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The measure of my success as a leader is how minimal my intervention can be. I’m committed to stepping back and allowing others to make their own dec

"The best leaders are exothermic. Every atom jiggles faster around them. There is no chance for stasis.” -Tobi Lutke

Making systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack. A truly optimized, and th

The problem (or at least one of the problems) is that the twin edicts to simultaneously optimize your team and life and to be flexible in light of an

But you can’t optimize systems in a context that’s changing, especially if it’s changing in unpredictable ways. Removing inefficiencies when circumsta

Against Optimization

Instead of: there's something wrong with me as I am, and I hope my spiritual practice will fix it It helps to hold this conviction in your heart, how

Overthinking is always pointing at a deeper unmet need — the topic, as urgent as it feels, is just the form the need assumes when it can’t be felt. U

One of my favorite quotes in psychoanalysis, from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok: "What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the s

Neverrr neverrrr look desperate in life. Remain calm during hard times. Understand it’s just your time to suffer like every great man before you.

That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe

Traumatisation is most usually presented as anunassailable, concrete fact, and this is where I need to be respectful. If someone brings a firmconvicti

when the trauma label has been appliedby outside mores – when an event like an explosion, an assault or a sexual event has taken place andour culture

How Patagonia became Patagonia w/ Vincent Stanley

Tractors and Computers

What education does is provide a curated experience to help you learn. Done well, it sifts through the myriad resources, possible paths, and common e

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

I spent seven years building a kid/ed-tech product and one critical thing I learned about the industry is this... No matter what they signal, most pa

What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a t

My friends and I founded a university over the summer and...it's going great?! And it's been surprisingly painless to start and run?! It's a "networ

Galicia is a fantastic region in Spain.

Woolgather

The subscription model means content providers are paid regularly no matter the quality and quantity of the product. Makes sense – being paid on a reg

What tradition or practice from another culture or era do you think we should widely adopt?I wish patronage were widely adopted as an explicit social

Media and Machines.

10 key insights from Lenny Rachitsky on building a successful newsletter: 1. What do people ask you about that you don't have a great answer to? Vi

The Substackerati

Critical Atlas of Internet

Authenticity simply can’t survive this environment of constant performance – we become alienated from our own actions when every moment is filtered th

If the media is fragmented, how would you define the fragment that you are inhabiting yourself?It’s interesting. Last week we talked with Flynn McGarr

Could you give me some examples of — I don’t want to say AI-safe or AI-proof — but the types of journalism that are going to be the most robust in the

The Enclosure of the Human Psyche

Never Forgive Them

Casual Viewing

To Hell With Good Intentions

Never Forgive Them

Casual Viewing