Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to

varda reveals the importance of three things in this journey: inspiration (the motivations, ideas, circumstances and happenstance that ignite the desire to create), creation (the means, structure, details, and the work), and sharing (perhaps the purpose of creation).

There are two modes of experience: appreciative, and evaluative.
Concrete example: let's say you're listening to a piece of music. Are you sinking into it, awash in emotions? You're in the appreciative mode.

Are you the mixing engineer, listening to the snare hits to make sure they're consistent? You're in the evaluative mode.

Much of sanity, and

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A large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how... See more

The future won’t be built merely by those who move fastest, but by those who remember how to stand still. Until we recover the courage to receive what we cannot produce, we will mistake velocity for vision. And we’ll keep accelerating—not toward the good, but simply away from the ground.

But this isn’t really about the software. It’s about what software promises us—that it will help us become who we want to be, living the lives we find most meaningful and fulfilling. The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and

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In the end, the only thing that matters is the quality and care of work you put out into the world

dialing up my agency, which I think of as something like “manifest determination to make things happen.”

i am renouncing useless guilt, and refraining from making a cult of suffering. i am living in the now (or at least the soon), doing what i fear, trusting joy, and believing i will figure it out. i am taking the time to learn about what brings me joy, not just relief, what feels nourishing, not just numbing.