Jun 30, 2024
Flaubert famously said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I suppose the effect of being irregular and disorderly in your life is that you end up meek and unoriginal in your work. But people much older than me seem to cheerfully handle much more demanding and incoherent travel schedules and retain their creative momentum, so clearly I’m doing something wrong. There’s a Pareto frontier here and it looks like I’m nowhere near it. Let’s call it the Flaubert frontier.
—Venkatesh Rao