The Secret to Expertise

Posted on May 18, 2007 by Elizabeth

This graph from Creating Passionate Users is not exactly scientific but it illustrates a good point: The amount of expertise you gain in a field is directly related to the amount of effort you put in over time.
K. Anders Ericsson is billed as the “world’s top expert on expertise.” If I recall correctly, he’s the [...]

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The Do-It-Yourself Retreat begins

Posted on April 19, 2007 by Elizabeth

Later today I will be leaving for our writing group’s first annual DIY retreat. I’m very excited and also nervous. Nervous because there’s so much to do before I leave (ergo, I blog); excited because there will be so much to do when we get there! I’m taking with me notes from old stories, my [...]

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Do-It-Yourself Writers’ Retreat

Posted on March 20, 2007 by Elizabeth

I don’t remember how the idea got started — maybe it was when we were working on our goals for 2007 — but the critique group I belong to decided sometime last year that we would like to put together a retreat for ourselves.
It took quite a while to find a clear weekend on our [...]

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Day three

Posted on January 31, 2007 by Elizabeth

Just a little pat on the back for myself. This is the third day in a row that I’ve worked on a story. I finished a quick rough draft of a story yesterday, and today I’m working a tiny bit on an old story that I couldn’t get finished. It gets easier as I go. [...]

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Tough love from John Dufresne

Posted on January 30, 2007 by Elizabeth

Yesterday I wrote about 900 words on a new story. I plan to glue my bottom to my chair and pound out the rest of a very rough draft in the day or so. The story idea itself has been kicking around in my head for about six months now, but I’d never found [...]

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Why do we procrastinate?

Posted on January 15, 2007 by Elizabeth

Science has the answer!
Over the years, psychologists have come up with a lot of ideas about what makes people procrastinate. In addition to anxiety and perfectionism, some suggested that procrastinators were self-sabotaging, hostile and rebellious, or depressed.
But for Steel, procrastination can be explained by an insight borrowed from behavioural economics called hyperbolic discounting. This is [...]

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New Year’s Resolutions

Posted on January 2, 2007 by Elizabeth

I don’t like to make New Year’s resolutions, or set goals of any kind, really — I’d rather put off until next year what I could plan to accomplish this year. But once again the temptation of a fresh new year is too strong, and I find myself resolving the following:
1. To be kind, for everyone [...]

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