Agalia Tan
@agaaalia
Senior Strategist at We Are Social
RADAR Chapter Lead for Singapore
Agalia Tan
musingsandmore.substack.com
- What we can try to do—and what only human curation, so far, can make possible—is to find creative ways out of our house of mirrors. “Leave the door open on your way out” is one of our commandments, and it is an invitation to bring parallel worlds and universes, antagonists and dissidents, renegades and rebels into our beautiful bubble, and to engag... See more
from 🏡 I Don’t Resonate With You
seeds and
- the things in your immediate vicinity are the things that are going to dominate your life. So picking and influencing your neighborhood is really important... the neighborhood determines quite a bit about our life and our happiness.
from 3-2-1: On mental toughness, when confidence fools you, and the importance of neighborhoods
- My latest column at The New Yorker is about the revenge of homepages: Why we're turning toward individual websites as the platform era of the internet continues to disintegrate.
I started working on this piece because I've found myself going to homepages more often. It's a way to get a controlled, curated look at what a publication offers, and a ch... See more “Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.”
― Henry David Thoreaufrom 30 Useful Concepts (Spring 2024)
what "living life to the fullest" looks like and things you should remember
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possib
from Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tenets of Storytelling by Maria Popova
- A primary reinforcer is something we’re born to desire. A conditioned reinforcer is something we learn to desire, due to its association with a primary reinforcer.
from Why Everything is Becoming a Game
we are shaped by our tools, systems, and environment
the world has been gamified
- What I write is all mine, it’s a living thing, it’s an extension of me that wanders out into the world. It is desire turned inwards instead of outwards, focused instead of displaced. It’s a way to access self-knowledge and self-respect.
from how to avoid half-heartedness by Ava
- One of my (many) contrarian beliefs is that we do not have strong enough preferences. We often blame social media or the speed of information as the reason why we’re easily distracted, but the real reason behind our inability to focus has less to do with the sheer quantity of media and more to do with our laziness when it comes to distinguishing wh... See more
- There are many kinds of value. Time, space, personal freedom. Monetary worth is only one. You choose what holds the most weight.