Brian Thomas Clark

3. Maintain a standard

Jalen yelled at me a few times for not getting my eyes on coach Jay Wright. We used to have this thing at Villanova: When the coach was talking, we would yell “eyes” so everybody would quiet down and look at him.

I was a freshman, so I didn’t really understand how important it was. Jalen really got on me one time. “Eyes, eyes,... See more

Online discourse has debased and trivialized the concept of obsession.

People love to post about how they’re “obsessed” with a pair of jeans, or with Flossie the world’s oldest cat (respect), or with something else they will forget exists within minutes of posting about it. They love to pretend they “can’t stop thinking about” Bolivian neo-Andean... See more

If you’re trying to lead real change, the most important question is not “How do we drive adoption?” It is “How will this system try to stay itself?” Where will it perform agreement while preserving the old rules? Where will it translate the change into something harmless? What will it protect, and who will it protect?

Progress is not when people... See more

Your extreme local, embodied community is your only truly real one. Think of it this way: Whose bodies are closest to yours when you’re sleeping at night? Those are the ones who can keep you safe. You have to know these people, care about these people, or even just recognize these people.

When we know each other, our relationships transcend whatever... See more

Real influence is closer to craft than performance. It’s about understanding the system you’re working in—its incentives, fears, histories, and fault lines—and moving through it with eyes open. It’s knowing when to push, when to wait, and when to shut up. Done right, influence is how you avoid brute force. It’s how you make change stick without... See more

Technical debt is the pollution of the digital world, invisible until it chokes the systems that depend on it. In an era of mass automation, we may find that the hardest problem is not production, but stewardship. Who maintains the software that no one owns?

The question of our time is how do you artistically rebel — and win — against a totally flat cultural landscape? And before my readers, who I assume are all approximately 36 years old and very tired, say, “so what, who cares?” This does matter. I mean, just look around right now lol. You know things are bad when even OpenAI President Greg Brockman... See more

5. Middle age is really the time, I think, that the tamped-down parts of yourself, anything you’ve ignored, any dreams you left behind, come first trickling then bursting back up out of the place you’ve put them in, and the foundation of the structure you’ve build to survive in the world and get to this point starts to get washed away. It happens... See more

The internet has fundamentally altered the conditions under which genuine self-expression can exist. The solution isn’t to perform authenticity harder, but to recognise and jealously guard the remaining places where real authenticity might still be possible: in unrecorded conversations, in private moments, in closed networks that haven’t yet been... See more