“Shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.”

I’m even more OK with this after watching her TED talk (below), and it definitely sums up the people I consider true artists and innovators.

In an Internet celebrity culture and social emphasis on being out in front, it’s great to see validation in the importance of the introvert.

Excerpt:

Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,” Picasso said. A central narrative of many religions is the seeker — Moses, Jesus, Buddha — who goes off by himself and brings profound insights back to the community.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak:

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

“Today, we are the creators. We each have our own unique skills and talents to contribute to creating the kingdom of god. We serve god best when we do what we love for the greatest cause we can imagine. What the people in this room do is spiritual. It is profound. We are the leaders of this new religion. We have faith that people connected can create a new world. Each one of use is a creator, but together, we are the Creator.”

The documentary’s premise is based on a Nepali surgeon who is visiting to provide cataract surgery to 1,000 North Koreans. At the end, the praise each patient gives to Kim Jong-il after they realize they can now see is heartbreaking.

Chodron has written a number of books, including ones I recommend:

• The Places that Scare You
• Comfortable with Uncertainty

Happy New Year!

Part 1:

“We really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives, and it’s not going to do that if it leaves us isolated in a Web of one.”

“We estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind. So you can imagine how that works. You hear a lot of tiger attacks. There must be a lot of tigers around. You don’t hear about lion attacks. There aren’t a lot of lions around. This works until you invent newspapers, because what newspapers do is repeat, again and again, rare risks. I tell people if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it, because by definition news is something that almost never happens. When something is common, it’s no longer news.”

“Smiling is one of the most basic, biological, uniform expressions of all humans.”