Catherine Bryt: Practice Makes Perspective

November 10, 2015

For this week’s installment of #PracticeMakes, we talk to MM stylist Catherine Bryt about her 15-minute-a-day ritual.

“Practice makes perspective.”

Reading is a type of meditation for me; it helps me get perspective on my day-to-day life by allowing me to step out of it. It’s so easy to just watch TV at the end of a long day, but I always try to read for at least 15 minutes. It engages my brain and allows me to dip into another world or get inside another person’s viewpoint. It helps me stay creative and forces me to forget my own biases, if only momentarily.

I recently read Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities; Sam Walton’s Made in America, which details the conception and growth of one of the biggest companies in the U.S., Walmart; and a book of short stories called Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. It’s named for an essay by Joan Didion, and I picked it up after college when I was considering leaving New York, my hometown. I also love books like Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being that I can get into emotionally.

Whatever the story, I like to be completely engrossed in the book—to the point where I don’t notice if someone’s talking to me. That’s how I know I’m doing it right.

Check out the #PracticeMakes collection, and read about its creation here.