Oh, yeah.

You put things inside the safe, and then you set the timer, and you can't open it up again until the timer goes off.

No, I would say be really, really strict with yourself about protecting that hour for your project, but then be really not strict with yourself on the rest of it.

Like, I think if you spend the hour, like, looking out the window or sweeping or watering your houseplants or whatever it is you do, like, that's an hour well spent as long as you're in the space of your project for that time and not letting your attention get sucked sp- uh, up by something else.

There's a great quote, which is actually the epigraph of the first Daily Rituals book.

It's a moment in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, where there's this sort of outburst, and he says, "Who can unravel the," something like, "the essence of the artistic temperament, the deep fusion of discipline and dissipation on which it rests?" That's a paraphrase, but, um, that part discipline and dissipation has always struck me as so accurate and wise because I think that good creative stuff happens when there's this kind of interplay of discipline and, like, anti-discipline.

Like indulgence, play, goofing off, procrastination, setting yourself the problem of doing something and then stepping away from it and seeing where your mind goes or what happens in the background while you're doing other things.

I'm curious, is there any story, any person's life, their money story that you took with you and it changed your, the way you approach something, it changed your life in some way, something you had adapted or adopted in your own life and money-making, art-making world?

Let's hear what he did.

Hi, Beck.

This is Mason.

One thing I found that really helps me when I'm writing anything is to print out my draft and then cut out each paragraph and lay out all the paragraphs on this reasonably large Ikea table that I have in my office, which I first clear out so I have a big white space, and just put them in the sequence of whatever it is I've written.

And then I start rereading, but suddenly because it's a physical thing and it's gotten me off the screen, I can read it in a different way.

I can see what's good and what's bad, and I can especially see where the, mm, logic of the piece, uh, falters.

There's some way in which the overall structure becomes more clear, and the way in which the idea is, um, meandering or ideas aren't connecting properly.

He has an encyclopedic knowledge of creative practice, so of course, he had a precedent for his approach.

Could you walk us through the four and maybe share a little bit of what you learned from each one of those?

Yeah.

Well, the book is in four sections.

The first section is family money, 'cause I kind of thought, well, the absolute best case scenario for an aspiring artist would be to have access to some sort of family money, either an inheritance or some kind of parental allowance or sort of mooching off your family, borrowing money.

So I gave a chapter to each of those possibilities and just tried to explore the ways in which it enabled different careers.

I mean, Virginia Woolf is an example of someone who never would have been able to have a serious creative practice without that family money that she inherited, and she had to work incredibly hard to build a successful writing practice and a publishing enterprise, but she also always had this steady income, the interest off of her inherited investments, which allowed her to get started on all that.

So, you know, it's, like, a little depressing maybe if you don't have that money, but it's also, in a way, sort of a relief to know that, yeah, some people did have a leg up, and it's definitely an underlying factor in a lot of famous artists' lives, is access to some kind of money that we don't all have.

Can you share, like, one or two stories from that? 'Cause that's fascinating that people would go to those lengths.