On Really Trying

The truth is that what determines your success is, in large part, how much you believe you can succeed, so for the purposes of our conversation, let's ask what comes first and is most important in achievement: the achievement of a goal or the belief that the goal can be achieved or believing you deserve to achieve the goal or committing to the goal

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Motivation is at least as important as method for the serious thinker, Shockley believed...the essential element for successful work in any field was “the will to think”. This was a phrase he learned from the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi and never forgot. “In these four words,” Shockley wrote later, “[Fermi] distilled the essence of a very signif... See more

July 2023

If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.

Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise sh... See more

We can imagine almost anything, but only a tiny fraction of what we imagine can become real. There is no easy way to verify how much change is possible. Hard-nosed realists may be right much of the time, but then, periodically, they become dramatically wrong. Wild-eyed visionaries may be wrong much of the time, but occasionally they become dramatic

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