When remembering that day, Chris admits he got lucky \u2013 and also brought a box of donouts to the janitor\u2013 but he stresses that retroactively, he earned the luck by working hard and always improving. And so he got to write amazing pieces like the National Award Winners Home<\/a> and The Things That Carried Him<\/a>, plus over 60 other stories – about politics, space, magic, animals, celebrities or sports.<\/p>\n During his previous visits to Romania, Chris Jones offered advice for young people trying to break\u00a0into journalism, writing or any other creative careers. Here are some:<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0Sit down and do the work<\/strong>. Do it again and again and again, until you\u2019ve given yourself enough evidence that you can do it. I don\u2019t believe in writer\u2019s block, because if you sit down on the chair and you put your hands on some kind of writing device, magical things happen. You won\u2019t always be great. Some days you\u2019ll sit down and what you\u2019ll write will not be good. But you\u2019re giving yourself the chance to be good.<\/p>\n \u2022 As long as you are making good things, this is the best way to live your life<\/strong>. If you are producing something that matters, that\u2019s beautiful, even if it\u2019s for a small number of people. Teller the magician<\/a> spent years working on this trick that was seen by exactly 12 people. And for him it\u2019s the most beautiful thing that he\u2019s ever done. It doesn\u2019t matter that thousands of people haven\u2019t seen it, it doesn\u2019t matter that it didn\u2019t make him any money. What matters is that those 12 people saw the most amazing trick ever.<\/p>\n \u2022 I get asked all the time about what makes a great writer<\/strong>. \u00a0And it\u2019s such a hard question to answer. There\u2019s things like curiosity, determination and honesty, and all these things are important, but the thing that for me \u2013 it\u2019s my test \u2013 if I was to hire one person out of this room, who would I take? It would be the person who cared the most.<\/strong> It would be the person with the biggest heart in this room.<\/p>\n \u2022 The poorest years of your lives will be the ones when you don\u2019t believe in anything or anyone. To do your best work, you have to be a true believer<\/strong>. You have to believe that what you do is important, and you have to believe that what you\u2019re doing matters. And you have to believe that what you write will be read and edited with the same care that you put into it. You have to believe in this stuff. Otherwise it will come across in your story that you didn\u2019t think that what you were doing counted.<\/p>\n Book you place <\/a>for the 5th edition to see him\u00a0spread magic on stage again.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The story of how Chris Jones began his magazine writing career starts with a box of donouts. Having never written a magazine byline before, he one day walked into the offices of Esquire USA and asked to speak with David Granger, the Editor in Chief. He was 24 years old, had a degree in urban … Continue reading Chris Jones on doing meaningful work<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1274,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[24],"tags":[38,60],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1234"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2999,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234\/revisions\/2999"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"10494783_341070292737592_8445978680418938259_n\"](\"http:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/10494783_341070292737592_8445978680418938259_n.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n