Brian Sholis

* “If you’re a manager, or if the circumstances of your birth afford you more privilege, the burden is on you to attend to the opportunities for lossiness and work to reduce them.”

- “Perhaps our biggest time error is near bias—caring too much about what’s about to happen, and too little about the future.”

- “One characteristic of a desirable elite, it seems to me, is that its members be self-aware.”

- “The duration of felt experience is between two and three seconds …. Everything before belongs to memory; everything after is anticipation. It’s a strange, barely fathomable fact that our lives are lived through this small, moving window.”

"This counsel is surely weighted toward white-collar knowledge work, although I hope it’s at least somewhat valuable to any reader."

- "Pater said beauty is impossible without some element of strangeness; the potential for beauty was built into his own “strange webs” of significance, spun in such writerly fashion around the object with which he was in dialogue. Criticism is one way to be the spider, paying out silk, both navigating and creating the web as one goes. What defines... See more

- “They found that an ideal clock — one that ticks with perfect periodicity — would burn an infinite amount of energy and produce infinite entropy, which isn’t possible. Thus, the accuracy of clocks is fundamentally limited.”