Ideas I want to write about
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.
Via Negativa: The Process of Making Good Decisions By Eliminating Bad Ones
“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
Via Negativa: The Process of Making Good Decisions By Eliminating Bad Ones
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.
The 'Atomic' Secret of the World's Greatest Writers
To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Maybe introduce this idea of the mini-memoir
I find myself drawn to literature more now than in the past; not the individual works as much as the idea of literature—the heroic effort and nobility of our human desire to make beauty of our minds—which moves me to tears, and I have to brush them away, quickly, before anyone notices.
Ruth Ozeki • A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
If I had to guess, I think the general disappearance of good manners has something to do with how we’ve been conditioned to view each other: as things, not people. We see other people as things that can get us things. Maybe we have such little respect for one another because we have such little respect for ourselves. The commodification of the self... See more
All I know is what I have words for