Ideas I want to write about

“The essence of oligarchical rule,” George Orwell wrote in 1984 , “is the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.”

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents,” he wrote; mass movements “can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil.” America was Khamenei’s devil.

I think there should be more art in the world. I think there should be more art in corporations. I think artists in residence have proven to be powerful within corporations. I think artists should be more comfortable in their role. And again, what they’re doing is often useless and that’s hard to justify in a corporation. But we know that actually... See more

If you want to understand a society, don’t listen to what they say about themselves. Look at what they make. So, who are we then? Obsessed with scale, productivity, and the bottom line with little regard for the soul of what’s being made or the souls that’ll be shaped by it. Don’t get me... See more

Most business plans are made, how-to books are written, and policies are designed by charlatans pretending to be experts. The learning of life is more about what to avoid. For e.g., avoiding cigarettes, junk food, toxic relationships, slow friends, overconfident confidants.

“I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognisable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

The world is built by those who can think, but it is ran by those who can articulate.

the best storytellers understand that an essential part of their craft is knowing how to pack maximal meaning into minimal words.