questions are the guide to life
Each person’s mind is hungry for different things (different nutritious things, at least), and each person’s big question will be different.
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers Long Questions/Short Answers
Caro’s question is: How does political power really work in America?
Once he asks it, it takes the wheel. Caro is willing to go broke to answer it.
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers Long Questions/Short Answers
Take some time this weekend – better yet, play hooky, take a snow day or a sick day – and just think about the question you’d be happy spending a decade or six trying to answer. It’ll light up your world more than any answer could.
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers Long Questions/Short Answers
How to focus
Are you building a practice or a cathedral?
- Yancey Strickler
Virginia Woolf, writing in her diary in 1933, expressed essentially the same thing: “What an odd coincidence! that real life should provide precisely the situation I am writing about!”
Celine Nguyen • research as leisure activity - by Celine Nguyen research as leisure activity
"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the thi
... See moreJohn Gardner • Personal Renewal
A famous paragraph from John Gardner that was back to him in a rather heartbreaking way.
"A man wrote to me from Colorado saying that his 20 year-old daughter had been killed in an auto accident some weeks before and that she was carrying in her billfold a paragraph from a speech of mine. He said he was grateful because the paragraph -- and the fact that she kept it close to her -- told him something he might not otherwise have known about her values and concerns. I can't imagine where or how she came across the paragraph, but here it is:"
Research begins with a desire to ask and answer questions, thereby contributing to the greater sum of human knowledge and culture . Research often involves some hypothesis, question, or avenue of inquiry. Why is this plant a particular color? Why is this plant species a different color in different soil conditions or ecosystems? How is this color
... See moreCeline Nguyen • research as leisure activity - by Celine Nguyen research as leisure activity
Research requires commitment to evidence, broadly defined. In the sciences, this might involve running experiments and quantitatively analyzing the results; in the humanities, this might involve translating or transcribing primary sources and qualitatively interrogating them. (But this is oversimplifying things: the “sciences” and the “humanities”
... See moreCeline Nguyen • research as leisure activity - by Celine Nguyen research as leisure activity
Why did I want to join a startup to figure out if all the things I had learnt actually worked? I wanted evidence for my research. The only way to find the answer was to join a startup
One of the things it is to be a human being is to pursue a question so Big that you could pursue it for a Bryan Johnson Lifetime and never get your answer.