Don’t forget luck, too!

Why people reward innate talent over hard work – BBC Worklife

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230517-why-people-reward-innate-talent-over-hard-work

The key is to develop the habit of creating. Preferably regularly. Reward and appreciate your subconscious and other selves for their ideas!

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Advice about moving to Hawaii to work

If you’re thinking of moving to the Hawaiian Islands, get hired for a job you can do here first, then move! And be prepared to sacrifice a lot to stay here.

Or be very rich.

Why?

  • Living here is very expensive.
  • Pay scales are not competitive with pay scales at other, similarly-expensive areas.
  • Many employers won’t hire people new to the islands until you’ve been here 3-6 months.

They’ve been burned too many times by people that came to the islands on vacation, decided they loved the islands so much they had to stay, got hired somewhere here – then went back to where they came from when our cost of living hit them. Like when their first two-weeks’ paycheck came to less than their apartment rent.

And how does keeping secrets affect your characters?

Your secrets hurt your mental health. What’s the alternative? | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/your-secrets-hurt-your-mental-health-whats-the-alternative?utm_source=rss-feed

A lot in here that can apply to us (as a person) and to story characters.

How many stories have you encountered where characters keep secrets from one another? How did it affect them and their relationships?

It also talks about guilt and shame: the differences between them, their effects on people, and ways to handle them.

The author pursued these studies of keeping secrets because he and his brother are products of a secret his parents decided to keep from them before the kids were even born: That each was the product of sperm donors. Different donors. So the usual childhood discussions of “who was the most like Dad” had a secret depth they weren’t even aware of.

If you’ve followed the Marvell Comics Universe stories about Thor and Loki, those are stories of keeping secrets, and what happened when they came out.

The movie Thor: Ragnarok is particularly about keeping secrets.  The secret of their banished sister Hela, the secret of how Asgard became so powerful. When the secrets came out, Asgard was destroyed!

The James Bond movies starring Daniel Craig regularly have secrets coming back to bite the characters. In fact, the entire plot of Skyfall is about M’s secret betrayal of an earlier Double-Oh agent to the Chinese, and how that eventually kills her and massively damages the agency.

So read the essay and think of how keeping secrets affects themes, plots, characters.