Everything Is Connected

Embracing the risk of losing everything means learning that our self-worth and identity are not solely tied to the success or failure of our ventures.

People don’t exist independently of a place. Places bring out who we are.

When I think of you, I think of community. You’re so devoted to uplifting the voices of others. Can you talk about this impulse in yourself?

What I'm devoted to is the idea that a brain is really the result of its connections to other brains. A life is really the result of its connection to other lives. So we’re the sum of our connections. Those co... See more

The “problem” with expanding the web of connected things is that “right” answers become few and far between. Instead of a “next step,” you see more questions. Instead of the confidence of an “action plan,” you feel the gentle anxiety of ambiguity.

Danny Meyer the restaurateur has called ABCD: “always be collecting dots, so that you can always be connecting dots.” Dots or breadcrumbs, if your whole life is oriented around that collection, which mine is, then you're always preparing.

You are interconnected to everyone, because the world doesn’t work without everyone.” You may think that you’re alone, but you’re never actually alone. This was really important because at a very young age that made me understand the importance of collectivity, and that we can’t do anything alone that’s worth it. Everything worthwhile is done with ... See more

Complexity basically means that everything is circuitous and hard to understand. Hard to understand means that the things that lead to the things you want aren't the things you want. They're very complex. So you need to do things like work on vacuum tubes to get to computers because vacuum tubes are in the first computers, even though vacuum tubes ... See more

It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.