Ajinkya Wadhwa

Simple writing also lasts better. People reading your stuff in the future will be in much the same position as people from other countries reading it today. The culture and the language will have changed. It's not vain to care about that, any more than it's vain for a woodworker to build a chair to last.

Humans are so complicated for a simple reason: we’re each the product of a struggle between two fundamentally different, often contradictory forces.

Reflecting on the nature of thought may not come naturally, but it can be trained with consistent practice. In the same way our muscles don’t bulk up without physical exercise, our minds won’t sharpen up without adequate mental training. Contemplative practices like meditation and prayer contribute to this type of project, but much of it starts by... 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

While you can easily predict the concerns of making any leap, there is no way to predict the numerous rewards that await you on the other side.

A respect for each other’s brains and way of thinking. A life partner doubles as a career/life therapist, and if you don’t respect the way someone thinks, you’re not going to want to tell them your thoughts on work each day, or on anything else interesting that pops into your head, because you won’t really care that much what they have to say about... See more

A single cell is itself a giant—a magical living giant made up of trillions of non-living atoms—and an animal is a higher-level giant made up of trillions of cells. This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is called emergence. We can visualize it as a tower.

Indirect knowledge only works in favor (of learning) when it’s coupled with reason.