Lessons from John Durham Peters

  • “Write early in the morning,
  • cultivate memory,
  • reread core books,
  • take detailed reading notes,
  • work on several projects at once,
  • maintain a thick archive,
  • rotate crops,
  • take a weekly Sabbath,
  • go to bed at the same time,
  • exercise so hard you can’t think during it,
  • talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old,
  • take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries),
  • step outside of the empire of the English language regularly,
  • look for vocabulary from other fields,
  • love the basic,
  • keep your antennae tuned, and
  • seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).”

—John Durham Peters