loving the process

So much of getting good at anything is just pure labor: figuring out how to try and then offering up the hours...

...Pleople always assume I'm interested in the end result-the wonderful thing they've made-when what I'm really interested in is the process. How did you get this way and why? I'm curious about the ugliness of trying, the years and years... See more

I can chart the exact moments of inflection where I was being pushed to rise to a new level of worth and, instead, took what was on offer. Said yes when it didn’t feel right. Gave something valuable away because I didn’t even know it was valuable. Took whatever was offered to me instead of saying no, and demanding options. Being so impatient to... See more

He offers a thought experiment: what if the brief to design a new train connection was given to Disney instead of railway engineers? The latter immediately focuses on speed, time, distance and capacity. With Disney, the goal wouldn’t be to shave minutes off the journey. They may ask a different question: “How do we make the train journey so... See more

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

David Foster Wallace,

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The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more

The reality is that you will build many worlds throughout your lifetime. Look how many you have built already, only to walk away from them, or have them dismantled, or watch them collapse without your permission. You will play many roles, you will be many people, you will try on a lot of costumes, you will exert an enormous amount of energy to put

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Only that nothing works out the way you plan, which is a blessing every hour. Life always takes a different form, if only because life will always be more imaginative — deeper, wiser, more surprising — than you are.