find your people

Working with talented and open-minded collaborators, if you have the chance, can be a way to enter the zone. Nick Cave, when asked how he’s been able to reinvent himself so many times as a musician, says that his bandmates, especially Warren Ellis, simply will not play anything that sounds like what he’s done before. He has surrounded himself with

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 o

We all live one-of-a-kind lives with a unique set of experiences, and therefore the way we interact with the world is always somewhat different. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a vast amount of overlap, and I think it is exactly this dichotomy that makes life so wonderful. When we expose more of the web (the connections, associations, and representat

Deliberately exposing the connections and associations can act as a catalyst for this ‘new kind of power’. And when we look back to answer the question, ‘how does one become who one is?’, we can be liberated from the limitations of isolated representations. Let the in-betweens, associations, and the whole web of complexity and connections do the ta

Try to be around smart, productive, happy, and positive people that don’t belittle your ambitions. I love being around people who push me and inspire me to be better. To the degree you able to, avoid the opposite kind of people—the cost of letting them take up your mental cycles is horrific.