Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Building a T-shaped knowledge graph means aggressively diversifying your information sources, spreading out wider to seemingly unrelated areas and capturing the advantage of being at the beginning of the diminishing returns curve where you’re constantly exposed to new ideas. It also means being selectively ignorant about certain things. You have to... See more

Take 30 minutes every day to journal on an idea and explore its repercussions or deeper considerations. Then, go share those reflections with someone. If you don’t have someone to have that conversation with, spend 30 minutes instead reaching out to people who might be interested. This is the real practice of “digesting” our information.

The short of it is that when we think about information diets we might fixate on the quantity of information but ignore the quality and the processing of it. That’s like only looking at calories to determine if a diet is healthy. We need to have a higher-fidelity picture of the information we consume – our entire perception of reality relies upon i... See more

As a strategist, if you want rare insight, you need to have access to rare perspectives and those come from people, not publications or posts on social media.

We can give ourselves permission to make things without those things being perfect. And the fact is, once you get started, you don’t stop. The more you make things, the more you can make things and the more you want to make things.

We don’t need to define ourselves by the things we make, but we can still make them. This goes back to the idea of handiness, right? This isn’t a book about becoming an expert in any one thing. It’s about trying lots of things and becoming increasingly capable as a result. It’s about getting comfortable experimenting with something you’ve never don... See more

It’s true that a farm family of the 1930s had to depend on their material intelligence for survival, while today’s city dwellers and office workers can get away with ignoring their physical environment and making a fine living. Maybe this feels like a sort of progress. But basic necessity is only one side of our relationship to materials. There are... See more

the more we have the confidence and ability to make things from what we already have, the less we feed the capitalist system that doesn’t care about us or the people making our stuff or the planet that our rampant consumerism is actively making uninhabitable.