There is a tremendous problem in modern culture. We have become used to everything coming to us with tremendous speed and ease. It is a culture where discipline and patience is almost impossible to develop.

If you're meant to do something like writing and you end up going into banking or finance, your going to be miserable. You're trying to fit something into a square peg and a round hole. It's just never going to work.

I think the homeless thing is very interesting and I think is an incredible exercise.

Here in Beacon, I feel like this was the worst year yet. The entire town, like a lot of winter towns, just kind of holed up in the winter.

It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.

If you view everything through the lens of fear, then you tend to stay in retreat mode. You can just as easily see a crises or problem as a challenge, an opportunity to prove your mettle, the chance to strengthen and toughen yourself, or a call to collective action. By seeing it as a challenge, you will have converted this negative into a positive purely by a mental process that will result in positive action as well.

In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them -- those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can enver focus enough to learn.