The most invisible form of wasted time is doing a good job on an unimportant task.

The way to greater confidence is not to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to come to peace with our inevitable ridiculousness

— Alain de Botton in ‘On Confidence’

“Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text genera

Let go of the 'shoulds.' Life is full of 'shoulds' - you should go to that event, you should answer that text, you should do the laundry, etc., but at the end of the day, they are 'cans' and you determine if and when you act.

Successful people don’t just ride out the Dip. They don’t just buckle down and survive it. No, they lean into the Dip. They push harder, changing the rules as they go. Just because you know you’re in the Dip doesn’t mean you have to live happily with it. Dips don’t last quite as long when you whittle at them

— The Dip

“They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm

How did we get here?

If it’s going to be different, the forces involved need to be different as well.

Optimize for legacy, not empire. Empires die because they’re alone, legacies live because they involve others.

-OH, on building teams and brand communities