Ajinkya Wadhwa

Trust and security. Secrets are poison to a relationship, because they form an invisible wall inside the relationship, leaving both people somewhat alone in the world—and besides, who wants to spend 50 years lying or worrying about hiding something? And on the other side of secrets will often be suspicion, a concept that directly clashes with the... See more

The hard thing is, we’ve all been trained to think in only one dimension—in the What dimension. We look at people’s behavior, their words, their tendencies, their habits, their demeanor, their disposition—and we stop there. The Psych Spectrum adds the critical second dimension to the equation that asks why people act the way they do. Or you can put... See more

For the rest of this post, we’ll zoom in on one specific type of culture: intellectual culture. There are all kinds of intellectual cultures out there, but we can slot them into two broad categories:

The pursuit of knowledge is heralded as a virtue, but the attainment of understanding is far more important.

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. 

Interestingly enough, these two perspectives act as the universal endpoints of a see-saw representing our quality of thought – with Rumination on one side, and Reflection on the other.

The key is to take that exact feeling and remind yourself of it whenever money hijacks your attention. That when you’re fixated on its pursuit, you can break the spell by understanding how laughable it is to be remembered for it. That in the end, it will have very little to say about the person you are.

The core idea of retirement is this: You frontload your attention spent on money to generate wealth. You then offload your wealth to spend your attention on leisure, purpose, or love.

When you are an infant, Life is writing furiously — the developments in your life are happening so fast that the range of potential experiences expands exponentially.