the shift
When you are 26 years old, it common to spend a lot of time pursuing what you want without spending much time considering why you want it. When I was 26, I wanted to be a successful YA novelist. I wanted it more than I wanted a long life, or happiness, or a family...
John Greenx.comWe invented fire, repeatedly messed up, and then invented the fire extinguisher, fire exit, fire alarm and fire department
Max Tegmark • Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence [Paperback] Tegmark,
As my work-driven identity dissolved, I felt a burning ambition across all facets of life. Instead of a desire to achieve goals that society told me were valuable, I felt a hunger to discover what makes me feel fully alive. Instead of a commitment to “winning” other people’s games, I felt a commitment to design a life that I deeply enjoy... See more
Sam Sager • Work, Ambition, and Identity
July 2023
If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.
Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise... See more
If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.
Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise... See more
Paul Graham • How to Do Great Work
Total efficiency constrains us. We become super invested in maintaining the status quo because that is where we excel. Innovation is a threat. Change is terrifying. Being perfect at something is dangerous if it’s the only thing you can do.
Shane Parrish • Getting Ahead By Being Inefficient
Very often, we’re not consciously aware of why we want what we want. Conducting a “root cause analysis” is a useful way to discover the motivations behind our desires. The Five-Fold Why is a technique to help you discover what you actually want. Instead of taking your desires at face value, examining the root cause of what you want can help you
... See moreJosh Kaufman • The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume
When your goal is to be the most efficient machine possible, your work never ends. We never reach the point of being done, no matter how many daily widgets you churn out. Productivity, without barriers, is a race to the bottom, a race where no matter how fast we go -- we never truly arrive.
Steven Lawson • inc.com
the perpetual quest for efficiency is a machine’s role; to pursue efficiency at all cost is to become a machine.
Intellectual property rights are sometimes hailed as the mother of creativity and invention. However, Marshall Brain points out that many of the finest examples of human creativity—from scientific discoveries to creation of literature, art, music and design—were motivated not by a desire for profit but by other human emotions, such as curiosity,
... See more