the start of an idea

If you touch an idea too much without actually making it, just like a dough or plaster, it dies. I think it’s better to make and bake it and throw it away than to imagine how it would have worked or tasted. —Zeynab Izadyar

Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.

“There’s the old anecdote we were all taught in Psych 101,” Martin said, “which is that physical environment matters. I think a separate device matters here: sometimes you’re reading, and you’re in a slow section, and you have that random thought, like, what was that thing I wanted to buy on Amazon? And you’re there without thinking about it.” A... See more

"“If you put these five things together - you can't use money to attract talent, you can't advertise, you can't take risks, you can't invest in long-term results, and you don't have a stock market - then we have just put the humanitarian sector at the most extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector on every level, and then we call the whole... See more

"Paying rapt attention, whether to a trout stream or a novel, a do-it-yourself project or a prayer, increases your capacity for concentration, expands your inner boundaries, and lifts your spirits, but more important, it simply makes you feel that life is worth living." (Winifred Gallagher, Rapt)