Agalia Tan

Best practices are rarely the best — they're mostly just cargo cult common practices.

And as more people adopt them, the more mediocre they become.

The best is usually what most people aren't willing to do.

Being a romantic means being brave. To offer something to someone, with hope — the hope that they will like it. To show someone who you are by making something that only you could make. To be extra, to choose to build something extra. To manifest things that are strange and unexpected and surprising…

These acts can feel wildly vulnerable and frighte... See more

I find explaining any actually interesting idea usually requires explaining like 5 subsidiary ideas. If you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky it’s like 25 and either they’re ready for a three hour lecture or you’re not going to succeed.

Defining time well spent for yourself is one of the most important tasks of going day to day in this life.

The key thing to take away from this is that the real expertise here isn’t doing the work. It’s knowing how to guide the work. How to evaluate the work. It’s knowing what is worth prompting — which is really just another way of saying: knowing what’s worth doing.

I saw someone define modern art as:

Modern art = You could do that + Yeah, but you didn’... See more

"A lot of people no longer do work that has any meaning to them, since humans are productive creatures... we are meant to create. When we do work that is not creative, that doesn't reflect who we are, that imposes depression, anxiety, a sense of meaninglessness. When we have a sense of meaninglessness, we will want to substitute the meaninglessness... See more

Remember The New Yorker. You subscribed because you liked it. Then it taunted you with its endless words, pages and pages demanding to be read. It reminded you of all the time you didn’t have to spend reading The New Yorker. Whenever you glimpsed the growing pile, you felt mild panic. Every time you recycled an unread issue, you felt like a wastefu... See more