Stuff worth reading

“Newsflash: Sometimes It’s Okay To Not Follow Your Dreams” by Kelton Wright

Maybe it’s brave to quit your job to go paint in Peru for a year, but it’s also brave to work two jobs to help pay for your mom’s medical bills. It’s smart to stay at the law firm until your loans are paid off. It’s OK to only tolerate your job but love your hobbies, because as soon as passions are turned into careers, you risk turning love into work.

So you don’t love your job — who gives a shit?

Are you happy with yourself? Are you happy with the way you treat people? Are you happy with your life?

“An Interview with Finalist Isabel Quintero” at YALSA’s The Hub

Living on the hyphen is a complex cultural existence at times, and we’re often pulled in many directions where allegiance is always demanded. It is a fractured state of being, though I don’t think it’s necessarily bad.

“Is Being a Writer a Calling or a Job?” at the NYT Sunday Book Review

No young writer can know how rare inspiration is — or how, in its place, the real talent turns out to be sitting down, propelling oneself, day after day, through the self-doubt surrounding our nebulous enterprise, trying to believe, as when we began, that writing is important. Not to believe that literature — other people’s writing — is important. But to believe that our own writing, imperfect, unfinished, inevitably falling short, might matter to anyone else.


3 responses to “Stuff worth reading”

  1. Anthony Lee Collins Avatar

    I saw a blog post about this recently, and now I can’t remember where (if I think of it, I’ll post a link). Sometimes giving up on a dream can be a very positive thing.

    I gave up on the (not based in reality) idea of being a successful musician years ago, and now I wonder why I didn’t stop even sooner. My ex and I get along now because we had the good sense to break up before things got really nasty.

    I don’t love my job, but, you know, they pay me. :-)

    “…as soon as passions are turned into careers, you risk turning love into work.”

    Very true. I knew somebody who moved to New York years ago to become a writer. In order to be “on the scene” he got a job at a literary agency, reading submission manuscripts.

    The job almost immediately stopped him from wanting to write his own book. He never written anything, as far as I know. It is best to keep your passions and your job separate.

    1. Kristan Avatar

      Lol it might actually have been my earlier post about the football player Andrew Hawkins’s personal essays on doing everything possible to achieve his dreams? In the comments section, you, me, and Julia (yogadog) kind of got into how pursuing one’s dreams at all costs isn’t always the best idea. Link: http://kristanhoffman.com/2015/03/12/have-you-done-absolutely-everything-you-can-to-reach-your-dreams/

      1. Anthony Lee Collins Avatar

        Ah, yes, that’s it. I tried to find the post on a few other blogs (difficult because there’s no obvious search terms), but I hadn’t thought that it might have been here. :-)