Keeping Enemies Close, and Producing

I'M NOT GOING TO yell at my cat anymore. I've always tried to avoid it, but it at times becomes necessary, like, say, when you want it to hurry across the street rather than sitting down in the middle of it while a car is approaching. And when she screams at me because she wants ten dollar catfood and I just filled her bowl with the nine dollar brand, no problem. I just smile, say "good girl", and walk away. I'll let her figure out that what I gave is what she gets, even if it takes a cat lifetime. Regarding people, Machiavelli got it right: "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer". You'll notice how seasoned professional diplomats always treat each other as if they absolutely adore each orher, when they both know better, and everyone else does too. I've never read the once fmaous Dale Carnegie book "How To Make Friends and Influence People", but my best guess is that he emphasizes being a good listener, making every word count when speaking, and (again) being a good listener. Some dolt can drone on for sseeming hours about nothing n particular, and you can, when finally given the chance, make a one senctence remark which summarizes a situation succinctly and profoundly in a single sentence, or less. My cat just now stopped yelling at me. Yelling requires effort and energy. The food in how bowl, perfectly acceptable to any formerly stray cat, remains in place. She'll eat it when she is hungry enough, She doees this every day, and yet, amazingly, is not underweight. The secret is to swing the bat, and produce. You can type a paragraph of reasonably good expository prose without forethought, notes, or preparation, while a cat is screaming at you, and achieve passable results. Your assignment, class, is to compose an essay of betwwen two hundred fifty and five hudnred words on the topic "what I did on my summer vacation", and have it on my desk by the time the bell rings. Its all about production. A stream of consciousness essay will all tie together, if only because it reflects a history of your thought processes. You can sit for hours, editing and rewriting today's essay, what other people mistakenly call a "blog post", and "at the end of the day", have nothing superior to what would have come out of you had you merely typed off the top of your head, or contracted with a thousand monkeys to type until one of them produced something coherent. The thing is to produce. Producing requires taking full advantage of every opportunity, of every particle of matter and energy within and without you, of regarding no person or situation as lacking value. "There is no situation which cannot be ennobled through achievement and endurance" said Goethe. I was stuck in the nightmarish state of being of agaonizing over every word of every essay, but noticed that the quantity and quality of my producation didn't seem to reflect the effort, which at length I determined was wasted. The world's greatest artists, writers, painters, musicians, tend to produce an immense quantity of work. Not a rare few materpieces, but a vast quantity of work, not all of which can be regarded as masterpieces. Of his thirty eight published plays, several of Shakespeare's, arguablly, are dogs. "Titus Andronicus" comes to mind. In school, we are taught to engage in an elaborate intellectual process to write an essay, or to produce anything, Note cards, outlines, rough drafts, the whole works. That's fine, but as one gains experience, one learns to condense and compress this into a tightly woven ball of yarn, out of which one must fashion fashionable fashion. Buy a few gross of blank canvasses, and fill them with art. At least one of them is, according to the laws of random statistics, almost certain to be a masterpiece. Just ask Dali and Picasso.