SethG

Question your own expertise. “I don’t know” is a complete sentence.

The simple life hack is to lower your expectations, regardless of what you’re entitled to. Create the conditions for the outcome you seek, but leave yourself room if it doesn’t arrive.

Lowering expectations is a way to ensure that tomorrow is even better than you hope it will be.

An essential feature of every bottle is the neck. No neck, no bottle.

Confusing status with skill

The tenured philosophy professor at Princeton might not even be half as effective a teacher as the adjunct at the community college.

The head of surgery might be relatively better at meetings and politics than they are at actually helping patients.

Having a lot of social media followers doesn’t mean you’re really good at... See more

A manipulator doesn’t care if the story is true. They’ve succeeded by taking advantage of our goodwill, our assumption that things asserted to be true usually are. A manipulator brings us a story that creates emotion–and causes action that the recipient ends up regretting. Manipulation isn’t resilient, because sooner or later, we discover that the... See more

“Whining in the face of imperfection often ruins what you’ve already got.”

Whining is the evil cousin of complaining. Whining purports to exist to make things better, but it never does.

James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem said, “The best way to complain is to make things.”

And perhaps we can extend that to: “The best way to complain is to make things... See more

Your job might not be to do your job. Your job might be to make the decisions and commitments needed to lead other people who do your (former) job.

An argument, though, is an exchange of ideas that ought to surface insight and lead to a conclusion.

Uncomfortable ideas

The ideas aren’t uncomfortable, we are.

You don’t have to like the weather to acknowledge that it’s raining.