lifestyle or experiences, but to soak in their mindset, their drive, and how they tackle life? If I had the chance, I’d definitely choose to be Apolo Ohno.Apolo isn’t just an…

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Writing and Achieving Big Goals When Life’s Not Treating You Well

I Completed Four Books in 2024 In the Heat of Life and What You Can Learn from My Approach As an Aspiring or Established Author Summary of “How I Wrote 4+ Books in 2024 Despite an Extremely Busy Schedule” I am an author of multiple books in different niches and content strategist with 40+ years of experience. Reviewing my 2024 results, I am satisfied with how I wrote four books amid personal…

[angerieque]

You don’t have to force a whole new personality, but reintroduce patterns and ways of existence.

[anghraine]

I know it's well-understood at this point that Kirk/Spock is much more of a nerd4nerd ship than a nerd/jock thing, but it's just been kind of percolating around my mind that both of them aren't just space nerds but space nerds who were personally bullied.

Like, 18-year-old Kirk was targeted by an older bully who combines "total asshole" with "the most grating man in existence":

MCCOY: Well, yeah, I'm beginning to feel a little bit picked-on, if that's what you mean. KIRK: I know the feeling very well. I had it at the Academy. An upperclassman there. One practical joke after another, and always on me. My own personal devil. A guy by the name of Finnegan. MCCOY: And you being the very serious young— KIRK: Serious? I'll make a confession, Bones. I was absolutely grim, which delighted Finnegan no end.

This was five years after Kirk survived a genocide, btw, and likely well before his stint as an Academy instructor known to be strict and demanding (which is the period the "stack of books with legs" description of him comes from). By the time he's 33, fifteen years after all this, it turns out one of his deepest fantasies is just beating the shit out of his bully, but only if he can do it According To The Rules (the replica of Finnegan sneers, "Always fight fair, don't you? True officer and gentleman, you").

Spock, meanwhile, is viciously targeted by his Vulcan peers for being biracial from at least age 5; he's described as being tormented by other boys by that age, and "at home nowhere except Starfleet." I think he'd have been 18 or 19 when he left for Starfleet and it's... the least bad of his options, but he seems to have spent his entire career among humans and being persistently subjected to raw racism and profound disrespect for his culture at every turn.

Like, their histories of being metaphorically shoved into lockers are not identical or anything, but I think it's interesting that they both have them.

[animatormentata]

Momento autostima 👍🏻

[ursiday]

may i ask how you've gotten to the level of skill you're at with your art when you're studying another field? like obviously you studied lots but how did you go about finding out what and how to study to hone your anatomy, painting, animation etc. skills?

If you crack this please let me know because I'm struggling lol. Honestly when it comes to studying art I'm not the person to ask, my technical skill is quite far behind where I would like it to be, I've never really studied art in a dedicated way and moreso backed into learning things just by doing stuff I feel like working on. Most of my drawings fall pretty squarely in my comfort zone and I don't do a lot of time-consuming projects, like it's probably obvious I haven't done much animating since starting grad school lol

The reality though is that I choose to spend time on art at the expense of a lot of other things (including my school/research/teaching work... I am not a disciplined student). I can't say I recommend that approach necessarily buuut I think the best advice I can give is to think about what's important to you and what you personally want to get out of making art, if you want to enjoy it as a hobby then I think you should do whatever whenever you want that feels fun. That's what I've been doing, but it's starting to wear on me a lot because I do want to build a stronger body of work and work on more ambitious projects. If you do have a specific goal in mind then whatever that is will direct the kind of things you'll want to work on and practice. But be kind to yourself because that's a difficult thing to do even without having to split your time and energy

[surelysilly]

just take me to the beach 'cos my heart is cold enough 🧊🔥

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 (here)

[a-path-by-the-moon]

[thepersonalwords]

Have you decided how great you want to be? It’s really up to you. Greatness is a choice.

Mensah Oteh, Unlocking Life's Treasure Chest: Wisdom keys to keep you inspired, encouraged, motivated and focused

[throughdoegaze]

Doing the task for 20 minutes is better than thinking about it for 20 hours

Overthinking, over-planning, over-preparing won’t get the work done, it never did. Action does. Over time, even the “insignificant” one

Sitting down and starting—no matter how small or messy—is always better than letting fear and doubt hold you hostage

20 minutes of effort is breakthrough. It’s momentum. 20 hours of thinking is just a spiral, keeping you stuck in the same place

So stop waiting for motivation. Put the timer on. Start the task. Even if it’s imperfect, even if it’s just a little—you’re moving forward, and that’s progress.

[lightningidle]

Fig's line "I don't think I'm an artist, I think I'm just a good friend" has not left my head at all. Just...

You're Fig Faeth and your horns came in over the summer and you pick up the bard class as a form of adolescent rock 'n' roll rebellion, and it works! It's exactly the outlet you need! You give a guy you just met drumsticks and you start a band and it's good enough that within a year and a half you're touring. You are, in every sense, good at being a bard.

And then, finally, your junior year, you start to take it seriously. Your art goes from an outlet and a form of rebellion to a practice. A discipline. (Can rebellion exist within a discipline?) Your classmates know what they want to do with their work. They all have a thesis statement. And yeah, there's cohesion in the music you make, but you've never had to think about why you make it. You've never sat down and dissected what it is about bass that speaks to you. You've never poured over your lyrics to pick at any deeper meaning. Why should you? You don't play music for a grand design, you do it to... huh, why do you do it?

(Your art is the one form of self-expression that feels as safe as Disguise Self does, because even if you're pouring your heart onto the page and then screaming it in front of thousands of people, it's not like you're really making yourself known. You can sing I'm lonely, I'm scared, I'm furious, and your fans will sing it right back, and there will still be the distance between performer and audience to keep your heart safe.)

Now you're being asked to look inward to explain the artistic choices you're making, and you can't help but recoil at that, because you'd rather do anything than look inward. Meanwhile, your classmates have no problem with it, so you start to wonder if you're a real artist at all. Can your art be authentic if it only exists to bolster a thesis statement? Has your art been unauthentic this whole time because you've never really thought about a thesis statement before? Is that what makes it art, and not just the next track on somebody's teen angst playlist?

You can't think about yourself— acknowledging your own existence makes you want to puke. So if your music is an extension of yourself, (and it is, even if it's just because the spotlight reveals only what you want it to,) you can't think about your music. You can't. You have to. Your grade depends on it.

You're Fig Faeth, and you keep multiclassing because you'd rather be a good friend than a great artist. If introspection is what great art demands, then fuck it. You must not be a bard at all.

[in-tenebris-et-in-solitudine]

Stay Safe Online

[croc-odette]

the lumon thinking too of like... 'you need to behave according to these rigid extremes and destroy/berate/obliterate the parts of yourself are unseemly. in exchange you will JOIN KIER' is giving christianity it's giving catholicism it's giving puritanism. it's probably definitely giving scientology but i'm afraid to learn about it to check. you should be ashamed of being a human being with desires and personality traits and you will let your life on earth be micromanaged to the atom by people who say they can grant you power and immortality. well!

[anghraine]

It's a little past midnight and I didn't write a whole lot, but I added a scrap to this bit of the femslash Spirk AU:

S’paak did not quite return her smile. Still, she felt the temptation to do so. Captain Kirk was so utterly the captain in her mind that she couldn’t quite think of her so casually, but she understood the invitation for what it was and nodded. Oddly enough, the arrival of a new chief medical officer—Dr. Leonard McCoy, an old friend of Kirk’s—helped S’paak accept a degree of informality. It was not because she wished to mimic him in the slightest. He was an excellent physician and a wildly disrespectful colleague, a loyal, practical friend to all appearances, and self-righteous to the point of remarkable callousness. S’paak could not have said whether she liked him or not, but he almost invariably addressed Captain Kirk as Jess, though her observations suggested he wasn’t quite as close to her as S’paak was. If he could refer to the captain by nickname on the ship, on the bridge itself, without undermining her authority or his own, then S’paak dared little by thinking of her by the same name. After all, she spent 24.38% more off-duty time with S’paak than McCoy. Even when both were present, S’paak calculated that the captain looked at her with 39.217% more frequency than the highest rate of fixed attention paid to anyone else, including McCoy. He might be her friend, and gradually he became S’paak’s friend as well, but he was not Kirk’s right hand. He didn’t understand them as they understood each other, nor did he need to; he cared without understanding. He was not S’paak. Logic suggested, therefore, that a nickname from S’paak would be no more inappropriate than it was from McCoy. She did not often use it aloud, still, but she looked at her captain and let herself think Jess. S’paak would not have admitted it to anyone for any reason, but sometimes, now and then, she did more. She allowed herself to unwind the captain’s true name in her thoughts, in the voice of her mind. Even McCoy never used it, not by itself. And S’paak doubted she could speak more familiarly than he did without every discipline failing her, her terrible, impossible yearning exposed in every syllable. Jessica. - By the ending of the fourth year of the voyage, half a decade seemed far too short a time for their work—certainly too short for this rewarding period of companionship and professional rapport. S’paak sometimes privately estimated the chances that they would be sent out again after their return, that Jess would be permitted to retain her as first officer, that they would remain together in some form after all this was over. She lacked the information for a rigorous estimate, however; it was only a torment.