purpose
Kurt Vonnegut on picking a lane:
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way—although I would not be sorry if you wrote one,... See more
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way—although I would not be sorry if you wrote one,... See more
Buttondown • Tweet
In the short term a 1-of-1 purpose will almost always fail. Every day is yet another moment that people didn’t follow your vision and the world failed to transform according to your ideas. The failures are literally limitless.
With a longer view, however, this process looks different. Eighty straight days of struggling in the darkness can produce... See more
With a longer view, however, this process looks different. Eighty straight days of struggling in the darkness can produce... See more
Yancey Strickler • When Your Purpose Is 1-of-1
The Most Important Piece of Career Advice You Probably Never Heard - Cal Newport
Cal Newportcalnewport.com
One of my (many) contrarian beliefs is that we do not have strong enough preferences. We often blame social media or the speed of information as the reason why we’re easily distracted, but the real reason behind our inability to focus has less to do with the sheer quantity of media and more to do with our laziness when it comes to distinguishing... See more

“Every journey is a question of sorts, and the best journeys are the ones in which every question opens into deeper and more searching questions.”
— Pico Iyer, The Pilgrim’s Way on Waking Up
Expected elation. Society has built a world that defines what's appealing and what's not. What success should look like. I spent years chasing this idea, and achieved it. And never felt truly happy. Why? It seems so obvious, there are a million songs and movies about how wealth and fame aren't the end all be all for human states. Yet we pursue it... See more
Why should the universe have a purpose? The question of the purpose of the universe is an invention of human minds, and has no significance, except for the way that it illuminates the psychology of scholarly pursuit and of the pursuing scholars themselves. We should not impose human-inspired attitudes and questions on material things. There is a
... See more