I absolutely devoured this profile of Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) from 2008 that John Gruber posted on Daring Fireball earlier this week. There is so much to glean about craftsmanship, the creative process, collaboration, and respecting your audience—just the things I think about most!

The profile centers around Teller’s exploration of a 100 year old trick called involving a simple red ball and they actually reveal how it’s done, yet still surprise people. I love how hard and how long Teller worked to perfect it; he’ll spend hours on an empty stage after a show getting it just right. He says:

When the theater is empty I like to go out on stage. It’s lonely and beautiful. I look at your empty seat and think about you being in it. … Then I practice. I often practice stuff you’ll never see. For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a hundred-year-old trick called the David P. Abbott Ball. It is a very, very hard trick, almost like juggling. I put in an hour almost every day. I try to get the tricky moves so deeply into my muscles and brain that I can forget I’m doing a trick. Soon I’ll know whether the ideas I have for this trick are possible. But I won’t know that till I learn all the moves and invent my own. If the trick doesn’t work out, you’ll never see it, and I won’t be sad. I had fun every second I was working. I love the stuff you never see.

This obsession with his craft makes it obvious how he became one of the masters in the field, yet he is never satisfied and is always thinking about how to improve, perfect, and add to:

[R]ather such total dedication to craft and art in a Las Vegas show causes me to admire the incredible focus Teller still has on improving, revising, thinking over this one brief trick. More than two years since he first began playing with the Abbott ball, he is still professionally obsessed with it and he loves every moment spent practicing and pondering improvements. How long will this last? Near the end of his lecture he says, “In six months or a year, it will start to settle into my bones. … In 10 years it’ll be perfect.”

And then the piece ends with a great quote from Teller that made me want to jump right out of me seat:

I am never bored. I never understand people who say they are bored. I wish they could just wrap up those hours and give them to me.

Me too, Teller. Me too.

Brian Jay Stanley on interestingness, boredom, and seeing the potential in every single thing:

Paging through an accounting textbook, walking past a wig shop, or listening to a lecture on early American basket-making, I never say “that is uninteresting” but rather “I am uninterested”, for it is always more reasonable to assume that I fail to see what is there than that devotees see what is not there. I love to hear of people devoting their lives to pursuits that sound dull to me, for I know that their enthusiasm is right and my boredom is wrong, and I am happy for the rebuke. I convert my specific boredoms into general fascination with passion’s possibilities, reflecting that, under altered alignments of choice and chance, I might have given my days to different causes. There is more worth loving than we have strength to love.

A foolish trope of modernity is that experience leads to disenchantment and ennui. Boredom with life does not result from exhausting life’s riches, but from skimming them. Nothing is boring, except people who are bored.

See also: how to be interesting and the wanting to like it principle.

Scott Berkun on the problem with being too busy:

This means people who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.

Also:

Some of the best thinkers throughout history had some of their best thoughts while going for walks, playing cards with friends, little things things that generally would not be considered the hallmarks of busy people. It’s the ability to pause, to reflect, and relax, to let the mind wander, that’s perhaps the true sign of time mastery, for when the mind returns it’s often sharper and more efficient, but most important perhaps, happier than it was before.

I couldn’t say this any better. This is the exact thing I’ve been writing about the past few weeks. 

An interesting perspective on boredom:

It’s about a certain mindset. Perfect boredom is the enjoyment of the moment of stasis that comes between slowing down and speeding up — like sitting at a traffic light for a particularly long time. It’s at the cusp of action, because however enjoyable it may be, boredom is really not a long-term aspiration. It’s for an afternoon before a sociable evening. It marks that point in a holiday when you’ve shrugged off all the concerns of work and home, explored the hotel and got used to the swimming pool, and everything has become totally familiar. ‘I’m bored’ just pops into your mind one morning as you’re laying your towel over the sunlounger before breakfast, and then you think ‘How lovely.’ It’s about the stillness and familiarity of that precise moment before the inevitable anxiety about packing up and heading back to God-knows-what.

Sounds an awful lot like Sabbath to me. I’ve become increasingly interested in this idea of just slowing down. I just came out of one of the busiest weeks of my life and this upcoming week doesn’t look much better. I was up early and to bed late working on school projects, freelance projects, and a few personal projects and by the end of the week I was just worn out so on Friday, I took a Sabbath and didn’t do a thing. I emerged incredibly refreshed ready to tackle this week.

Okay, so sometimes you might wrap your bathrobe around you and snuggle into the sofa and think, I’ll tackle the future just as soon as I’ve caught up with these old episodes of The West Wing. But that’s how boredom works. Eventually you will step out into the brave new world. You have to move. That’s what boredom is for; and perhaps why God invented cramp and bed sores.

That’s the idea behind Sabbath: “On the Sabbath we live as if all of our work is done—even if it isn’t.”