Insights

If you can understand this my dear friends, the understanding will melt the addiction. And you will be free and you will understand the loveliness of what prayer is. Then you will discover what reality is, what god is, because you will have dropped one of our biggest illusions: the illusion that we need to be appreciated, to be popular, to succeed,

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I distinctly remember at Microsoft in the late 90s, walking around campus and there was just all the folks sort of saying, God, we must be God's gifts to mankind because we are so good now that the market also recognizes it, except that it was obviously the beginning of the end in some sense, right? The day hubris takes over and you're not grounded... See more

Must is who we are, what we believe, and what we do when we are alone with our truest, most authentic self. It’s our instincts, our cravings and longings, the things and places and ideas we burn for, the intuition that swells up from somewhere deep inside of us. Must is what happens when we stop conforming to other people’s ideals and start... See more

Elon Musk is building SpaceX because he can’t buy a trip to Mars. You can have all the money in the world, but you can’t buy a trip to Mars. One hundred years ago, the richest man in the world couldn’t buy an iPhone. That’s the kind of progress I care about.

“Give up trying to create something sophisticated,” I told myself. “Why not forget all those prescriptive ideas about ‘the novel’ and ‘literature’ and set down your feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you like?”

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious... See more

“You can either be judged because you created something or ignored because you left your greatness inside of you.”

It's an intimidating prospect to enter a field where a few big winners outperform everyone else. Some people do this deliberately, but you don't need to. If you have sufficient natural ability and you follow your curiosity sufficiently far, you'll end up in one. Your curiosity won't let you be interested in boring questions, and interesting... See more