Creativity is often blocked by trying to be perfect. Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
I delight sometimes in saying to - as when I'm a teacher, I love saying, 'This is really important, so don't write it down.' To me, what you retain is a very important filter.
The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.
You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but you want to get rid of the bathwater so the baby can swim the next couple of days and be OK.
We try lots of stuff. We throw it against the wall, and the stuff that sticks stays in the movie.
The past is a rich resource on which we can draw in order to make decisions for the future, but it does not dictate our choices. We should look back at the past and select what is good, and leave behind what is bad.
Become like a sheet of blotting paper and soak it all in. Later on you can figure out what to keep and what to unload.
You spend that money, and then what? At least now you know it's going to a great cause. We'll see how many masks I'll keep in the future, but certain ones have more meaning, so I'll hold onto them.
I'm a selective pack rat. There's some things I have no problem getting rid of and others I hold onto dearly.
I know as a writer how valuable a tool is the wastebasket. Perhaps God throws away many experiments before He finds the right expression. Perhaps we are the discards - or we could be the part He keeps. This mystery is what keeps us all going, to see what happens in the next chapter.
Rather than engage in the sort of selective retention that so many investors tend to do and pretend mistakes never happened, I prefer to 'own' them. This allows me to learn from them and, with any luck, avoid making the same errors again.
People hold on to what they like. They discard what they don't...
