Alex Burns

Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream.

Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.

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Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.

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Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.

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Building specific knowledge will

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Are you a Creative Pragmatist? You know I pretty much abhor labels, I find them constricting. Except when they are not. And this is one of those times. You see, the label “CP” gives a name, permission if you will, to those whose style is Creative, but still Pragmatic. And some days, the scale may tip more creative. And then quite the opposite on... See more

In early interviews with Whaley, he often talked about the internet being the magic ingredient to MSCHF: “Life is too short and the internet is too big to not make what you want.”

The Coffee Beans Procedure is a way of doing what psychologists call unpacking . Our imaginations are inherently limited; they can’t include all details at once. (Otherwise you run into Borges’ map problem—if you want a map that contains all the details of the territory that it’s supposed to represent, then the map has to be the size of the... See more

“Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls—while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.”