"Twitter’s basic structure is about speaking, not listening — the platform’s formal innovation was that it made replies first-class citizens, equal to posts. Social gave everyone a voice, but it blocked our ear canals. The more complex or painful or shocking an event, the more it behooves us to “listen first, speak last.” But we don’t. There’s... See more
Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.
That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it;... See more