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

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Intelligence is a form of friendship with the world. It can’t be cultivated out of fear of 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

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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

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Learning and humility are kissing cousins. Humility is a celebration of the awareness that you are a part of something much greater than yourself. Holding this form of humility as a present sensibility calibrates an engagement with the world as interconnected. Through humility, we see ourselves in relationship to other forces. An ecology of

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Knowledge responds to the gravitational pull of questions: new questions, and new questions about old questions.