Aditya K Suresh

People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,” and their descriptions of the joy of that state are so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an “optimal experience.” Many activities can induce a sense of flow, from painting to raci

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But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more

One of the best ways I’ve found to organize one’s thoughts about a huge swath of intellectual and creative space, is to write a syllabus

Agency is the drive to play a game you created. Chart your own path. Forget politics. Work when, how, and where you want. Lean in—to your unique “why.”

A funny thing happens when you begin to capture competitive differences on paper”, says Harvard Professor

Youngme Moon

in her book

Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

, “there is a natural inclination for folks in the competitive set to focus on eliminating differences rather than accentuating them.”

Another key fact is that agency isn't intrinsic to a system, but rather something we ascribe to it. It's a way of describing a system at the level of abstraction that includes goals, obstacles, motivations, etc. If you look too closely (at a sufficiently low level of abstraction), the agency might seem to disappear. A plant, for example, is 'merely

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