Through hard work, the pianist prepares for the moment of visitation. As I walk across the stage, I’m alone, and the moment I start playing, I cease to be. A presence is protecting me. Is it the presence of the music? Of the composers whose work I’m playing? It’s as though there are two of me and I can watch myself playing at the same time as continuing to play—sometimes I see a light come down that casts a halo around the piano and I know that that light is them. Because if I went on feeling as satisfied as I was yesterday, that would mean—in contradiction to what I generally think, wouldn’t you say?—that either I’ve lost my critical faculty or I’ve now come to a point where there’s nothing left for me to do.”

To escape difficulty, you must stop resisting. Ease will come once you give it a chance. Being in a natural state, such as that of many greek statues, puts us in a natural state of ease, which enables us to stop resisting. Proper posture is important for a variety of reasons, as it helps to enable grace (or flow). Your imagination is at the heart of your life. If you can image something, you can create it; such is what is proven by the arts. Ollivier Pourriol is a philosopher, writer, and novelist. He lives in Paris, where his lectures mixing philosophy and cinema are widely attended, and where he puts his ideas into practice over aperitifs with friends.Read the first two chapters and then save yourself! This book could have been a great 3000 word essay. But as it stands as a whole is shit. It is wordy and repetitive, the same point being made in each chapter with different sporting analogies. Also there are some misogynistic undertones. I know nothing of the sports men talked about in this novel, so can't offer an opinion there, however, I can speak on the two artists that we're mentioned. Ollivier (who claimes to be well versed) idolises the lifestyles of both Rodin and Picasso who are known to have actively abused women and children in their lifetimes. It is one thing to talk about their art and talent, it is another to uphold them as great men whose way of life and philosophies are what we should strive to achieve in our own lives, completely ignoring the harm their actions and lifestyles had on those around them. There is no excuse for this. Ollivier later goes on to spend a whole chapter diminishing a teen girl he tutored to make himself look intelligent. It has the exact same vibe of those Tumblr stories that end with 'everybody clapped'. This chapter may be based on a real interaction but the dialogue definitely is not real, I feel so bad for the girl he was writing about, she was reduced to a 'sexy lampshade'. Everything comes down to attitude imagination and prepositions. You can struggle or you can relax, accept, and give in. Fluency is fluid, and to be fluent in a language means to be fluid. Pretending is a precondition for success. Do not resist, do not fight; simply be, allow, adopt, and absorb. i can conclude this book for you: “the key to action is getting down to it” that’s also one of the phrases the author uses in their conclusion and that’s literally all it says throughout using different words like okay i wouldn’t t know exactly cause i started skimming during chapter 2/3 but that’s what i believe through my expertise in skimming What can we learn from Stendhal’s example? Not everyone wants to become a writer. But “never make fun of the art of writing,” Alain says, Despite the flaws of the 10,000 hours rule well documented, we are still bombarded with variations of the same. Through the example of a failed experiment and other references, the author drives home the point that working hard is not enough

This is not a new idea in France: since Montaigne, philosophers have suggested that a certain je ne sais quoi is the key to a more creative, fulfilling and productive existence. We can see it in their laissez faire parenting, their chic style, their haute cuisine and enviable home cooking - the French barely seem to be trying, yet the results are world famous. Grace is also a state of flow. It is a complete merge of the self with action, without the interference of intellect or other factors. The body is barely embodied by knowing and not by thinking. There is no self correction, judgement, or anything else. There is just pure action and the fluid movements of the body doing what it was meant to do. It is effortless and the result of not thinking or trying to escape from the physical state of being into a mental or emotional state of judgement or control. True courage, for him, turned out to be recognizing his limits and his humanity, and renouncing his desire to be all-powerful. He discovered the Stoics’ precept that if we want to be happy, we need to focus on the things we can control, and leave the rest to the gods. In this sense his experiment taught him something, and his failure is a success, because he became aware of his own physical reality, and of reality itself. One point in his favor: it took only 6,000 hours for him to realize this and to become an expert in stoicism; that’s 4,000 hours fewer than predicted. That’s not counting the two years of doubt and denial, which makes 365 a 2 × 24 (since depression is twenty-four hours a day), equaling the 17,500 hours of “purposeful depression” that it took him to realize that the rule of 10,000 hours perhaps didn’t exist or wasn’t valid for him. The rule of 10,000 hours flatters us because it allows us to think that with enough work, we can become whatever we want. That everything depends on individual will and a sense of effort. If performance was only about training, if 10,000 hours really were sufficient to compensate for natural differences, why continue to separate men and women in competitions? Because, as David Epstein shows, just because we want to doesn’t mean we can. To think you didn’t become a golf champion after 10,000 hours because you didn’t work hard enough is as misguided as to believe that a champion doesn’t need to train, that they just have to exist to win. The temptation of 10,000 hours, for all its whiff of egalitarianism, offers an even more dangerous illusion than the inverse temptation to just let it all hang out. You can’t afford to skimp on training, nor to underestimate your limits. We shouldn’t say “if you want to, you can” but “if you can, you’re right to want it.” Take cooking, for example. Think of the times you’ve been chatting away to a friend, enjoying yourself, and forgot to turn down the gas on the stove. Oh well, those onions will be nicely caramelized now. It even holds true for washing up: when you burn a pan the best thing is to let it soak, rather than to scrub at it like a maniac. I’m not saying you should never scrub, but that you need to know when there’s no point in scrubbing. Letting time do its work doesn’t mean you’ll never do any yourself. It just means working more efficiently. Understanding can't be focused. Distraction can make the work easier, it builds momentum. Distraction helps you to not think about what you are doing, so you are content with doing it. There are two ways to clean a burnt pan: taking considerable time and effort to scrub it, or to simply let it soak and return to it later. The first is based on effort, and the second on ease. Postponing action and letting things look after themselves is a win-win. When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Hyper specialization can cause a sort of blindness to the broader picture of what is, based on the view we have of the world and how we operate within it. Don't think about solutions, think about the problem as if the problem were a person, let it speak for itself. Do not confuse preparation with practice. Excessive practice makes you stale.An] amusing and interesting read; even Pourriol’s description of his approach to the material is a lesson in the laissez-faire outlook. Is this likely to change readers’ lives? Peut être pas, but it is fun to think that it might.”― Booklist In the realm of love, what could be less seductive than someone who's trying to seduce you? Seduction is the art of succeeding without trying, and that's a lesson the French have mastered. This is the heart of it: to give the impression that you’re simply going for a walk, easy does it, when in fact you’re walking on a rope 110 floors up. You’re a metaphor, an inspiration, a dream come true. You’re living the dreams that are dormant in those humans down below. To accomplish a dream, you need the lightness of a dream. So be very careful with that first step. The people who gathered in Montparnasse formed a sort of foreign legion, though the only crime they had on their conscience was that of being far from home, far from their own milieu . . . Paris had handed over this small corner to us . . . This place for the displaced was as Parisian as Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower. And when, like a firework, genius erupted out of this small crowd, it was still the Parisian sky that received its reflected glory. When the Chinese painter Zao Wou-Ki first set foot in Paris in 1948, he knew only one word of French, one open-sesame that he gave to the taxi driver: “Montparnasse.” He didn’t mean the train station, he meant the mythical place that all aspiring painters dream of. He spent the rest of his life there in a studio very close to Giacometti’s. Chinese by chance, but French by the dictate of his heart.