So maybe it's not that you've been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it's almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any… - Oliver Burkeman

Inspiration is for amateurs,' the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. 'The rest of us just show up and get to work.

It's a self-help cliché that most of us need to get better at learning to say no. But as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert points out, it's all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In fact, she explains, 'it's much harder than that. You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.

Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can't persuade himself to believe are good. (And such things will happen.)