Ajinkya Wadhwa

This is The List of Human Experience , and every one of us has our own version of it. I see it as the ledger of our individual existence — the master document that tracks every range of potential experience we can have at any given moment.

In the end, a healthy relationship with money stems from how grateful you are for what you have. The constant pursuit for “the next big thing” is a clear indicator that what you have isn’t enough, and it’s worth considering if any amount ever will be.

The schlep filter is so dangerous that I wrote a separate essay about the condition it induces, which I called schlep blindness.

I’m worried that the answer to this is trending toward “no.”

The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice." At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders' own experiences "organic" startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way.

The clash of domains is a particularly fruitful source of ideas. If you know a lot about programming and you start learning about some other field, you'll probably see problems that software could solve. 

While performing a deep dive on death can seem like a difficult thing to do, I’ve found that contemplating death in this manner actually teaches us what it means to live a fuller life. There are many perspectives that can be shared here, but I think the key takeaways are the following:

Give yourself some time. You have a lot of control over the rate at which you turn yours into a prepared mind, but you have less control over the stimuli that spark ideas when they hit it.