You have the exacting and constant task of protecting ideas while also being honest and sometimes challenging about their development. You are not executing on a vision but balancing how to be rigorous without being controlling, and how to be encouraging without interfering. Your work is essential and indirect.

is so important to hold that space of conversation is in order to protect the exploration of new ideas on the way to an as-yet-unknown point B.

how to construct a life of originality and meaning within the real constraints of the market economy.

one of the kindest compliments you can pay to someone who is engaged in the deep middle of a creative project is, “You’re not crazy. Carry on.” And then you can try assigning roles and process goals and building an architecture to help them.

take. She was in the weeds.

if you can compliment other people and have them compliment you sincerely, that elevates everyone, and is also far easier to do than complimenting yourself.

because the colleague-friendship has dimensions of performance requirement that regular friendships don’t, you may disagree. Being able to have a difficult conversation without emotional undertow is a hallmark of a colleague-friend. That requires a high degree of trust, which means, facile as it sounds, that the truest route to colleague-friendship

Leonardo wrote, “If you stay doggedly at the work you will deceive yourself.”

in navigating that space, you have the lighthouse of knowing and revisiting the question that guides you—and the artistic permission to ask a big enough question that you don’t know whether you might fail. The next tool is figuring out how to manage the risk of the question by applying investment thinking to your lighthouse, placing your question