Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Curry is a very entertaining collection of the work and creative habits of 161 very successful people including writers, painters, musicians, composers, actors, philosophers, and even Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. These people are profiled in bit-size chunks, and it’s the perfect book for a quick read during a short break…like when you’re pooping. Hey, it’s not just me–I’ve found this book in several bathrooms of friends houses!
It’s our conviction at Life Sausage that everyone should be engaging in creative activity in some small way every day. Being deliberate and intentional is the only way that beautiful things get created, and this book will give you perspective on how creative the creative process can be! Another benefit was seeing how compulsive and neurotic these people were. Made me feel a little better about myself.
Here’s a excerpt from the Introduction by the author:
Nearly every weekday morning for a year and a half, I got up at 5:30, brushed my teeth, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to write about how some of the greatest minds of the past four hundred years approached this exact same task–that is, how they made the time each day to do their best work, how they organized their schedules in order to be creative and productive.
By writing about the admittedly mundane details of my subjects’ daily lives–when they slept and ate and worked and worried–I hoped to provide a novel angle on their personalities and careers, to sketch entertaining, small-bore portraits of the artist as a creature of habit. “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are,” the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once wrote. I say, tell me what time you eat, and whether you take a nap afterward.
In that sense, this is a superficial book. It’s about the circumstances of creative activity, not the product; it deals with manufacturing rather than meaning.
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