If you know something’s going to work, it’s not worth working on. It requires no courage. It requires no faith. It requires no skin in the game. Whether you’re a spy or a teacher or a spouse or a painter or an abuela or an astronaut or a monk or a barista or a board-game designer, the bits that matter are the bits you make matter by putting yoursel

I told myself this wasn’t the right time, knowing full well that those who tell themselves that particular lie so often discover that the right time never comes.

Mindanao wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t even a Secret. It was a SECRET.

But hegemony slips away from those who rest easy. As soon as you take something for granted, fate revokes the grant. The US drained its coffers on useless wars and bitter infighting, failing to tackle problems of sufficient ambition to lead the world, instead of merely ruling it—not unlike the progeny of a wealthy family blowing their inheritance o

If you have friends who work in intelligence, do not throw them surprise birthday parties. One of two things will happen. Either they’ll discover your plans and ruin the effect, or you’ll take them by surprise and leave their nerves jangling for the next eighteen months.

“People who manage people live on calendar time,” said Jerry. “People who solve problems live outside time, at least temporarily. When people who manage people who solve problems forget that interruption is sabotage, things fall apart.”

The moral of Damocles’s story is to beware envying the lives of the powerful, for a life of power is a life lived in terror.

Don’t even try to object. I refuse to believe that anyone with such generic taste would make it this far in this particular narrative. Almost everyone has never heard of this story. Of the few that have, yet fewer chose to embark on the journey. And then there are those odd ducks who kept going and then kept going some more until they arrived at th

which Saudi prince likes to attend BDSM parties in Berlin,