Agalia Tan

Wellness isn’t an extra. It’s the edge

“I’m actually not looking for feedback.” Employ as often as needed.

“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles. -- Muad'Dib”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

Poynter stresses that he’s not an expert; he’s just a normal guy running with a flag through a public park who stumbled upon a bizarre niche that allows him to live the life he’s always dreamed. But his — which is to say, the entire internet’s — brand of advice-giving and morality policing is remarkably black-and-white. This, obviously, is the reas... See more

When I say serious I

don’t

mean solemn and tedious.

I mean something closer to ‘dynamic persistence’, and a sense of humor is often critical to that. It’s hard to persist for a long time if you ‘take yourself too seriously’. You become rigid, stiff, the opposite of dynamic, and eventually you bang up against something that breaks you one way or ano... See more

Looking for love sounds more like chasing the high of an extreme sport, trust falling with someone you don’t really know like that. It demands exacting reciprocity, extreme vulnerability. It brings out people’s basest and most primal instincts and a frightening desire to merge into someone else. When the girlies on TikTok talk about dating, they ra... See more

The hardest part about being in a leadership position in a company is it requires this constant calibration of arrogance and humility. The arrogance to believe that we are going to build a more sublime internet but also the humility to know that there are many things that we will be wrong about. And it's hard because it's often not clear at what po... See more