Agalia Tan

Grace Clarke, the head of community at a large e-commerce tech company, told me, “Audience-amassing is actually no longer ‘expensive,’ a.k.a. hard or rare. It’s easy to game.” At the same time, users have been drawn to more individualized digital publishing platforms, ranging from YouTube to Patreon, where small and devoted audiences can congregate... See more

my belief that everyone’s most difficult trait is tied to their most winning one, e.g. a flighty person might also be fun and whimsical, or a neurotic person might be thoughtful and curious, therefore in order to love them wholly you must appreciate all manifestations of their core being. Dualism, basically, and I’m not the first to say it, but I... See more

But that’s online dating, I’ve always thought: random and chaotic and terrible and weird and then — with time or patience — transformative.

This is how you get intellectually unstuck. We put so much pressure on ourselves to get things right on first attempt. What we seek is some wild step change that plunges us into clarity. Instead, we should embrace the little pivots that get us closer. It might be a series of smaller changes over a long period of time that feel less than radical.... See more

Success is often a product of environment.

While a polar bear might thrive in the Arctic, it would not thrive in a desert. People are no different. The person who excels in one environment fails in another.

Understanding how environments impact performance changes how you hire. Employees who thrive in one environment easily fail in another if their... See more

Describe your ideal self—the qualities you’d most like to embody—in five words. Then, to find your shadow self, locate the opposing qualities of each one. The shadow self describes the parts of ourselves we most ardently reject and repress. I think my ideal self would be: insightful, generous, authentic, funny, discerning. That means my shadow self... See more

There will be a constant temptation to do the work in a way that doesn’t make the work good or effective, but instead makes it convenient or easy. The path of least resistance generally doesn’t lead anywhere you’re interested in being, in my experience.

The key isn’t in being obstinate and insisting that only you know the one true path. It’s in... See more

i do worry that it has become easier to appear interesting than it is to actually be interesting given our easy access to tools that are supposed feed our idiosyncrasies, washing away the work it takes to actually develop a unique opinion. i find that people often mistake “coolness” for “interest” as if their Prada Collapse sneakers were a packet... See more