provocations

One of the biggest reasons it gets harder to do new things as you get older is that new things are generally undignified at first (indeed, this is an excellent heuristic for discovering them) and the older you get, the more dignified you're expected to be.

if you’re so intelligent why isn’t your life more cozy?

Journaling is a terrible solution to negative feelings I never understood why people recommend this. Writing is thinking. The more you write the more you ruminate and the unhappier you become. Writing is the last thing you should be doing when you’re feeling down:

it matters whom we put on the stages of our world, whom we adore. Our collective love has been wildly misappropriated, particularly in Silicon Valley, but also all over the place.

In my experience, inspiration is not something that finds you, or offers itself to you, nor for that matter is faith. Inspiration and faith are similar in so far as they both ask something of us. They each require real and constant practical application. For me, inspiration comes only when I practice certain things regularly and rigorously. I must ... See more

As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks,

I could do better than that.

Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than "laziness" is the real reason you find it hard to get started

An underrated way to succeed at anything is simply to be ten times better. Everyone wants to have a unique idea or be a monopoly but you can just be ten times better instead. In a lot of areas, no one is really trying. The world is coated with a film of inertia.