alex

But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I certainly never interrogated them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. But a structure is not thinking. A tag is not an insight. And an idea never re-encountered might as well be forgotten entirely.

The musical Hamilton opened on Broadway in the summer of 2015 and quickly became a sensation. Famous people were in the audience every night. There were afterparties. There were people telling the show’s creator Lin-Manuel Miranda that he was a genius. Asked, “What about your life allowed you to be able to handle the crazy success of the show?”—Lin... See more

The best way to not let a project’s spectacular success get you too high or its spectacular failure get you too low, Ryan likes to say, is to be already working on the next project by the time the many deciding factors decide that success or failure.

The stand-up comedian Mitch Hedberg worked his ass off for years and years to become a great comedian. When his comedy finally started breaking through and finding an audience, people started asking him to do other things. People would ask to write movie scripts, to be an actor, to host this show and write for that one. “They ask me to do things... See more