Beyond that the wider internet just strikes me as a sad place. There is no energy there. The cracks in the wall are beginning to show.

“While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory.”

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.

good ideas emerge later in brainstorming because they are less obvious. If something seems obvious to you, it is probably obvious to others, and there are likely good reasons why incumbents remain unbeaten or the problem unsolved.

The world until recently was overflowing with onramps of opportunity, even for children, and we seem to do poorly at producing new ones. Modern complexity may have erased some avenues for agency (no boy can meaningfully learn the telegraph), but I suspect how we have oriented the world, not technology, is the main problem.

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

How could an American getting paid six figures in Mountain View understand how to identify problems and design solutions for a homemaker in Tokyo, a street seller in Turkey, or a doctor in Tunisia?

For the most part, they don’t. Or if they try, they do it badly.