craft and beauty - by Elaine - manners & mystery

At Stripe Sessions in San Francisco last week, Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, said, “I wish upon you great pain and suffering,” by which he meant that anything worth doing is hard. Nothing great can be achieved without some amount of discomfort. Doing work you love doesn’t guarantee you’ll be happy. We conflate love and happiness not only at work, but in relationships. We expect the person we fall in love with to make us happy. And when we’re upset with our partner, when we get into conflict, our fight or flight instinct kicks in. It’s easy to love a person, a relationship, a project when everything is going well. But the whole point of love—the essence of passion and eros—is to care deeply especially when it gets hard. Love is attention. Love is devotion. Happiness, by contrast, is a state of mind. You can be happy doing work you love. You can be happy doing nothing. You can be sad and lonely and depressed doing work you love. There are days I’m really into writing my novel, and I can’t wa

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• Kun Zhu