real wisdom is usually not frictionless. It’s hard to seek out, hard to understand, and something that reveals itself in time. However, if you do have a habit of getting cozy with this type of content, you’re not alone. Three things that will change your life, though:

1. Wrestle with ideas before saving them for later


2. If an idea is truly indispensable,

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My countervailing advice to people trying to understand something is: go slow. Read slowly, think slowly, really spend time pondering the thing. Start by thinking about the question yourself before reading a bunch of stuff about it. A week or a month of continuous pondering about a question will get you surprisingly far.

literature and philosophy—two disciplines that are, I believe, less about finding answers and more about asking better questions. And the questions I ask often take me down very narrow paths. Less main road, more rabbit hole. The deeper I dig, the stranger (and more interesting) the findings become.

But this kind of research isn’t something I always... See more