Building

Tolstoy on shortening the distance between where you are and where you want to go:

“A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.’”

Nan offered a distinction: there are two kinds of speed. The first is how quickly someone gets good, the pace at which they build fluency through repetition and feedback. And then there’s the speed they earn once that fluency is established—the efficiency and ease that comes after mastery. Think of it as the difference between learning to cook, and... See more

“Your garden is not complete until there is nothing else you can take out of it.”

Software startups face the same dilemma. Basecamp’s founders famously turned down VC money and capped headcount. They wanted to stay small on purpose. Not to signal humility, to preserve sovereignty. They understood that the minute you optimize for scale, you subordinate every other variable to it. Product quality, user intimacy, personal time - th... See more

Constraints operate on the second level - they shape how you move through the world over years and decades. Not by pointing to a specific outcome, but by removing paths that would corrupt, dilute, or distract you

Because goals are often surrogates for clarity. We set goals when we’re uncertain about what we really want. The goal becomes a placeholder. It acts as a proxy for direction, not a result of it.

Richard Feynman didn’t get his Nobel Prize by pursuing "win a Nobel Prize" as a goal. He played with problems, often placing arbitrary limits on himself: what if we assume this system has no dissipation? What if we ignore spin? He looked for elegance within boundaries, not outcomes. His freedom came from self-imposed structure.

Constraints do not bl... See more

The goal hadn’t been wrong. It had just been handed to me, implicitly, by a world that measures progress in forward motion and not in depth.

That was the moment I began to question the entire architecture of ambition. Not whether it worked, but whether it asked the right things of a person. Whether a life could be constructed from milestones rather ... See more

Rick Ruben on how to create anything great:

“If you need 10 of something, make 30. Then pick the best.”