People continue to undervalue and underestimate hyperlinks. This might not seem immediately relevant but it’s a magic technology that our predecessors would’ve done anything to have

People underestimate compounding and long games. When people think “that’s not possible”, “you can’t do that”, “that won’t work”, it’s often because they’re imagining something like 5 years, 10 years. Things get very different when you have 50 year plans

People continue to undervalue and underestimate hyperlinks. This might not seem immediately relevant but it’s a magic technology that our predecessors would’ve done anything to have

Real social media has not been tried. Social media creates tremendous network-building opportunities that hardly anybody realizes, and hardly anybody is doing anything about. People’s intuitions are still calibrated for old media. (why I tweet like a maniac, thread)

Nobody has any idea what 50 years of compounded friendly-ambitious-nerd switchboarding + modern media tools can look like. It's never been done. Montaigne and Emerson were better FANs than I'll ever be, but they didn't have Twitter. I see it as my duty to uphold their tradition.

IMO you have to be willing to earn people's attention slowly over 10+ years so that the people who choose to work with you deeply know your values and are serious and so on. I'm not in a mad rush here. In fact I gently reject anybody who's too excited because I’ve consistently found, over and over again, that overexcited people burn out.

Ambitious: I’m not talking about prestige-seeking (awards, accolades) but about wanting to embody one’s values at the highest possible level, whatever that means for the person. Gives a shit. Wants to keep giving a shit, and to and to continually give more of a shit over an extended period of time, perhaps an entire lifetime. There are a couple of ... See more

So this is what we start with. Become a loving and curious person. Seek out other people who are like this. Introduce the best of such people to each other.

A friend’s father said of a very successful decades-long intentional community: make it really hard for people to join, and make it really easy for people to leave. A lot of grifty bullshit and cults-gone-bad do the opposite: they make it easy to join, and hard to leave. Be mindful of this.