Maisel Quotes

Almost nothing beautiful or brilliant happens unless a person has thought about it a lot.

The song you write may be beautiful, the research you conceive may be beautiful, but you are the real beauty in life.

Creativity is not a talent or ability. It is the fruit of a person’s decision to matter.

Write, even if you have a twinge, a doubt, a fear, a block, a noisy neighbor, a sick cat, thirteen unpublished stories, and a painful boil.

If there is a soul, then it is a mistake to think that it is given to us completely created. It is created right here for a lifetime. Life is nothing but a long, painful process of creation.

If you wait for a better time to create, better than this very moment, if you wait until you feel settled, divinely inspired, perfectly centered, unburdened of your usual worries, or free of your own skin, forget about it. You will still be waiting tomorrow and the next day, wondering why you never managed to begin, wondering

How can a person brim over with life energy and big plans one moment and feel suicidal the next? She can cycle exactly that way because of the god-bug syndrome.

A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

An essential aspect of self-support is to remind yourself that success is not measurable, but a matter of feeling.

The result may be important but it’s not the actual measure. The measure is the feeling you have made contact with something.

Jay Maisel always says to bring your camera, ‘cause it’s tough to take a picture without it. Pursuant to the above aforementioned piece of the rule book, subset three, clause A, paragraph four would be…use the camera. Put it to your eye. You never know. There are lots of reasons, some of them even good, to just leave it on your shoulder or in your bag. Wrong lens. Wrong light. Aaahhh, it’s not that great, what am I gonna do with it anyway? I’ll have to put my coffee down. I’ll just delete it later, why bother? Lots of reasons not to take the dive into the eyepiece and once again try to sort out the world into an effective rectangle. It’s almost always worth it to take a look.

Because of our fear that we are merely excited matter and the consequent grudge that we hold against the universe, we feel lost and alienated, like a refugee far from home in a universe that cares nothing for us.

Except under dire circumstances or as a day job to support creative endeavors, a smart person is not so likely to want to wait tables, file forms, work on an assembly line, or sell shoes. It isn't that he disparages these lines of work as beneath his dignity; rather, it is that he can see clearly how his days would be experienced as meaningless if he had to spend his time not thinking.

That as a smart person, whose brain races faster and harder than the next person's, you can't accomplish something like stopping your racing mind from worrying doesn't mean that you have a disorder or that you are a failure.

I’ve always felt that photographers who say, “They used the wrong picture,” have only themselves to blame. They gave them the “wrong” picture. I didn’t worry because I only gave them pictures that worked. It’s my obligation to take out all the “wrong” pictures.

The primary challenge that smart people must deal with is making sense of meaning. Natural psychology suggests that the best answer to this problem is donning the mantle of meaning-maker and engaging in value-based meaning-making. No smart person is immune to this problem. In fact, it is the most significant emotional issue for our smartest 15 percent.

You do not want to avoid creating just because creating or the prospect of creating is making you anxious.

A smart person is even more likely to suppose that his brain is equal to the challenges he faces, even such frankly impossible ones. What a setup to send your brain racing! And what will it do when, racing, it realizes the magnitude of its challenges and the extent to which they can't be solved just by thinking? It will worry.

Both the biological and psychological approaches are suspect since both posit an unreal world, completely at odds with human experience, in which people do not get depressed for good reasons having to do with their experience in life and their uneasiness about the facts of existence. Rather, people only get depressed because something in them is flawed or broken. Depression of any magnitude, these approaches claim, is always an illness and never a reaction to being dropped, willy-nilly, into a world not of their making, which they are forced to make mean something.

Meaning is primarily a subjective psychological experience. A smart person is more likely than the next person to be aware of its absence and to be affected by its absence. He is more likely to get bored, to experience meaninglessness, to begin to see the extent to which neither his society nor the universe are built to satisfy his meaning needs, and to then hunt for soothing or exciting meaning substitutes that ultimately reduce his freedom. Meaning is a smart person's most difficult challenge.

We see how boredom arises as a special, terrible problem for smart people. A smart person has a lively brain; that brain wants to work; it is primed to think; and if you give it nothing to do, it will do nothing for as long as it can bear to do nothing, but it will not be happy. It will be bored and, worse, begin to doubt the meaningfulness of life.

If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you’re not out there, you’ll only hear about it.

leave yourself open to accept things rather than anxiously searching for them. You

With success came a new, deeper doubt that any activity, even his cherished writing, could make life mean anything.

We are the sort of creature who not only needs to put up firewood and food for the winter but who must also predict the distant future, make decisions about who or what created the universe and what sort of principles and path we should follow, deal with our fellow difficult and dangerous creatures, and in other ways make sense of things that would overtax any creature.

People who think a lot are more prone to mania than people who do not think a lot. That intelligent, creative, and thoughtful people are the ones more regularly afflicted by mania is beyond question.

But at heart what we are talking about is not pathology but an intense conflictual knowing, a knowing that we are worthy smacking up against a knowing that we are just passing through: a knowing, that is, that we matter and that we do not matter. This is a true and not a pathological understanding. Every smart person possesses this understanding and can't help but feel distressed by this understanding.

Smartness is a smart person's defining characteristic. Everything she thinks about the world—how she forms her identity, how she construes her needs, how she talks to herself about her life purposes and goals—is a function of how her particular brain operates. She is her smartness in a way that she is not her height, her gender, her moods, or her experiences. Her particular mind with its particular intelligence is the lens through which she looks at life, and it is also the engine that drives her days and her nights. It is her idiosyncratic brain, mind, and intelligence that determine how she will live—and why. An

The ascending spiral, one of the central images of early American letters and employed especially by Emerson, is probably an unconscious piece of every American's personal mythology. Its shorthand name is progress.

Picture a litter of kittens. One is more curious than the next. One is more aggressive than the next. One is a leader, and another is a follower. The first is not potentially curious; she is already curious. The second is not potentially aggressive; he is already aggressive. The third and the fourth are not potentially leaders and followers; they are already that. In exactly the same way a human infant is not potentially smart; he is already smart.

You must be able to create in the middle of things, or else you will not create. You must learn to take whatever practical and psychological actions are necessary to combat the anticreating forces that surround you and live within you.

We have arrived at an interesting moment in the evolution of our species when a smart person in a first-world culture is pestered by two contradictory feelings: first that he is as special a creature as nature has yet produced and second that he's not very special at all, just excited matter here for a while and off again into universal dark matter. This first feeling inflates him and makes him want to puff out his chest and preen a bit. This second feeling makes him want to crawl in a hole, act carelessly, or sit inert on the sofa. How unfortunate for a creature to be buffeted in such contradictory ways! These twin feelings lead a person to the following pair of conclusions: that while he is perhaps quite smart, he is nevertheless rather like a cockroach, trapped with a brain that really isn't big enough for his purposes, perhaps trapped in a corner of an academic discipline, a research field, a literary genre, or in some other small place, trapped by his creatureliness, and trapped by life's very smallness. I would like to dub this the god-bug syndrome: the prevalent and perhaps epidemic feeling of greatness walking hand-in-hand with smallness that plagues so many people today.

Man, in this view, is incapable of looking around him and acknowledging without wincing or worse, without falling down in despair, that he doesn't know anything about ultimate reality. In this view, man is simply too small for such acknowledgments. He fears that he might stop hoping or caring if he learned that the universe was perhaps indifferent to him. Could he feel gratitude for his existence or awe in the face of a starry sky if he suspected that he was neither designed nor loved? He thinks not. Therefore he opts for mysticism.

That hundreds of millions of people believe that a man named Noah built an ark and put all of the world's species onto it two-by-two, that those species included dinosaurs—even though dinosaurs and man are separated by millions of years—that these people want this taught as science, that they want to get onto every school board and into every legislature to ensure that their view prevails, and that the mainstream media of a modern society continues to take this seriously, may only mildly annoy one smart person, perhaps one who grew up in religion and is tempted to give religion a pass. But it will seriously outrage—and almost derange—another smart person who is convinced that these views always come with an authoritarian edge and a coercive public agenda. It will likewise strike a smart person as a ludicrous claim that the collectivist farms in her country are working beautifully when there is no food to be found on the shelves of any grocery store anywhere or to claim that a certain corporation is a mighty source for good and innovation when it is paying its employees peanuts and freely polluting. Misrepresentations of this sort affect our brain and our nervous system. They are an assault on our senses as well as our sense of right and wrong, and they bring pain and distress.

First and foremost, she recognizes that life has no single or ultimate meaning. Life only has human meanings of the following sort: psychological experiences of meaning, fleeting moments of meaning, best guesses about meaning, constructed ideas about meaning, personal evaluations about the meaningfulness of life, and so on. This may strike her as terrible news or as wonderful news, but in either case, she is smart enough to know that it is the truth. She accepts this truth, embraces it, and makes considered choices in the realm of meaning—so as to give herself the best possible chance of crafting a life that feels authentic.

How you conceptualize meaning matters. If you hold that it is outside of yourself and must be tracked down, you have one idea of meaning. If, however, you conceive of it as I've been describing it—that it is a subjective experience, that it sometimes comes unbidden and that it can also be coaxed into existence, that when it is absent we must try to create it rather than search for it, and so on—then you are holding a very different idea of meaning. It should go without saying that what sort of idea you hold about meaning matters a great deal—in fact, it completely dictates how you will live your life. How you construe meaning dictates how you will live your life. The way you construe meaning affects everything, from how much pleasure you get from ordinary things to how sincere an effort you make in manifesting your values and your principles. I think that the idea of meaning that I'm promoting, by being true-to-life and by returning meaning to your hands, will help you live more intentionally, more richly, and more happily. Be that as it may, you get to form your idea of meaning—and whatever you decide about meaning dictates how you will live. Remember that life is not set up to meet our meaning needs. It only sporadically provides us with the experience of meaning.

Stress causes the greatest number of doctors' visits annually. Yet we haven't noticed well enough that the issue is not just what is stressing us but also how poorly we are built to deal with that stress. We ask our experimental brain to work overtime to decide what line will sell next season, whether our son is drinking just a lot or has become an alcoholic, whether this passing feeling means that the universe has a purpose or that our medication is kicking in, where we should look to heal the hole in our heart and make life feel worthwhile . . . and everything else. Not knowing what else to do, we set our brain racing off, whether or not it has good brakes, whether or not it is equal to the task, and whether or not the task is reasonable. The smarter we are, the more likely we will use our brain in these ways, and the more painful pressure we are likely to produce.

A child is born; he is already somebody. To pick one set of circumstances, let's say that he is a bright boy born into a middle-class family that demands good grades and promotes a worldview that includes playing musical instruments, playing sports, admiring nature, going to college, and getting a good job. The parents pay lip service to the idea that thinking is a good thing but do not do much thinking themselves and do not really like it when their son thinks. They pay lip service to the idea that family members should love one another but don't love much and aren't very warm or friendly. They likewise pay lip service to the ideals of freedom but present their son with the clear message that he is not free to get mediocre grades, not free to dispute their core beliefs, and not free to really be himself. Of course, this all confuses him. In this environment, he becomes sadder than he was born to be, saddened by having to perform at piano recitals that don't interest him and that make him woefully anxious, saddened by having to take his boring classes seriously, saddened by his parents' inability to love him or take an interest in him, saddened by what he learns in school about how human beings treat one another, and saddened most of all by his inability to make sense of this picture of life—a picture that everyone seems to be holding as the way to live but that to him feels odd, contradictory, empty, and meaningless.

What if you can't help but judge life negatively? What if yesterday felt awful, today feels awful, and tomorrow is likely to feel awful too? What if you are poverty stricken, coughing up blood, incarcerated, alone, under siege, helpless, and hopeless? How absurd is it to ask you to make meaning and choose the meanings of your life? Don't you need medicine, money, and a friend more than some hard-nosed philosophy? Aren't you better off with a romantic movie, a pitcher of beer, and a dream of heaven rather than a demanding, soul-searching regimen? Doesn't natural psychology make little or no sense in your circumstances? ... It may be the case that someone who has a hard life is exactly the sort of person who would benefit from a philosophy that respects the hardness of reality and that proposes solutions, especially if that person is smart enough to understand the alternatives. That isn't to say that there won't be days when all of us need meaning to amount to more than this, to something more profound and important, to something that better soothes us and helps us forget that we are bound to suffer and that we will cease to be. The natural psychological view does not controvert the facts of existence, and there will be days—many days—when even the staunchest heart wishes that it could. We boldly stare at the facts of existence—and on some days, each of us will blink. Adherents of natural psychology know that days like that are coming.

don’t want to beat a dead lamb, but let me say again that contradictions between Old Testament laws aren’t exactly an industry secret. Jewish tradition has wrestled with them since before Christianity. Biblical scholars write books about it. Who knows, perhaps a future episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will have Midge’s mom stressed out about how exactly to prepare the Passover lamb.

On October 14, 1944, German generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Ernst Maisel visited Rommel in his home in Herrlingen. Outside, SS troops stood by, having been instructed to kill Rommel if he attempted to escape. Rommel was told that he had been accused of associating with conspirators, and had been implicated in the July 20th assassination plot against Hitler. They gave him the choice to die by his own hand, or face a public trial. Rommel was promised that the Nazis would report his death as an accident, and that his family would be left alone. He would leave with the generals, and on his way to Ulm would drink poison

We'll learn more about how the brain operates, how matter works, and what fills up empty space. But even if we evolve into a smarter, wiser species in possession of a truckload of new scientific knowledge, we will still have no access to ultimate answers. When a smart person finally admits that some mysteries can't be solved, she can relax and rejoice. When you honor what you know to be true, that nobody knows the ultimate answers, that there is a difference between what is not yet known and what can't be known, that guesses don't really count, and that easy answers like sitting on a mat or walking in nature may soothe you but answer nothing, then you can leave mysticism behind. Then you are ready for the answer: that you are obliged to take charge of the project of your life.

The only time I can get the thoughts to stop is when I get lost in something very creative and puzzle-like—and then I only get lost briefly. This way of life is exhausting

When you evolve a thinking creature, you evolve a creature that will think about all sorts of things, including its place in the universe (too low), its path (too hard), its accomplishments (too few), its hopes (too dashed), and its day (both too busy and too empty at the same time). It will think all sorts of things—including a bevy of unreasonable, reasonable thoughts. A thinking creature that is not provided with an off switch or with a simple cognitive regulator will just think on, turning itself into more of a brooding machine than a thinking machine

Typically, we start out with enthusiasm and then grow unsure--sometimes about everything.

A writer sets up his own amazing experiment: his work of fiction.

Even your sweetest character has claws, no matter how well they may be retracted and hidden (hidden even from herself).

Life is a series of unique situations, and we make meaning not by adhering to abstract principles about how we should live but according to the reality of the moment' Eric Maisel

To put it aphoristically, no experience can feel meaningful to a nihilist—that is, to someone who has already decided that life is meaningless.

A smart person, one who perhaps had her mind filled with religious ideas as a child but who recognizes that genuine mysteries exist with respect to the origins of the universe, can experience real pain if she opts for an easy mysticism. By the same token, if she refuses to opt for that easy mysticism and announces that she doesn't know ultimate answers and can't know ultimate answers, then she falls prey to the coldness and sadness that come with suspecting that the universe is taking no interest in her. Pain is waiting for her in either case, whether she tries to maintain a mysticism that she can see right through or if she sheds that easy mysticism but then doesn't know how to handle the resultant meaninglessness. As it happens, natural psychology provides a complete, satisfying, and uplifting response to this conundrum, one based on the idea of living the paradigm shift from seeking meaning to making meaning. If, however, she happens not to land on this good idea, she can spend a lifetime mired simultaneously in both unhappy camps, drawn to one mystical or spiritual enthusiasm after another—one year a Catholic, then a Buddhist, then a pagan, then a Taoist, then something with no name but with New Age trappings, and so on—while at the same time paralyzed by the thought that the universe has no meaning.

The choices aren't between a false but soothing mysticism and an acceptance of an indifferent universe. Rather, the choice is between an easy mysticism and genuine mystery. This is a very different choice! It is one that a smart person can embrace and applaud—and even grow excited about. He never again has to bang his head against the brick wall of mystery. He can just let it be mysterious. The mystic has made a poor choice, one that a smart person with a mystical bent will never really feel completely comfortable embracing. The mystic, instead of acknowledging that she has absolutely no clue as to what created the universe or how the universe operates, prefers to act like she understands—and, more than that, that the answer is simple and straightforward. If she has a scientific bent, she turns metaphors from physics into proofs of the existence of gods or of a cosmic consciousness. If she has no scientific bent, she simply opts for whatever occult system or language she is born into or that speaks to her.

…My daughter was dumped by her husband out of nowhere. That was her sabertooth. Instead of collapsing from the weight, she emerged stronger. A new person, so I thought, but now I think perhaps that was who she was all along. I never really took her seriously. My son, Noah, I took seriously. I would take him to Colombia with me every week so he could dream of what he could be. I don't remember if I ever did that for Miriam. I don't think it ever occurred to me. As unfathomable as this career choice of hers is, she's doing it on her own with no help from me or her mother. Where did this come from? This strength, this fearlessness that I never had. That my poor son never had. What could she have been if I had helped her and not ignored her, ignored who she really is. My daughter is a remarkable person and I don't think I've ever said that to her. - Abe Weissman, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

That is awareness; that is honesty; but you do not need to put yourself in the docket and indict yourself.

People who are accomplished at anything have learned that “perfect” is the enemy of the good.

you had likely anticipated that you would feel different and be different there, that you would be some sort of “new you” in Paris or Rome. What you discover is that you are still just you. You have brought your personality with you, the same personality that was having trouble writing that novel at home. This is a double disappointment, because not only are you left to deal with the same old you, but you now see that this really is you, that you are going to be this exact you wherever you go. There is no geographic salvation. This is quite a body blow, because you had been counting on change, on transformation, and all you have is more of you.

A smart person ought to be smart enough to see clearly the limitations of his species.

we can take a kinder view of our species, as one not built well enough to handle what it has been tasked to handle, and also a tougher view, demanding of our species that it look at its shortfalls and do what it can to rise above them.

I want a big life; I want to experience everything. I want to break every single rule there is. They say ambition is an unattractive trait in a woman -maybe. But you know what's really unattractive? Waiting around for something to happen. Staring out a window, thinking the life you should be living is out there somewhere, but not being willing to open the door and go out there and get it, even if someone tells you you can't. Being a coward is only cute in 'The Wizard of Oz'.

But this much can be said of Phillips, Polaroid’s Land, Netflix’s Hastings, Acumen’s Novogratz, the Airbnb founders, and others in this book: Confronted with a problem that was larger than themselves, they decided to make that problem—and the question that defined the problem—their own. The difference between just asking a question or pursuing it is the difference between flirting with an idea or living with it. If you choose the latter, the question will likely become what the psychotherapist Eric Maisel calls a “productive obsession.”35 It will surface, recede, then surface again. It will invade your dreams as it embeds itself in your subconscious. You’ll wrestle with it, walk with it, sleep with it.

I don't mind being alone. I just do not want to be insignificant.

Iron Man‘s success more than made up for that July’s Incredible Hulk. The result of Marvel’s most difficult production right up to the present, the second Hulk film starred Ed Norton, who proved a terrible fit for Maisel and Feige’s philosophy that studio executives should be the ultimate creative authority. Undeniably one of the best actors of his generation, Norton is also famous in Hollywood for being “difficult” and highly opinionated, refusing to allow artistic choices he disagrees with and seeking to rewrite scripts he doesn’t like, which is what he did on The Incredible Hulk. The clashes intensified in post-production, and the director, Louis Letterier, sided with Norton over the studio. They both learned who has the ultimate power at Marvel, though, when Feige took control of editing. He excised many of the darkest scenes, including a suicide attempt meant to portray how much the scientist Bruce Banner wants to rid himself of the curse of transforming into the Hulk when he’s mad. The resulting movie was still darker and more dramatic than any other Marvel Studios production and not different enough from the Hulk movie of 2003. It grossed only $263 million at the box office and barely broke even, the worst performance for any Marvel Studios film to date. The Incredible Hulk never got a sequel, but the character has returned in Avengers films, played by the easygoing Mark Ruffalo. The usually cheerful Feige stated that the decision to recast the role was “rooted in the need for an actor who embodies the creativity and collaborative spirit of our other talented cast members.

After considering making the Mandarin, a mustache-twirling Asian villain from the comics, Iron Man’s first foe, the new studio instead decided on Obadiah Stain, played by Jeff Bridges. He was less fantastical, had a more personal connection to Downey’s character, “and saved us $10 to $20 million we would have had to spend going to China,” noted Maisel. The first twenty minutes of the movie take place in a cave, and there are surprisingly few scenes of Iron Man flying or doing battle in his combat armor, which kept the budget down. Nonetheless, Perlmutter kept as close an eye on the script as he did on office supplies. When a convoy attack at the beginning of the movie was supposed to include ten Humvees, the frugal executive said, “No, too many, too expensive, we can do it with three.” Another scene, in which Iron Man saves villagers from a group of terrorists, was going to cost $1 million, and Perlmutter wouldn’t authorize the money until the last minute, figuring it could be trashed if costs rose elsewhere. All of this backseat driving by Perlmutter, who became Marvel’s CEO in 2005, drove Arad insane.

It is not a race that can be won, a truth the brain-aware manic knows somewhere in his being and a truth that brings with it additional sadness even at the height of the racing, as the manic races but knows that he can't outrace existential distress.