Agalia Tan

We live in an aggressive media environment. Everything we see advertises for our attention. Information is constantly pushed onto us.

As the torrent increases, it devalues more and more information that comes our way. All social media is advertising. Even my posts are essentially ads for my work and point of view. Newsletters have become overwhelmi... See more

It's scary to admit that you can't control the future; it's a lot easier to distract yourself by trying to optimize every decision, no matter how insignificant.

The Noetic Spiral works the same way with our creative process. It moves through four distinct but flowing phases:

First comes Gathering – the active consumption of ideas, experiences, and information. It's the reading, the listening, the observing. But unlike our usual content binge, it's intentional and purposeful. Think of it as carefully selecti... See more

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

What they thought was a priority and what I thought was a priority diverged.