How To Enjoy The Process

What I call temporal curiosity is the practice of actively directing our curiosity across time – past, present, future – to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, others, and the world around us.

Past curiosity. Directing our curiosity towards the past can help us understand our origins and learn from history. By exploring past experiences from y... See more

Anne-Laure Le Cunff • Temporal Curiosity: Exploring the Past, Present, and Future

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Getting curious is being human

Collab Fund • Lucky vs. Repeatable

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“It’s the everlasting switching that’s the dangerous thing, not what they choose — while others actually build a life in which things gain meaning and significance, this is not true for the restless.” writes Sheila Heti in How should a person be. She continues with “The antidote — to build on things they have begun and not abandon their plans as so... See more

Emily Kuret • The Case for Intellectual Loneliness

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“A tiny acorn grows into a magnificent oak tree, and it never goes: ‘I have to improve myself.’”

Discover, not improve

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How are you reading this email right now?

There’s likely a more pleasurable way to experience it. Perhaps it’s being less rushed, or noticing the sensations in your body and feeling how each word lands in your system.

Transformation from the gut is all about our capacity to enjoy pleasure.

When I say pleasure, I don’t mean getting a massage or doing y

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Set aside time for experiments . Straightforward calculus suggests that doing what you’re already good at has the best payoff. But you won’t encounter nearly as many opportunities if you never learn anything new. Setting aside time for hobbies you’re bad at, books you know nothing about or skills you’ve never practiced may seem wasteful, but it’s

Scott H Young • Why Do People (Usually) Learn Less as They Get Older? - Scott H Young

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To keep progressing means to keep learning and experimenting

s you invest in some skills, but not others, you get a greater return from activities where you have considerable training. Thus, your opportunity cost for learning new things increases. Therefore, a failure to learn new things is perfectly rational, even if it can result in inflexibility as we get older.

One way this manifests is the time horizon y... See more

Scott H Young • Why Do People (Usually) Learn Less as They Get Older? - Scott H Young

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Learning isn’t linear. How do you continue to enjoy the process as you get older?

nostalgia is the enemy of progress

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Once you choose a project, you are confined to a relatively narrow band of impact (

Figure 1

B); barring an unexpected surprise, the solution to a mediocre problem will have incremental impact, whereas solving an important problem will have greater impact. Even if you execute well, it is hard to make the solution to a middling problem interesting. In... See more

Problem choice and decision trees in science and engineering: Cell

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