To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing, red-hot iron; it burns into you and that is very painful.
Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it... See more
romantic relationships are one of the toughest things to figure out as a human:
- u get very few of them to "practice" with. most people will not have more than 4 serious relationships before marriage.
- there's massive qualitative differences at later levels of time spent and greater investment. having... See more
I just finished Victor Shlovsky’s “Art as Technique” (1917)—which I’ve seen referenced a lot but never read!—and I love his beautiful description of what poetic language does. Whereas practical language is meant to communicate as efficiently and cleanly as possible, poetic language is actually meant to slow us down—to force us out of our usual... See more
Start your next project with a giant scroll of paper
I learned this from my friend Rob Kalin, founder of Etsy. When he starts a project, he gets out a giant piece of butcher paper — like three feet by sixty feet.
When you start the project, you put your first ideas down in the top-left... See more
americans treat optionality like a virtue when it’s actually a pathology. ppl optimize for keeping doors open indefinitely, never committing, never locking in, because they conflate flexibility with freedom. but optionality is not freedom, it’s just deferred responsibility.
eventually, optionality maximization leads to... See more
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”