Celebrating Ten Years of Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, #7

Over the past several years, Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings the inventory of a meaningful life, has become one of my favorite sources of inspiration. Brain Pickings was born as an “eccentric personal record” of Maria’s studies and originally sent to seven readers. Now, it is included in the Library of Congress’s archive of “materials of historical importance.”

In celebration of her tenth year of Brain Pickings, Maria offers us ten of her life-earned core beliefs. This is rich stuff so they will be offered one at a time over the next ten weeks. If you’re impatient or want more, go to Brain Pickings and get your own subscription. Incredibly, this feast is still free … although she accepts donations, suggesting a donation level ranging from “a cup of tea to a good dinner.”

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I’ve reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

Here is the seventh in Maria Popova's list of things she loved reading and writing about:
James Gleick on How Our Cultural Fascination with Time Travel Illuminates Memory, the Nature of Time, and the Central Mystery of Human Consciousness