Amy Zhen

If everyone is busy making everything,

how can anyone perfect anything?

We start to confuse convenience with joy.

Abundance with choice.

Designing something requires focus.

The first thing we ask is:

What do we want people to feel?

Delight.

Surprise.

Love.

Connection.

Then we begin to craft around our intention.

It takes time.

There are a thousand no’s for... See more

In her TED talk, Karen imagined a world in which AI and machine learning helped to bring us humans deeper into the world of animals. She closed by asking us to imagine an orca giving a TED talk:

And maybe one day in a speculative future, instead of a human here on stage, maybe bioacoustics would enable an orca to give a TED talk.

The better life you absolutely can build isn’t going to be brought to you by ChatGPT but by your own steady uphill clawing and through careful management of your own expectations. You live here. This is it.

I’ve always believed the best early-stage founders are artists – they're obsessive about new and unusual things, they feel compelled to bring creation into the world, and they are often misunderstood for long periods of time–even lifetimes. Building businesses is their art.

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

It’s as if they started a game of Monopoly hours before everyone else, bought up everything save two properties, and then invited the rest of the people to join — and swiftly blamed and shamed them for losing.

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