I know that people are too eager to recommend their current lifestyle and disavow their developmentally important previous decisions.

There’s always a next step, and the higher you climb, it doesn’t necessarily get easier. For the creators who are just getting started: Enjoy your five subscribers. That’s a dinner table. Forget more people—what are you going to bring to the table?

The mountains are molehills

And the molehills? They are lit — you ever hang out in a molehill? Moles go nuts man they party.

The world is is a tragic mess of nothings that feel like everything.

and everythings that feel like nothing.

You are not most people, so don’t do things for most people. Don’t do things for most people; do things for yourself based on your own unique tastes and experiences, and the right people will show up. Raise your standards and aspire for greatness. Don’t just impress your friends; impress God himself.

I like to look at Leonov's drawing when I am feeling exhausted by despair and drudgery, or when I feel the weight of longing and fear pressing in on my chest. I look at the picture and I think of all that had to happen for the drawing to exist. For Leonov to exist. For anything to exist. For me, art is a kind of landing site in the wilderness. Art ... See more

It’ll be awesome to live a long and healthy life, but the purpose of life isn’t to have as much of it as possible. The purpose is to know what to do with what you have. Without something worthy of dying for (dedicating yourself to), you can live 900 lifetimes and still feel like it’s not long enough.3

But I have begun to come around on this: art—or at least good art—is defined by its non-instrumentality. Art is not useless, but it is use-agnostic, and that’s what makes it so useful after all.

Many of the most interesting innovations revolve around novel production, funding, and ownership models that shift the balance of power toward workers and ordinary people. Commons-based peer production (CBPP), the system that produced critical open infrastructure such as Wikipedia and Linux, involves a large volunteer community supported by smaller... See more

And here’s what I learned from all that: The ones who succeed are often simply the ones who try harder than everybody else. They wake up in the wee hours to write before their first meeting of the day; they turn down social invitations to practice their craft. They kill their darlings; they do the reading; none of this sounds easy because it’s not.