Brian Sholis

A thoughtful essay about how our online identities—even when our default mode is misdirection or obfuscation—are visible to the platforms we use, and by extension to capitalism and its prerogatives.

1. Your career is not your life2. Explore, then exploit3. Don't do the job you want to tell other people you do. Do the job you want to do.4. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about what you value—and how much professional success matters to you5. Flow comes from voluntary, difficult, worthwhile work

- "At their core, Expansive Brands are about doing good by being good."

- “We undertake activities that we know to be difficult or unpleasant because we see them as part of a good life and wish to think back upon them in the future. We curate our presents to furnish our futures with the right kinds of pasts.”

* “The goal of my public engagement is a certain kind of open-mindedness, and that becomes impossible when all you ever think about is one thing — even if you call that thing “freedom of speech” or “liberal tolerance” or, for that matter, “open-mindedness.””

- “When making decisions about life right now, we often apply different standards to ourselves than to other people—but, when we make decisions about our future selves, we use the same standards. Thinking about our future selves has even been shown to resemble third-person thinking at the neural level.”

- “When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything... See more