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When evaluating a company, one of my favorite questions to ask is whether it has an aesthetic. We don’t talk about aesthetics as the highest form of
13 Creative Commandments: 1. Talent is an important differentiator, but talent needs to put in the hours to excel. 2. Question everything. Question wh
“In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”
We all know we’re overstimulated and want to stop, but we can’t. We use app blockers, throw our phones away, and build rigid routines. But none of it
humans don’t have fixed identities. we’re constantly testing. trying different versions of ourselves. seeing what gets rewarded. adjusting based on fe
I feel like there’s something so soulless about our culture—something deeply, deeply missing in people’s experience of life, a kind of superficiality.
a personally fulfilling and socially useful life of the mind
The internet taught us to consume everything. Save everything. Remember everything. But wisdom isn't about remembering more. It's about knowing what t
A digital communal garden. Shared beauty and care.
design is the embodiment of values. Design is the ultimate commitment to or compromise of one’s values. And this is how we go about the world. We make
When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the typeface of least resistance.” Ti
It also aligned the computer with something that is often inspiring to many people and artists: nature. If I can find the sublime in microchips and SD
Sometimes, You Have To Say No To Your Friends To Say Yes To Your Work When asked, Lin-Manuel Miranda says Wait For It is the best song he’s ever writ
when making things becomes frictionless, starting stops meaning anything.
So much value and love for the process of writing and what it does for the coherence between heart, brain, imagination, lived reality, unseen, and see
You can’t write a viral essay that says “it’s complicated and I’m not sure.” But this is the only path to truly novel insight.
Writing is a task that takes both objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs ace the objective parts the same way they ace every test; you can’t faul
At some point while I was trying to write a dissertation as a parent of a preschooler and an infant, I attended a workshop from which I remember exact
I find that changing mediums is always good for my writing, so often I will go from the manila folder to a sheet of paper to a Word doc to a Scrivener
“Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.” ― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
In 1985, Nike held a 24-hour shoe design contest. Nike was struggling. Their stock dropped 50%. They had to lay off people. Adidas, Converse, and Reeb
Unplugging Is Not the Solution You Want
Society is increasingly cutting the nourishing ties that attach us, and calling it innovation. I worry about how encouraged we are to do things effici
I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much t
Useful and Overlooked Skills
Design talk: Too much consistency will ruin your app. Humans are naturally drawn to experiences that create a strong sense of place. This demands va
People who don't pause exist more in their head than their body. The mind is top-down, rigid, quick, enforcing an established view. The mind is waitin
across many dimensions we have been acculturated to value the aggregated over the individual, and defaulting to the average consensus has become comfo
one of the reasons school fails to help people model success is that a series of tests introduces no randomness. Success in real life involves a grea
“You can search and search all your life, but sometimes you need to realise you’ve arrived.”
“So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.”
Christians believe purgatory exists because of God’s divine mercy, but even here on earth, perhaps the waiting period is more merciful than we realize
to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
my favorite feeling in the world is “I’ve done everything I could, and whatever happens from now on is not my fault so I can just relax”
I must admit, idling accounts for some of the most relaxing moments of my day. They’re not joyful, nor are they ultimately restful (I’m reading Twitte
If prestige thinking is less essential than we claimed, and if machines can now produce a lot of its outputs cheaply, then what’s coming is not necess
In ‘How Movies Were Edited 60 Years Ago,’ an editor manually cut film splicing, taping, and rewinding at a near biblical pace. Each move carried signi
Why should what you produce, rather than what you consume, be the most important thing about you? Why shouldn’t the fact that you race boats or watch
consumption choices force you to develop the habit of self-examination. And when you think about more complex life choices — what kind of personality
When you say that the status quo draws people toward more individuated, personality-driven work, what do you think is causing that, both culturally an
to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
iUnlock doors with it.iMeet lovers through it.iOrder food with it.iSummon cars with it.iEven meditate with it.Apple designed the iPhone too well.So we
If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an
Concerns about population growth are emerging again. A 2020 survey found that 39 percent of youth worldwide are hesitant to have children in the futur
The hyperreal doesn’t mimic or imitate reality. It replaces reality altogether, making it nearly impossible for us to determine what is real, what isn
I say please and thank you, not because I believe it matters to him, but because it matters to me. If I am going to use natural English to communicate
Every phase of life can be shopped for at Costco. Where else can you purchase a wedding ring, a baby carrier, and a casket? It follows your own life s
when i'm tied up in consumption, creation is lost to me; i am no longer the writer, the creative, the poet, the artist, but the eater, the viewer, the
What gets clicks becomes what gets made. The edges get sanded down. Originality gives way to imitation. Junk food wins, so everyone starts cooking cra
It takes yesterday’s trends, remixes them with today’s keywords, and spits out tomorrow’s mediocrity. It’s not thinking. It’s rehashing. Recursively,
We must choose the “longest way round” because meaning is neither fast nor viral nor optimized.It’s made. Slowly. Painfully. Honestly.By humans.
But what felt new was the speed and violence with which language now manifests markets. I’d sit in meetings as a single phrase “AI-native vertical Saa
HEY Email
A good life doesn’t ask you to be good at everything. It asks you to find the small circle where you have unusual leverage, and to be peacefully avera
My father was a Sarkari Babu (government officer with basic salary) his entire life, he was at one job throughout his life. He drove a Bajaj scooter
What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a t
The more upset I became, the more I felt that my sensitivity towards the paintings was the same sensitivity I held when I was the subject of the photo
To spot weird signals, you need to go down rabbit holes. Follow your intuition. And remember, pursuing rabbit holes is not always an act of procrastin
Gen AI for music has captured ~$300M in funding so far this year across several high-profile deals, the majority of which either focus on rights man
I think that talking about agency and introspection separately is misguided. People who emphasize how to get things done, and move faster, and reach h
When I try to make the best thing, it feels different. It feels like I’m trying to prove something to someone instead of trying to discover something
A trend is a fad whose demand is not satisfied. A fad is a trend whose demand is satisfied too quickly. The lesson? If you experience success, do not
This is silly simplified but people who work in “Brand” are typically valued for their taste and ability to forecast and predict trends. They see the
One of the surprising and counter-cultural truths about modern-day marketing, which I suspect drives many efficiency-minded people practically insane,
love coffee shops more than drinking coffee love notebooks more than taking notes love sweatpants more than sweating the vibes are in the vessel
So yes, if your heart stops and you need CPR, you would really like it to be performed by someone who remembers the steps. But they don’t have to nail
When evaluating a company, one of my favorite questions to ask is whether it has an aesthetic. We don’t talk about aesthetics as the highest form of
read between the vibes
The five principles of prompting I developed work equally well as management techniques for humans: Give direction. Describe the desired style in de
People who are good at solving poorly defined problems don't get the same kind of kudos. They don’t get any special titles or clubs. There is no test
2) Clear Roles & Decision Rights Without clear swim lanes and decision rights, individuals on teams feel disempowered and projects tend to stall out.
“I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting sick of their own bullshit” – Elizabeth Gilbert
“A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something.” — Bill Bernbach
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to
“Boundary lines, of any type, are never found in the real world itself, but only in the imagination of the mapmakers.” -Ken Wilber
Why So Many of the World’s Oldest Companies Are in Japan
The short-term crowd is always too distracted to notice the long-term crowd slowly compounding. An investor obsessing over daily economic data misses
All you have to do is just be 5% better than everyone else who’s really bad at it. You don’t have to get everything perfect… you just have to be a lit
Focus as a thing we have v. Focus as something we do
you can't do anything interesting without breaking from consensus, and you can't break from consensus without looking like an idiot to the people insi
“The anditode to doom is curiosity.” -Ezra Klein
The state of technology is arguably the most compelling it's ever been on a philosophical level
Confessional art can be beautiful, and it can be terrible; either way, to love it only as a representation of what we already know is to deny it, and
Meanwhile, a fixation on honesty continues to pervade popular arts discourse, music included. Indie scenesters have historically been the ones to agit
When scientific progress destabilized religious authority and the lack of meaning found in a pure rational worldview revealed science’s limitations, m
“So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This h
“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the over
People shying away from having babies because they heard that it’s so hard are making one of those category errors that are inescapable in this rotten
The most important rewards of being a parent come from the moment-by-moment physical and psychological joy of being with this particular child, and in
But strictly speaking, ambivalent is precisely the word two years in, because my feelings on the experience of motherhood do not add up to a tidy conc
I’ve spent the last three years pregnant, breastfeeding, or trying to conceive. I want more children, and I want close age gaps, and I want to write a
Technology increasingly robs us of the mystical in our lives. Not everything needs to be fast and available and convenient. I love ideas and products
We need ritual technology. Technology designed for ritual use.Why? Most of the software we use daily is designed to engagement-max. Social media feeds
Rob and I had to face the truth: Matter is a great product—3x App of the Day, with many thousands of passionate users—but it isn’t the next Duolingo.
When the institutions are optimized to fund the legible thing and the individuals are optimized to build the legible thing, the identity of the founde
1. It doesn’t have to be new. It just has to be fresh. The toy brick was invented (and patented) by British toymaker, Hilary Fisher Page in the 195
90% of Claude’s code is now written by AI, and this has completely transformed how they build products. The bottlenecks have shifted from engineering
hottest companies in Silicon Valley, famous for one thing: they made an extremely boring product extremely beloved. He speaks about how «technology ma
Zoom’s simplicity is a strength when it comes to the company’s ability to grow its network. When the product concept and value is simple to describe,
The best software businesses are networks. When every new user that joins makes the network more valuable for the other users, it leads to a sort of a
Your competitive advantage is not that your designs are secret, but that you have a strong relationship with your community of customers.
“At both Viaweb and YC, every minute I spent thinking about competitors was, in retrospect, a minute wasted... It's exceptionally rare for startups to
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What is this teaching me?
Latvia’s Flow won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and was created because he was somehow obsessed Blender, the free/open-source 3D modeling tool.
Scott Alexander’s recent post argues that the best response to AI displacement isn’t optimization or doomerism—it’s play. Figure out what you actually
what would one imperfect action teach me?
We should be skeptical of both utopian and dystopian technology predictions. New tools will amplify both our virtues and our vices, just like every pr
We see something that works, and then we understand it “We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper
I came of age in the Napster days, when only fools spent money on anything digital. Early on, we decided that we’d rather pay for the internet with at
One mistake I often used to make at Justin.tv was offering a potpourri of business models (virtual goods, product placement, chat ads, contests, etc..
The problem in media isn’t the business model. The problem is that most of the content sucks.
Ugh, I can’t believe I had to live/work through the deaths of both print media AND online media and now possibly television and film too?? Can I just
The problem in media isn’t the business model. The problem is that most of the content sucks.
the answer for publishers in the age of AI is no different than it was in the age of Aggregators: build a direct connection with readers. This, by ext
I want them to take away from the book the same thing they would take from the concert. I want them to think, well, I feel better now. I feel upli
Bubbling excitement for what the day holds. Novelty in the smallest of things. Unburdened by the clouds of worry that dim an adults life. Possibility
LLMs have three new capabilities that change the nature of search: Intuitive leaps: LLMs can answer poorly written questions with spooky-accurate ans
Unlike vertical search aggregators, boutique search engines feel less like the Yellow Pages and more like texting your friends to ask for a recommenda
Books and standup comedy are the rare mediums that are usually created by a single person. Because of this they can be more daring and go to more inte
“Truly showing belief in others will buy them a ticket to someplace they never knew.” -h/t sean feeney
I like thinking small. I like thinking of my reader as an individual.And even if I did this out of sheer stubbornness at first, I’ve come to think thi
The shift described represents a fundamental change in the "architecture" of how creative value is captured, moving from individual products to entire
Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that “Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können” – “One must still have
Claude’s outputs are the product of a form of mimicry, rather than as a report of genuine internal states.Consciousness is about internal states; the
I say please and thank you, not because I believe it matters to him, but because it matters to me. If I am going to use natural English to communicate
ideas only become clear once you begin to work on them
The friction between idea and ability that AI evangelists promise to eradicate is not a problem suffered by a disadvantaged few. It’s the fundamental
the choice humanity faces in every age is between the idea of power and the power of ideas
“I would make sushi in my dreams. I would jump out of bed at night with ideas.” Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Ferrero, and Colin Chapman all did the s
We built systems that prize speed above all else, and in doing so we lost the most fundamental lesson that nature teaches: speed of growth makes you f
All human wisdom is contained in these two words: ‘wait’ and ‘hope’!”
don’t live each day like it’s your last. live like you’ll make it to 100. think in centuries.
There are plenty of well-documented reasons to distrust Instagram — the platform where one is never not branding, never not making Facebook money, nev
If you write to please others, you are selling out. You are in the process of audience capture. This way of talking, which is how the fear in me talks
there's this feeling which is the opposite of audience capture - this feeling when you find a group of people who give you permission to be more and m
This is what nobody tells you: commitment is an act of agency. We often get through life comforted by the thought that we have the ability to make cho
our ability to bind our future selves to a future is what makes us agentic, rather than just moment-to-moment responders. Maybe the total inability to
the fear of commitment is really a failure of agency, of taking full responsibility for our choices and their consequences. A kind of learned helpless
The older I grow, the more convinced I become that commitment generates a kind of experiential wealth that can't be brute-forced into existence. There
‘As we work to reverse these long-term socio-economic and socio-political trends to foster more connections to others, stronger communities, more pro-
Maybe what we need is not an object to be known but a cause of wonder.
If you insist that anything too common, anything come by too cheaply, must be boring, then all the wonders of the Singularity cannot save you. You wil
“As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other peopl
I am tired of seeing speed as a selling point. I’ve wanted to talk about this for a long time. I think one of the main reasons many of us feel anxio
From Lily Chambers: I genuinely do not care if AI tools make me more productive. I am tired of seeing, "increased productivity" as a selling point. I
What does it mean that OpenAI bought a media company? That doesn’t feel like a random acquisition. It feels like a sign that trusted voices, archives,
The promise of artificial superintelligence is based on the idea that objective intelligence is the only intelligence. Or, even if there are multiple
the apparently hard problems (chess, calculus) turned out to be computationally easy, while the apparently easy ones (recognizing a face, walking acro
“smart” people are stupid in more complicated ways
Some ppl really ruin their lives trying to experience third person feelings in the first person.” Feelings observed are distinct from feelings felt. W
The quality that you’re looking for in most meditation is, I think, best described as collectedness. You can think of this as the opposite of being sc
Moreover, adopting this curious, receptive attitude throughout your life is what will make your practice actually meaningful. Sitting for long periods
Microfame is the best kind of fame, because it combines an easier task (be famous to fewer people) with a better outcome (be famous to the right peopl
“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.”
The peak of my influence was also the peak of my misery.
From a practical distance, achieving public success scanned to me as belonging, which is ironic, because what I’m talking about is actually separation
🧱Alternative funding model (inspired by cooperative breweries) Get 1,000 people to chip in $1,000. Make them members/ co-owners. Put each person's
If you make a cooperative, you have to know that you can’t design them; you can only grow them, like plants. If you grow one and you do it with other
Curation leads to expertise. Through curation, you better understand yourself, history, and unlikely connections across fields. Increasingly, we will
we’ve always been influenced in what we find beautiful or valuable or important, of course, but what’s new is the speed at which one is inundated with
You can use algorithms to surface new things. But algorithms are not nearly as good as human curators yet. Whatever pattern matching is going on insid
Memetic premium is a phenomenon in which people attribute higher monetary value to an idea because they: 1. See other people value an idea as well
These are two very different modes of cultural interaction. Charli’s approach invites participation: the memes exist for remixing, the portrayed scene
Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imi
Contribute your skills to an existing effort – make it possible. Build the website, raise the funds, recruit the talent, plan the events. As Bill McKi
They're blind to a simple truth: complex minds can't develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any other. And minds don't grow
Our society’s individualism, largely driven by technological advances and the illusion of endless progress, will no longer be sustainable – will not b
"Every product in the world, the quality at the end of the day is simply a reflection of how much the people who created it gave a shit about the prod
I asked Kelly about the tradeoffs of focusing on a single thing if you want to be great (which is what I had been getting at before). “Greatness is ov
“The techniques that we use, they’re not a big secret. It’s just about making an effort and repeating the same thing every day.” Jiro repeats the s
research on intellectual humility has exploded in the past 10 years. Psychologists now have many different ways to assess intellectual humility. Socia
“The more overtly unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and the not-quest
The King of Bhutan's coronation pledge is beautiful: “Throughout my reign I will never rule you as a King. I will protect you as a parent, care for y
