#finally found a use for this tweet ive had in my drafts forever

[businessliveme]

Kobe Bryant Dies in Helicopter Crash in California

(Bloomberg) — Kobe Bryant, the basketball icon who won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers, died in a helicopter crash Sunday, leaving a legacy that spanned 20 years in professional sports and a growing second career as an investor.

Bryant was among nine people killed when a helicopter slammed into a hillside in Calabasas, California, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said. He was 41. Also among the victims were his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, another parent and a teammate from Gianna’s travel sports team.

“The NBA family is devastated,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement. And in a sign that Bryant’s impact went deep into the city where he made his career, Los Angeles Mayor Mayor Eric Garcetti said he “will live forever in the heart of Los Angeles, and will be remembered through the ages as one of our greatest heroes.”

A 6-foot-6 small forward, Bryant was a gifted scorer whose intensity and work ethic became lore throughout the sports world. He entered the NBA in 1996 directly out of high school, and as the youngest player in the league had an almost-immediate impact for the Lakers. At the time the team was looking for the next star to continue a run of legends that included Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson.

Bryant delivered. During his 20-year pro career he won — in addition to his NBA titles — two gold medals in the Olympics, two NBA Finals MVPs and a regular season MVP in 2008. He led the league in scoring twice and retired with 33,643 points — third on the league’s all-time scoring list until he was passed this weekend by LeBron James. He wore two jerseys for the Lakers — No. 8 and No. 24 — and the team retired both.

Complex Legacy

His career was not without controversy. In 2003, he was accused of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old hotel employee in Colorado. Bryant said the encounter was consensual, and criminal charges were dropped when his accuser refused to testify. She later filed a civil suit against him, and the two sides settled out of court, with Bryant issuing an apology but admitting no guilt.

The rape case created a complex legacy for Bryant, who repaired his reputation both on the court, and off it, becoming a celebrated investor and businessman. He co-founded a venture capital firm in 2013 and in 2018 won an Academy Award for best animated short for 2017’s “Dear Basketball,” based on a poem he wrote announcing his retirement.

Bryant’s immense popularity, including overseas in China, made him a valuable endorser even after he finished playing. No partnership was as big as his long-time relationship with Nike Inc. Bryant signed with the company in 2003 and became one of the sneaker-maker’s most important athlete endorsers. Nike built an entire apparel line around Bryant, and released more than 10 signature Kobe shoes.

“He was one of the greatest athletes of his generation and has had an immeasurable impact on the world of sport and the community of basketball,” the company said in a statement.

Bryant’s name was the first to be mentioned on-stage at the Grammy Awards on Sunday evening, when singer Lizzo dedicated the night to him before opening the show with a two-song performance. His two retired basketball jerseys were illuminated in Staples Center, home of the Lakers.

“We’re all feeling crazy sadness right now,” host Alicia Keys said, before singing a song in Bryant’s honor. “We’re literally standing here heartbroken in the house that Kobe Bryant built.”

Bryant’s Childhood

Kobe Bean Bryant was born in Philadelphia on Aug. 23, 1978. Son of a professional basketball player, Bryant moved to Italy when he was 6 after his father took a job with a team in Rieti. Fluent in Italian, Bryant returned to the U.S. in 1991, and starred as a high schooler for Philadelphia’s Lower Merion High School.

He was drafted 13th overall in 1996 by the Charlotte Hornets, who traded him to the Lakers — the only team he would ever play for. Even early in his career, his work ethic set him apart from others. Longtime NBA coach Byron Scott recalls finding Bryant, when he was 18, shooting alone in an empty gym two hours before practice.

“I go out to the court and I look, and there’s Kobe Bryant, he’s out there shooting in the dark,” Scott told Business Insider in 2017. “I stood there for probably about 10 seconds and I said, ‘This kid is going to be great.’”

Paired with Hall of Fame center Shaquille O’Neal, Bryant won his first NBA title in 2000, the first of three straight that the team would win. After O’Neal departed, Bryant went on to win two more, in 2009 and 2010. He was named the finals MVP for both.

NBA Highlights

Outside of the championships, Bryant’s career contains a number of legendary NBA moments. In 2005, he outscored the Dallas Mavericks 62-61 through three quarters of a regular season game. A month later he scored 81 points in a game against the Toronto Raptors, the closest any player before or since had come to touching Chamberlain’s record 100.

In 2013, he tore his Achilles tendon against the Golden State Warriors, and hit two free throws before leaving the game. It’s just one of many examples of how Bryant fought through injuries in his career. Former Lakers teammate John Celestand remembers another, when Bryant broke his wrist during the 1999-2000 season.

“I am ashamed to say that I was excited the day after his injury because I knew that there was no way that No. 8 would be the first to practice, if he would even be there at all,” Celestand wrote in 2005 blog post. “As I walked through the training room, I became stricken with fear when I heard a ball bouncing. No, no, it couldn’t be! Yes it could. Kobe was already in a full sweat with a cast on his right arm, and dribbling and shooting with his left.”

Business Career

Bryant began investing long before he retired from the NBA. Those who worked with him said he showed the same intensity and work ethic in pitch meetings that he used to show on the court. He’d frequently cold-call CEOs and business leaders — including former Nike Chief Executive Officer Mark Parker, former Apple Inc. executive Jony Ive, and media moguls Oprah Winfrey and Arianna Huffington — to learn more about their business.

Bryant’s legacy cut across multiple fields — sports, entertainment, business — and social media erupted with messages and lamentations. Nike posted a poignant image in saying goodbye to Bryant, whose nickname was Black Mamba.

Among his most successful investments was an early stake in the sports drink-maker BodyArmor. He reportedly put $6 million into the company in 2014, a stake that was worth an estimated $200 million after Coca-Cola took a majority stake in BodyArmor four years later.

“It’s the same mentality” as playing basketball, Bryant told Bloomberg Businessweek of his investing back in 2018. “You win one championship, you can go on vacation all summer long or be in the gym the next day working on winning the next one. That same mentality carries through to what we are doing today, to me being here now.”

In 2013 he co-founded Bryant Stibel, a venture capital firm, with Jeff Stibel. The firm has invested in more than two dozen companies, including video game publisher Epic Games, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.com, Cholula hot sauce, and athlete-centered media platform the Players Tribune.

He dabbled in media as well, launching a production company called Kobe Studios.

Bryant leaves behind a wife, Vanessa, and three surviving daughters — Natalia, Bianka and Capri, who was born last year.

The Crash

The National Transportation Safety Board said it dispatched investigators to the crash site.

The superstar, his daughter and other passengers were traveling in a Sikorsky S-76B, a popular helicopter for commercial uses that has been used for decades. The helicopter identified by flight-tracking website Flightradar24 is owned by Island Express Holding Corp. in Van Nuys, California, according to Federal Aviation Administration records.

Flightradar24 said preliminary data indicated the helicopter had taken off from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles, at 9:06 a.m. local time. It flew over Los Angeles and Glendale, then over the San Fernando Valley before turning toward the rugged Santa Monica Mountains near Malibu.

In its last recorded position at 9:45 a.m., the helicopter was at 1,700 feet altitude and flying at 176 miles per hour. Photos of the crash site show that it hit an undeveloped hillside.

The final tweet on Bryant’s personal account referred to James’s achievement on the court this weekend passing him as No. 3 on the all-time NBA scoring list.

In 2010, Bryant spoke with Yahoo! Sports about his legacy.

“When my career is over, I want them to think of me as an overachiever despite the talent that I have,” Bryant said. “To think of me as a person that’s overachieved, that would mean a lot to me. That means I put a lot of work in and squeezed every ounce of juice out of this orange that I could.”

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[writingguide003-blog]

44 Writing Hacks From Some of the Greatest Writers Who Ever Lived

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44 Writing Hacks From Some of the Greatest Writers Who Ever Lived

Writing looks fun, but doing it professionally is hard. Like really hard. Why on earth am I doing this?-hard.

Which is probably why so many people want to write, yet so few actually do. But there are ways to make it easier, as many writers can tell you. Tricks that have been discovered over the centuries to help with this difficult craft.

In another industry, these tricks would be considered trade secrets. But writers are generous and they love to share (often in books about writing). They explain their own strategies for how to deal with writers block to how to make sure your computer never eats your manuscript. They give away this hard-won knowledge so that other aspiring writers wont have to struggle in the same way. Over my career, Ive tried to collect these little bits of wisdom in my commonplace book (also a writers trick which I picked up from Montaigne) and am grateful for the guidance theyve provided.

Below, Ive shared a collection of writing hacks from some amazing writers like Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Anne Lamott, and Raymond Chandler. I hope its not too presumptuous but I snuck in a few of my own too (not that I think Im anywhere near as good as them).

Anyway, heres to making this tough job a tiny bit easier!

[*] When you have an idea for an article or a bookwrite it down. Dont let it float around in your head. Thats a recipe for losing it. As Beethoven is reported to have said, If I don’t write it down immediately I forget it right away. If I put it into a sketchbook I never forget it, and I never have to look it up again.

[*] The important thing is to start. At the end of John Fantes book Dreams from Bunker Hill, the character, a writer, reminds himself that if he can write one great line, he can write two and if he can write two he can write three, and if he can write three, he can write forever. He pauses. Even that seemed insurmountable. So he types out four lines from one of his favorite poems. What the hell, he says, a man has to start someplace.

[*] In fact, a lot of writers use that last technique. In Tobias Wolffs autobiographical novel Old School, the character types the passages from his favorite books just to know what it feels like to have those words flow through his fingertips. Hunter S. Thompson often did the same thing. This is another reason why technologies like ebooks and Evernote are inferior to physical interaction. Just highlighting something and saving it to a computer? Theres no tactile memory there.

[*] The greatest part of a writers time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. Samuel Johnson

[*] Tim Ferriss has said that the goal for a productive writing life is two crappy pages a day. Just enough to make progress, not too ambitious to be intimidating.

[*] They say breakfast (protein) in the morning helps brain function. But in my experience, thats a trade-off with waking up and getting started right away. Apparently Kurt Vonnegut only ate after he worked for 2 hours. Maybe he felt like after that hed earned food.

[*] Michael Malice has advised dont edit while you write. I think this is good advice.

[*] In addition to making a distinction between editing and writing, Robert Greene advises to make an equally important distinction between research and writing. Trying to find where youre going while youre doing it is begging to get horribly lost. Writing is easier when the research is done and the framework has been laid out.

[*] Nassim Taleb wrote in Antifragile that every sentence in the book was a derivation, an application or an interpretation of the short maxim he opened with. THAT is why you want to get your thesis down and perfect. It makes the whole book/essay easier.

[*] Break big projects down into small, discrete chunks. As I am writing a book, I create a separate document for each chapter, as I am writing them. Its only later when I have gotten to the end that these chapters are combined into a single file. Why? The same reason it feels easier to swim seven sets of ten laps, than to swim a mile. Breaking it up into pieces makes it seem more achievable. The other benefit in writing? It creates a sense that each piece must stand on its own.

[*] Embrace what the strategist and theorist John Boyd called the draw-down period. Take a break right before you start. To think, to reflect, to doubt.

[*] On being a writer: All the days of his life he should be reading as faithfully as his partaking of food; reading, watching, listening. John Fante

[*] Dont get caught up with pesky details. When I am writing a draft, I try not to be concerned with exact dates, facts or figures. If I remember that a study conducted by INSERT UNIVERSITY found that XX% of businesses fail in the first FIVE/SIX? months, thats what I write (exactly like that). If I am writing that on June XX, 19XX Ronald Reagan gave his famous Tear Down This Wall speech in Berlin in front of XX,XXX people, thats how its going to look. Momentum is the most important thing in writing, so Ill fill the details in later. I just need to get the sentences down first. “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” is how Joshua Wolf Shenk put it.

[*] Raymond Chandler had a trick of using small pieces of paper so he would never be afraid to start over. Also with only 12-15 lines per page, it forced economy of thought and actionwhich is why his stuff is so readable.

[*] In The Artists Way, Julia Cameron reminds us that our morning pages and our journaling dont count as writing. Just as walking doesnt count as exercise, this is just priming the pumpits a meditative experience. Make sure you treat it as such.

[*] Steven Pressfield said that he used to save each one of his manuscripts on a disk that hed keep in the glovebox of his car. Robert Greene told me he sometimes puts a copy of his manuscript in the trunk of his car just in case. I bought a fireproof gun safe and keep my stuff in therejust in case.

[*] My editor Niki Papadopoulos at Penguin: Its not what a book is. Its what a book does.

[*] While you are writing, read things totally unrelated to what youre writing. Youll be amazed at the totally unexpected connections youll make or strange things youll discover. As Shelby Foote put it in an interview with The Paris Review: I cant begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.

[*] Writing requires what Cal Newport calls deep workperiods of long, uninterrupted focus and creativity. If you dont give yourself enough of this time, your work suffers. He recommends recording your deep work time each dayso you actually know if youre budgeting properly.

[*] Software does not make you a better writer. Fuck Evernote. Fuck Scrivner. You dont need to get fancy. If classics were created with quill and ink, youll probably be fine with a Word Document. Or a blank piece of paper. Dont let technology distract you. As Joyce Carol Oates put it in an interview, Every writer has written by hand until relatively recent times. Writing is a consequence of thinking, planning, dreaming this is the process that results in writing, rather than the way in which the writing is recorded.

[*] Talk about the ideas in the work everywhere. Talk about the work itself nowhere. Dont be the person who tweets Im working on my novel. Be too busy writing for that. Helen Simpson has Faire et se taire from Flaubert on a Post-it near her desk, which she translates as Shut up and get on with it.

[*] Why cant you talk about the work? Its not because someone might steal it. Its because the validation you get on social media has a perverse effect. Youll less likely to put in the hard work to complete something that youve already been patted (or patted yourself) on the back for.

[*] When you find yourself stuck with writers block, pick up the phone and call someone smart and talk to them about whatever the specific area youre stuck with is. Not that youre stuck, but about the topic. By the time you put your phone down, youll have plenty to write. (As Seth Godin put it, nobody gets talkers block.)

[*] Keep a commonplace book with anecdotes, stories and quotes you can always usefrom inspiration to directly using in your writing. And these can be anything. H.L. Mencken for example, would methodically fill a notebook with incidents, recording scraps of dialogue and slang, columns from the New York Sun.

[*] As you write down quotes and observations in your commonplace book, make sure to do it by hand. As Raymond Chandler wrote, when you have to use your energy to put words down, you are more apt to make them count.

[*] Elizabeth Gilbert has a good trick for cutting: As you go along, Ask yourself if this sentence, paragraph, or chapter truly furthers the narrative. If not, chuck it. And as Stephen King famously put it, kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribblers heart, kill your darlings.

[*] Strenuous exercise everyday. For me, and for a lot of other writers, its running. Novelist Don DeLillo told The Paris Review how after writing for four hours, he goes running to shake off one world and enter another. Joyce Carol Oates, in her ode to running, said that the twin activities of running and writing keep the writer reasonably sane and with the hope, however illusory and temporary, of control.

[*] Ask yourself these four questions from George Orwell: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? Then finish with these final two questions: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

[*] As a writer you need to make use of everything that happens around you and use it as material. Make use of Seinfelds question: Im never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I am thinking, Can I do something with that?

[*] Airplanes with no wifi are a great place to write and even better for editing. Because there is nowhere to go and nothing else to do.

[*] Print and put a couple of important quotes up on the wall to help guide you (either generally, or for a specific project). Heres a quote from a scholar describing why Ciceros speeches were so effective which I put on my wall while I was writing my first book. At his best [Cicero] offered a sustained interest, a constant variety, a consummate blend of humour and pathos, of narrative and argument, of description and declamation; while every part is subordinated to the purpose of the whole, and combines, despite its intricacy of detail, to form a dramatic and coherent unit. (emphasis mine)

[*] Focus on what youre saying, worry less about how. As William March wrote in The Bad Seed, A great novelist with something to say has no concern with style or oddity of presentation.

[*] A little trick I came up with. After every day of work, I save my manuscript as a new file (for example: EgoIsTheEnemy2-26.docx) which is saved on my computer and in Dropbox (before Dropbox, I just emailed it to myself). This way I keep a running record of the evolution of book. It comforts me that I can always go back if I mess something up or if I have to turn back around.

[*] Famous ad-man David Ogilvy put it bluntly: Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

[*] Envision who you are writing this for. Like really picture them. Dont go off in a cave and do this solely for yourself. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in his interview with The Paris Review: …every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. Thats the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.

[*] Do not chase exotic locations to do some writing. Budd Schulbergs novel The Disenchanted about his time with F. Scott Fitzgerald expresses the dangers well: It was a time everyone was pressing wonderful houses on us. I have a perfectly marvelous house for you to write in, theyd say. Of course no one needs marvelous houses to write in. I still knew that much. All you needed was one room. But somehow the next house always beckoned.”

[*] True enough, though John Fante said that when you get stuck writing, hit the road.

[*] Commitments (at the micro-level) are important too. An article a week? An article a month? A book a year? A script every six weeks? Pick something, but commit to itpublicly or contractually. Quantity produces quality, as Ray Bradbury put it.

[*] Dont ever write anything you dont like yourself and if you do like it, dont take anyones advice about changing it. They just dont know. Raymond Chandler

[*] Neil Strauss and Tucker Max gave me another helpful iteration of that idea (which I later learned is from Neil Gaiman): When someone tells you something is wrong with your writing, theyre usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, theyre almost always wrong.

[*] Ogilvy had another good rule: Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

[*] Print out the work and edit it by hand as often as possible. It gives you the readers point of view.

[*] Hemingway advised fellow writer Thomas Wolfe to break off work when you ‘are going good.’Then you can rest easily and on the next day easily resume. Brian Koppelman (Rounders, Billions) has referred to this as stopping on wet edge. It staves off the despair the next day.

[*] Keep the momentum: Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether. Jeanette Winterson

That taps me out for now. But every time I read I compile a few more notecards. Ill update you when Ive got another round to share.

In the meantime, stop reading stuff on the internet and get back to writing!

But if you have a second…share your own tips below.

Read more: http://thoughtcatalog.com/