Explore vs Exploit

“If you want to know yourself better you have to bring in something different from someplace else.”

this is an account of memory, not fact, and facts are not how we know ourselves, while memory—its tricks, its evasions, its silences, its inventions, its inevitable questions—is who we become

To be agentic, you have to really look at the problem and at the solution space and accept the responsibility of learning what is necessary to make the problem go away.

What do you call a void that sets something in motion? What do you call an eagerness that cannot be ignored? What do you call a search that never stops? I give it names. An urge, a hunger, a longing, a desire, a drive. I call it interest, thirst for knowledge, I think hunger for history and yen for the past, but none of these is quite right. It is

The creative process is also incredibly complex and opaque. Every successful creator has to cultivate their own information ecosystem, prototyping process, and methods for polishing their work. This takes years to learn, and every individual and team has to, to some extent, figure it out on their own.

“running a million small experiments trying to figure out the composition of this object that is [you]”—

people who are able to remain interesting design “their lives to avoid [mode collapse] happening to them.” He suggests they do this by writing a lot and exposing themselves to information that contradicts them or is novel to them: