I wish I had either of these attention spans.
The first, Robert Caro’s for spending almost 40 years writing a multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson: > Caro is the last of the 19th-century biographers, the kind who believe that the life of a great or powerful man deserves not just a slim volume, or even a fat one, but a whole shelf full… Caro once spent several nights alone in a sleeping bag in the Texas Hill Country (where Johnson was from) so he could understand what rural isolation felt like there.
Insanity.
The second is Shaun Inman’s, who has been on a tear lately by first releasing The Last Rocket for iOS and just this past weekend participating in antoher Ludum Dare competition, where the goal is to create a fully playable game in 72 hours. He writes about the process here: > Ludum Dare is always a rewarding experience. You have a deadline and a direction and 48 (or 72) hours to see where they take you. At the end of the weekend you have something that didn’t exist before. It’s simultaneously exhausting and rejuvenating.
Also, insanity. There’s something to be said about both the similarity of both of these things. The first is a slow burn, while the other burns so bright and so fast. I don’t know which is better, and does it really matter?