Seashells
Open-minded people can take in the thoughts of others without losing their ability to think well—they can hold two or more conflicting concepts in their mind and go back and forth between them to assess their relative merits.
Ray Dalio • Principles: Life and Work
Mozart wrote over 200 hours of recorded music and never edited his work once (Don Giovanni’s overture was written the night before it was to be performed, he handed it to the copyists while hungover before 7am). Sometimes the less you edit the better. Trust your instincts. Inspiration comes fast, so if you’re taking too long to write something,... See more
Sherryx.com
Cringe tolerance: The crucial ability for creators to overcome embarrassment and release imperfect work to achieve success.
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Cringe tolerance describes the psychological capacity to act, despite the certainty that others will judge your work as amateurish, naive, or embarrassing. It's the ability to post your first YouTube video knowing it will be awkward, to launch your website despite its obvious design flaws, to share your writing before it reaches professional
... See more.@naval: First of all, I don't think of myself. I just want to be clear on that. And that's not a rule. It's just a habit I've kind of developed because I found that thinking about yourself is a source of all unhappiness and misery.
Self obsession is the root of all unhappiness.
What did... See more
Arjun Khemanix.comWhen you wait, you lose momentum. And momentum is incredibly powerful because when you’re inspired, you act—and you do it with enthusiasm.
Erifili Gounari • literally just do things
introspection is overrated. That’s in part because what’s going on in your mind is not only more complicated than you understand, it is more complicated than you can understand. Your mind hides most of your thinking so you can get on with life. Furthermore, you’re too close to yourself. You can’t see the models you use to perceive the world because
... See moreDavid Brooks • How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.