drink from different fountains

Take the time to listen to smart people with whom you disagree.

This is not easy to do. Over time, any firm will find that certain methods and biases tend to work very well, and the more successful it is, the more it will develop its own unique mindset. We couldn’t succeed without the methods and principles that we learn over time, nor can we

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Return to first principles and act quickly on your new conclusions.

It’s very easy to take the world as it is, as opposed to envisioning it as you want it to be. For example, when re-designing a feature, one approach is to take what you have, and imagine small changes that will solve the problems with the feature. Instead, it’s often instructive

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Now, the fun part. If there’s one new thing you love, time to descend into the rabbit-hole. I recommend listening to the whole discography. Watching all the movies from the director. Making your way through the creator’s oeuvre. You will develop an irreproducible connection with the work. That’s when the magic “love” comes into play.

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the democratization of everything as the amateurization of everything.

But when I am served videos by someone who has been anointed with this stardom I don’t feel like I am inhabiting someone else’s taste but, rather, the taste of the algorithm.

We already have too much internet inside of us.

(I told someone recently that the specific joy of stalking someone else’s Spotify account has been lost as more and more playlists are generated by the platform. It’s the opposite of intimacy, isn’t it? To stalk an algorithm? Like climbing a tree to look into your crush’s window and realizing someone else got there first...please don’t do this.)

The tyranny of the contextualizer online is their constant and immovable presence between the reader and the text, the listener and the music, the viewer and the film. We now reach for context before engaging with the content. When my first interaction with a song is through TikTok reactions, I no longer encounter the work as it is, on my own. It... See more