Agalia Tan

You draw out of the world what you put into it.

​

Want to attract reliable people? Be reliable.

Want to attract trustworthy people? Be trustworthy.

Want to attract welcoming people? Be welcoming.

Want to attract exceptional people? Be exceptional

My job is not to think about what exists but rather what I want that does not yet exist.

Echo chambers lack that friction. So do “filter bubbles,” which are essentially the digital incarnation of echo chambers. In his book Filterworld , Kyle Chayka explores how personalized searching, algorithms, and online behavior flatten our culture by continually offering us more of what we’ve already consumed, shrinking our digital worlds.

I think there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest.

All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work

“Desire that arises in agitation is an expression of the ego; desire that arises in stillness is an expression of the soul.”