Your to-do list should include items that need to be accomplished for the month, the week, and each day. You must then ask yourself how much time you need to block off to achieve each task. Time blocking allows you to minimize distractions and to maximize your efficiency as you work to complete this list.
The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it's Whitman, who lost his job for 'Leaves of Grass,' or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose 'Howl' was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you're going to put yourself in jeopardy.
If you hug to yourself any resentment against anybody else, you destroy the bridge by which God would come to you.
Active questions are the alternative to passive questions. There is a huge difference between, 'Do you have clear goals?' and 'Did you do your best to set clear goals for yourself?' The former is trying to determine the employee's state of mind; the latter challenges the employee to describe or defend a course of action.
Sometimes those fears creep into the back of your head, but then you slap yourself and think, 'Oh, woe is me! People actually like me.' What a silly thing to worry about. This is a huge opportunity, and I'm excited.
Your movie becomes much more narrow-minded when you have like-minded department heads. Whereas if you can surround yourself with people who have been a mother before, been a grandmother before, you get a much broader and wide-reaching swath of human emotions.
I've learned that to expose yourself, to reveal yourself is a test of your humanness.
There's absolutely no way you can feel the freedom to embarrass and humiliate yourself unless you have finally recognized that your identity is in someone other than yourself.
There's something about being any kind of entertainer that is acting. You have to put on a show. Things you wouldn't do in your life, you do on stage. You have to let go. And that's extra hard for rappers. We have a tendency to, quote unquote, keep it real. As an actor, you have to be able to humiliate yourself. Do whatever it takes.
I have inherited my father's sense of humour about myself. It's a lot more pleasant to make fun of yourself than when someone else does.
You can't get much done by yourself. Speaking as someone who made a movie - and it took hundreds of people to make it happen - I can say that.
If someone says something hurtful to you or makes you feel down on yourself, then you just gotta stay positive and keep moving forward because they might not know much about you, or they may not understand the situation.
To complete your daily mental hygiene, observe any part of you that is upset or anxious, and offer that part of yourself the following simple wishes: 'May you be well. May you be happy. May you be free from suffering.' Repeat this until you actually mean it.
I actually think acting is a form of self-hypnosis. You have to be hyper, hyper aware of what's going on around you. You have to know where the lens is, what the shot is, and where you're moving. And then you have to trick yourself into an emotional state where you believe this stuff is actually happening.
There are really two types of laughter on the part of the spectator. There is the laughter of recognition - which means seeing things you're familiar with and laughing at yourself. But there's also hysterical laughter - a way of dealing with the things we see that upset us.
With imagery, as actors know, you can make up anything you want to. You can put yourself in icy water to get rid of this or that.
It's actually cool to be positive and optimistic and idealistic. It's cool to see yourself doing beautiful, great things.
We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.
If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.
'The Odyssey' is the great tale, and I was really taken by 'The Iliad,' so I dig into those things, and when I was a kid I didn't. You've gotta have a certain level of understanding yourself before that stuff really starts to resonate.
