Thanks to Susanna Plotnick for sending me this post from April 2013 by James Rhodes, concert pianist. I’m ripping it off lock, stock, and barrel from the Guardian (UK) website and posting it here for our collective delectation. My life as a concert pianist can be frustrating, lonely, demoralising and exhausting. But is it worth it? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt James Rhodes Friday 26 April 2013 After the inevitable “How many hours a day do you practice?” and “Show me your hands”, the most common thing people say to me when they hear I’m a pianist is…

If you follow this blog, you know that I’m not a big believer in feedback. By that I mean “notes,” “critiques,” “comments” about one’s work from writing groups or editors or friends or just about any other source. It’s been my experience that very, very few people can read something and tell you accurately what’s wrong with it. And practically nobody can tell you how to fix it. Feedback from anyone else will just screw you up. Here, unexpurgated, is an e-mail exchange between me and a hard-working young writer named Michael G. S. Hesse. Michael has given me his…

I was watching a documentary about Lindsey Vonn, the champion ski racer, and she said something really interesting (I’m paraphrasing): The fastest runs are never the perfect ones. Perfect runs are always slow. My friend Christy is a downhill racer herself. I asked her about this. She said, That’s absolutely true. In the runs that are your fastest, you get past the point of control. You’re reacting to the hill in the moment. Maybe a bump throws you off and as you try to recover you find you’re taking a line that you never took before and somehow that line…

Here’s something I learned from my friend Paul. He has a metric he applies to characters in a book or a movie. He asks, “How close are they to the edge?” What he means is, “How desperate is this character? How capable is he of going to extremes?” Paul’s theory is that, if we want to write a character who is riveting, we have to give that character a moment to perform some extravagant action—the sooner in the story the better. The character has to announce to the audience, “I am hanging on by my fingernails. Don’t take your eyes…

I was having breakfast with a friend and we were talking about Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” You know, the pyramid with food and shelter at the base and self-actualization at the apex. My friend was making the case that before we can take a shot at fulfilling the needs at the top of the pile, we have to have taken care of our other more basic sleep-and-eat needs at the bottom. I respectfully disagreed. I understand what Maslow was saying. He’s absolutely right—and his insights are brilliant and original. But what about you and me as we enter this…

At the gym where I work out, there’s a program called Pro Camp that specializes in training professional athletes. They train basketball players, football players, hockey players, track athletes. And they train high school and college athletes whose ambition is to make it to the pros. I was standing with the chief of Pro Camp, T.R. Goodman, watching a 15-year-old high school football player go through his workout. “He’s a winner,” T.R. said. I was immediately curious. I asked T.R. what he meant. What qualities did he see in this young boy that marked him as an athlete with a…

I studied ballet at the old Metropolitan Opera when Antony Tudor, the famous choreographer, was the head of the ballet school. In fact, Margaret Craske was the teacher most students considered to be more important. She had danced with Pavlova in the ’20s. Miss Craske instructed us: “Leave your problems outside the classroom.” This excerpt comes from an upcoming book by my mentor, David Leddick. David continues: Such good advice. And in that hour and a half of intense concentration on every part of your body, the music, the coordinating with other dancers you really couldn’t think about your troubles…

Shawn, Jeff and I just did an hour-long “Ask Me Anything” podcast called Organizing a Day, Organizing a Year. We’ll be e-mailing it on New Year’s Day to everyone who has signed up for First Look Access. Our aim is to help get 2014 off to a productive start. One of the subjects that came up during the taping was Predictable Trouble Spots. We were talking about looking ahead to the new year, starting out strong, staying strong—and then we remembered the horrors that inevitably lie ahead. Bank on it, there will be moments for you and me during 2014…

Several of the streets I normally drive are blocked these days by construction for a new light rail line. As I was detouring around one blockage yesterday I thought, “Mass transit is a great idea but it’ll never work here in Los Angeles.” The reason it won’t work is that it runs counter to the culture of the city. L.A. is a car culture. Even when the Metro Line gave away free passes, the trains were still 90% empty. That got me thinking about cultures in general. Institutions have cultures. Apple has a culture, IBM has a culture; so do…

This happened in New York, can’t remember what year. Early one frozen morning, I’m schlepping home from somewhere—probably a girlfriend had kicked me out—and I find myself on 53rd Street passing the Museum of Modern Art. There’s a line out front. If you’re a New Yorker, you’re like a Russian during the Stalin era. You see a line, you get on it. A line means something good is happening. There must be, or people wouldn’t be lining up waiting for it. Even better this particular morning, the line is short. Six people. That means I’ll be up front. I’ll get…