How to Success by Corinne Caputo is, without question, one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. The honest cluelessness on each page is like reading a how-to on brain surgery by someone who’s never cut so much as a watermelon, and probably hasn’t come closer to using a knife than watching a YouTube clip on slicing fruit, but has all the trust and confidence that they can, indeed, perform brain surgery and have it result in a positive outcome.

Every page is funny (“How to come out as a writer to your parents”) or irreverent(“How to bring up your book at parties!”) or maybe quasi-useful (“Math problems for writers”).

But unsaid throughout the book is the idea that you can get it done – you can write a novel, or a memoir, or a screenplay. All you need is to do it. Do it wildly, do it badly, do it loudly..but do it.

You can’t edit what isn’t written. And maybe fortune, awards, and fame await. If they do, you’ll have practiced taking an author photo and signing autographs (things to do before writing that bestseller. 😉

Full disclosure – Corinne is also my daughter, but it makes the book no less funny.

Fear has all the gravitational pull of a black hole, preventing anyone from making positive progress.

Courage, faith, trust, hope, dreams, support from those we love – this is the fuel mixture that lets us burn hot enough and fast enough to achieve escape velocity.

The level of trust demanded by the writing muses is staggering. Every time I feel I’m writing a significant moment (which always feels more like I’m documenting something happening before me, but that’s a whole separate post) I rarely know why, but I feel weight of the scene. Then, hundreds or thousands of words later, the “ah hah!” moment clubs me in the back of the head and I’ll know why that scene needed to stay.

I just hate not knowing ahead of time. The engineer and scientist in me lives in a petri dish of reason and fact, and is at odds with the artist, who happily burns brightly in a crucible of creative energy.

The arrogance of youth is rooted in a blindness towards mortality, just as the jaded cynicism and simmering anger of old age is rooted in mortality’s glaring inescapable spotlights. 

Some say the key to independent creative success can be summarized in one of two mantras: 

Constantly Create Content or Constantly Consume Coffee. 

I think they’re equally important. 

If you were in a desert and had water, but didn’t know and could never know how much water you had until you were out of it, would you run the desert hills and revel in the dunes and bask in the sunshine, or spend your days burrowed in the sand and only come out night? 

Isn’t it funny how everything and anything is more interesting when fast-forwarded or reversed or watched in slow motion? I can’t think of any exceptions. 

That level of interest suggests a powerful desire to view things outside of our own timeframes, an inner desperation to find a different tempo for our lives. Maybe to stretch out the good moments in our lives, or to fast-forward the rough patches we go through. 

Nothing corrodes as insidiously as time. 

You will die bankrupt if you live a life of sacrifice thinking you’re depositing into some kind of karmic bank. 

Balance selflessness and selfishness. Always balance. 

“I can make money doing anything!” is a vastly different thing than “I’ll do anything to make money.”