Cory Doctorow on advice he gives to writers:
This is no different than Robert Heinlein’s advice to writers: Write, finish what you write, send what you write to an editor. Almost every writer who approaches me for advice is not doing at least one of those three things. And if you are not doing those three things, you are not on a trajectory to publishing work. If you are doing those three things, you may not ever publish your work, but you need to do those things, otherwise what you are doing is writing-related activity. You are no longer writing.
Obvious application to graduate school and academic writing (thesis chapters, papers, etc).
Corollaries:
- Research-related activity
- Programming-related activity
- Exercise-related activity
- ??-related activity
Everything that matters has a deceptive, counterfeit version.