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The key (to anything really) is to stick with it and every day do something that advances your project specifically or your craft generally. Doing this should help to get you into a flow-like state where it becomes habit and you simply "do the work" every day without really thinking about it. The author argues that there is no such writer's block (but this could be applied to any creative endevour) and a lack of daily practice is what keeps people from getting things done; if you don't feel inspired, write anyway, write junk, throw it out, keep writing. "We don't write because we feel like it, we feel like it because we write." With all this practice every day taking up a large chunk of your life, one should recognize that if you are planning to become great at your craft, understand there will be a sacrifice - you can't do everything.

Apparently Rick Rubin is a music producer, and while he certainly makes use of some art as music examples there are plenty of other media he explores with his examples and musings. Some of the advice given is quite literal in how you might go about whittling your work down or finding ways to see the works (or world) through a different lens. Other advice is more abstract, but useful none-the-less, and helps you find, start, or complete a project when you are stuck. I think his advice on treating every project as nothing more than an experiment, that you can discard at a moment's notice like a child dropping one toy for another, helps to alleviate stress about it being good enough and simultaneously allowing even failures to be seen as experimental stepping stones that will make the next project that much better. Finally another important take-away is the idea that you can train for anything - that obviously means the technical aspect of your craft, but it also means you can train yourself to quiet you mind, to focus on different aspects of whatever you are looking at, or even how you give and receive criticism.

Each of the damn near 100 'chapters' is little more than a couple pages that read more like a long form Twitter post than anything resembling an actual book chapter. It feels like it was written by someone who doesn't write for an audience of people that don't read. Overall I generally disliked the whole idea of all these 'random' chapters flowing in no particular order, but I must admit that there are a few gems, particularly on the topic of creativity and film making, hidden among the dross. Lynch's creative process can probably be summed up accurately as: meditate and be happy. With this, I can not disagree.

At its core the book lays out how the shift from a typographic centered communication society to a image centered communication society has redefined the very epistemology of civilization. Before radio, photography, the telegraph, and television (not to mention the internet), the only way people communicated, excluding orally, was via the written word. A book, as the piece de resistance of the typographic age, meant a number of things in and of itself that the modern telecommunications lack. A book, or more particularly the ideas a book holds, are wrestled into their final form over months or years as the author distills their thoughts, rearranges their arguments, and hones their presentation into a final lucid concept as they imagine how the future reader might react. Telecommunications holds no such claim and instead distills its ideas into an acceptable for, free of all context, to be enjoyed as entertainment for the lowest common denominator of public fool, culminating with the eventuality that entertainment not on usurps information, but that is *becomes* information itself.

The book begins by drawing a distinction between the relatively newer "knowledge work" and the age-old physical work and noticing that productivity is measured completely differently between these two realms. Forcing the knowledge working into the physical box tends to create an office environment where appearing to be busy - the frantic busyness of endless meetings and pseudo-productivity - is more important than actually producing meaningful work. The author proposes that we slow down, do fewer things, but do them to a higher quality while measuring our output over years and decades instead of days and weeks. This, I think, isn't actually anything new and is contained in the proverb of "Rome wasn't built in a day" and encapsulated in the fable of "The Tortoise and the Hare." The book is flanked with a pair of stories that describe the slow thoughtful meandering when John McPhee is lying on a picnic table grappling with how to write his next piece and a second story where McPhee is fully engaged in typing up, organizing, and arranging his notes as the words start to hit the pages - what he calls putting little drops of water (work) day-by-day into the bucket until 365 days later you have quite a lot of water.