Brian
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Brian
“The best thing you can do is whatever nobody else is doing. And the way to find that is to notice what about yourself is weird.”
Justin Gary • Derek Sivers — Embracing Simplicity, Owning Your Weirdness, and Designing a Life with Intent (#86)
World as machine : In keeping with theme of this newsletter, we’re adopting a mechanistic, engineering perspective. We’re trying to do our reading with an eye to reverse engineering how the world works (and how it came to work that way) in a machinic rather than humanist idiom. So we deliberately go looking for machine metaphors, decenterings of th... See more
The Modernity Machine II
“Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The... See more
The Interesting Times: How to Do What You Love
I think I mostly agree except that sometimes you sort of don’t enjoy doing things early on because they’re new and hard. It’s easy to enjoy doing stuff that can seem like “producing” (e.g., endlessly doing research or studying) but not actually being productive. Many true forms of creative production are Type 2 fun, which is not necessarily enjoyable in the moment.
But look a little bit more closely. Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and all the other many groups have something in common: they all operate out of places with exceptionally weak and fragile states (and, if you want to get all lib about it, fractured and hopeless societies). How could it be otherwise? Governments don’t like a bunch of other wannabe gov... See more
REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr
I guess this is because we love the American Revolution founding story of being rebels still…
What 5-Minute Action Could Shortcut You to What You Really Want?
Most people take the long way around. They imagine multi-year plans to finally do the thing they care about. Derek challenges that mindset with a simple question: what’s the five-minute action that could start you down the shortcut path?
Most people take the long way around. They imagine multi-year plans to finally do the thing they care about. Derek challenges that mindset with a simple question: what’s the five-minute action that could start you down the shortcut path?
Derek Sivers — Embracing Simplicity, Owning Your Weirdness, and Designing a Life with Intent (#86)
Derek also offered a framing I loved: instead of asking “Is this idea true?”, ask “What action does this idea create?” If a belief drains your energy or keeps you stuck, toss it. If it moves you toward growth, connection, or creative output, follow it.
Derek Sivers — Embracing Simplicity, Owning Your Weirdness, and Designing a Life with Intent (#86)
Make Your Brain a More Fun Place to Be: One of my favorite takeaways from this conversation with Derek is how he treats thinking like play. When he hears a belief like: “you have to go to college to succeed,” he doesn’t accept it at face value. He flips it. Asking: what if the opposite were true?
Derek Sivers — Embracing Simplicity, Owning Your Weirdness, and Designing a Life with Intent (#86)
Art Doesn’t End at the Edge of the Canvas: Derek shares one of the most powerful lessons of his career: the art isn’t just the song, the book, or the game: it’s how you present it to the world. When helping a friend promote a concept album, he didn’t just send a CD to radio stations; he hand-crafted a bizarre, dirt-rubbed package from a fake conspi... See more