Everything Is Connected

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... 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.

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.