curiosity

What solitude gives you is an opportunity to study what personal curiosity feels like in its undiluted form, free from the interference of other considerations. Being familiar with the character of this feeling makes it easier to recognize if you are reacting to the potential in the work you are doing in a genuinely personal way, or if you are givi

Even if you know what it feels like to be completely open to where your curiosity wants you to go, like Grothendieck, it is a fragile state. It often takes considerable work to keep the creative state from collapsing, especially as your work becomes successful and the social expectations mount. When I listen to interviews with creative people or re

But in a complex world, it’s impossible to know what might be useful in the future. It’s important, therefore, to spread our cognitive bets. Curious people take risks,

Imagination – that ‘ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise’ – needs diversity to feed it.

Not just reading more, but whom I read and how I read. Including authors in reading lists can be a mere “[indication] of engagement, but as such that ‘engagement’ can be a very superficial one, one which acknowledges the existence of a body of work through name-checking, but which fails to attend to, disseminate, reinforce, or critique the detail o

Cayce Pollard as the positive archetype for how to navigate volatility. So by intensely tuning oneself in to subjective responses to things, you can cut through huge amounts of noise and volatility. Even though I couldn’t admit that that’s what I was doing in a lot of trend forecasting settings, that is really what my experience of it was. People w

it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one’s own unique perspective. It doesn’t matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneously discovering and creating “yourself,”