loving the process

I think there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest. And I don’t think we’re going to differentiate between those things. Because... See more

The only things I allow myself to feel regret about are past food, clothing, and hair choices. Everything else, I think of as part of my path, my journey. All the steps we’ve taken have led us to where we are. For some reason, in this culture, we always want to win, be right, comfortable, and happy. There is, however, tremendous value in losing, in... See more

Writer Hanif Abdurraqib has said: “Find a living, breathing lineage to make yourself responsible to.” I love this encouragement to locate ourselves within an artistic, spiritual or cultural tradition and build loving, accountable connections with our compatriots.

We all love the training montage in movies—those brisk two-minute sequences where the protagonist transforms from novice to expert while upbeat music plays. One minute they're struggling to do a single push-up; the next, they're ready for the championship fight.

Real life doesn't work like that. The actual training—the part where you build the... See more

So I got my ass back into therapy. It was a slow, humiliating, expensive process, as the acquisition of self-awareness tends to be. All these heartbroken fascist wannabes are running around, yelling about how being “woke” is like some form of chemical castration. All it means is that you are becoming less of an asshole. That’s what therapy did for... See more

Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, said the main motivation of his life was, “To be a good ancestor.”

Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn't matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious. Work as hard as you can without burning out, and this will eventually bring you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. These look smooth from a distance,... See more