Brian Sholis
@briansholis
Brian Sholis
* "Sometimes, to be a resident of polite society, you have to lie, and this feels unpleasant for a moment but is usually bearable. But lying to an empty page alone in a room feels awful."
Sasha Chapin • If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying
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
Derek Thompson • Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life
- "The aggregate carbon footprint of Shopify’s fragmented conglomerate of small internet businesses on the other hand, is massive. Each product line houses an inefficient, dysfunctional (mini) supply chain, involving extra transport steps, re-boxing and temporary warehousing, drastically increasing CO2 emissions (and baseline cost) when compared to... See more
Hugh Francis • ✨ Expansive Brands • garden3d research
friendship and
2019 profile of Wendell Berry by Amanda Petrusich.
Archive-friendly link: https://archive.is/wMaf1
WB: “The thing that worries me very much is how much language we’re using now that is so abstract as to require no thought at all. I mean very important words. Justice, for instance. I had a list, I think, of eleven kinds of justice. Restorative justice, climate justice, economic justice, social justice, and so on. The historian John Lukacs, whose work I greatly respect, said that “the indiscriminate pursuit of justice . . . may lay the world to waste.” And he invoked modern war, which kills indiscriminately for the sake of some “justice.” He thought the pursuit of truth, small “t,” much safer. I want to remember—and this comes to me from my dad, to some extent—that our system of justice requires a finding of truth, and it labors to see that justice is never done by one person.”
WB: “Once you accept that something or somebody is exploitable, there’s another limitlessness. Exploitation leads, with perfect logic, to exhaustion. And our ways of land use exploit both land and people.”
WB: “You must either decide this is worth working at, or just leave it undone. Marriage is not perfect agreement. But you’ve accepted this other person into your mind. I work alone, but always with her presence in my mind. And she is somebody I want to impress. I’m going to write this with the hope that it’ll help her to love me. I feel the stakes are pretty high. I’m in a conversation with her that hasn’t ended yet.”
WB; “Our dominant practice now is to solve problems with other problems.”
WB: “You can’t think about the issues we’re talking about without finally having to talk about mystery. You’ll finally have to talk about the commitment that doesn’t see any end. That’s a life that you are not going to be able to prescribe, that finally you’re not in charge of.”
* “The most powerful new group of publishing brands will be built around people, focused on direct connections and not pageviews, and increasingly community driven.”
The Rebooting • Slow growth
- "if there is some kind of systematic, structural feature that encourages the same kind of review drift across a whole reviewing community, then we create a clearer system for companies to target. And this can happen when a whole body of reviews gets filtered through a particular portal — like Instagram or YouTube — which homogenizes the patterns... See more
C. Thi Nguyen • Review Drift
- "The layers of the night are in fact the layers of the self; they offer the most random unfolding of the accumulations of experience—everything that happened and mattered and lapsed away as the next new thing claimed the attention. There is no way to guess what will suddenly surface in those hours. At times I need only to call to mind a specific... See more
Lapham's Quarterly • Strange Days | Sven Birkerts
On the "myths" about IRL versus remote work. "By constantly comparing remote work to an office straw man, we’re not engaging seriously with the challenges of remote work."