Curiosity
“Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”
Lots of people write about solutions to the problem that Note-writing practices are generally ineffective. The vast majority of that writing fixates on a myopic, “lifehacking”-type frame, focused on answering questions like: “how should I organize my notes?”, “what kind of... See more
Lots of people write about solutions to the problem that Note-writing practices are generally ineffective. The vast majority of that writing fixates on a myopic, “lifehacking”-type frame, focused on answering questions like: “how should I organize my notes?”, “what kind of... See more
Andy • §Note-writing systems
... See moreThe best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or
Side projects as the key to the good life By Marty Bell • 31 Jul 2025
When I was 13, I created a chat room for teenagers to talk about art and photography (the tagline was, if I remember, “The future of art but we don’t give a fuck”). I think that was the first self-made project I put out into the world, and it taught me one of the most important
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Learning is downstream of doing. The order should rarely be reversed. Most real knowledge, knowledge worth attaining, lives in the hands . It must be cultivated gradually, like a garden. Really, it must be grown. Most real knowledge is the result of doing something deliberately for a long time and steadily making small improvements. It requires a... See more
Do what you can't
This is why I like substack
> A year after college graduation, my friend Sebin introduced me to an exercise that changed how I thought about direction-finding. She handed me a piece of paper and asked me to mind-map everything I actually thought about during a typical week, not what I thought I should be thinking... See more
Nicklaus Transubstack.comMy favourite example of the dramatic difference between the IP perspective and what some now call the 'anti-representational' view of human functioning involves two different ways of explaining how a baseball player manages to catch a fly ball -- beautifully explicated by Michael McBeath, now at Arizona State University, and his colleagues in a... See more
Matter
The call of any creator is to keep making things, not to make any sense of what you create. Just dive down deep into the ocean of awareness and see how long you can hold your breath. What I know is that most days I wake up with an question in my mind, some thought that begs an answer, without the slightest clue where the urge originated. On a good... See more
What Is This?
Nobody knows how to start anything