Amy Zhen

The way I beat intellectual obesity was by trying to become the best writer I can be. Writing requires you to filter out bad information because you have a duty to your readers to not be full of shit. Writing also forces you to periodically shut out information altogether so you can be alone with your thoughts. This regular confrontation with... See more

Hedonic Treadmill : Expectations rise with results, so nothing feels as good as you’d imagine for as long as you’d expect.

The problem isn’t that machines are becoming more human-like, it’s that humans are becoming more machine-like in an effort to keep up.

I'm really inspired by also how they were really quiet for a really long time at the beginning. They were not trying to become the next new success story on the pages of every paper. They were much more just like, "We're just going to prove through the quality of our output over time that we are doing something interesting, and weird, and... See more

Tech began to feel extractive, rather than additive: more and more people are in tech to make money, to climb the corporate ladder, to extract value, rather than adding it and growing the pie out of sheer curiosity of genuine love for the craft. Tech is attracting a different type of people than before, and everyone who's been in this industry long... See more

The biggest change for me a few years ago came from Amy Porterfield saying "what if it were easy?" Reframing every single idea, project and task with this lens (a) makes life fun and (b) puts you back in control. There is always a way.

So seriousness isn’t some kind of final reward, a golden watch you earn for a lifetime of operating in bad faith. It is, instead, one of those basic practices you gotta do to prevent your life from disintegrating, like getting out of bed and taking a shower and talking to people. That’s because seriousness is the great Orderer of Priorities, and... See more