Ajinkya Wadhwa

The three components of independent-mindedness work in concert: fastidiousness about truth and resistance to being told what to think leave space in your brain, and curiosity finds new ideas to fill it.

Some people are born with a reasonably tame mammoth or raised with parenting that helps keep the mammoth in check. Others die without ever reining their mammoth in at all, spending their whole lives at its whim. Most of us are somewhere in the middle—we’ve got control of our mammoth in certain areas of our lives while it wreaks havoc in others.... See more

Availability is no longer determined by one’s time, but by one’s attention. The problem, of course, is that our attention is constantly absorbed by the tools we use everyday, making us feel like we’re never truly available. As these tools continue to get nicer, prettier, and more powerful, it becomes increasingly difficult to stop checking them,... See more

The second place a mammoth hides is in the way-too-good feelings you get from feeling accepted or on a pedestal over other people.

If an animal’s life is a game of chasing good feelings and avoiding bad ones, the animal’s environment is the obstacle course standing between it and all those delicious chemical rewards.

Unfortunately, if you want to do new things, you'll face a force more powerful than other people's skepticism: your own skepticism. You too will judge your early work too harshly. How do you avoid that?

I wish someone had told me about this distinction when I was a kid, because it's one of the most important things to think about when you're deciding what kind of work you want to do.

But here’s the thing. Regardless of what you do to break out of the box, it won’t work. You can change your external environment all you want, but you will continue to travel with the one box that will always accompany you.

Life’s sole responsibility is to add new ranges of potential experiences that are plausible to this list. This is no easy task, as the list of items on here grows astronomically simply by you being born into this world.