words are true witchcraft and wizardry

How choosing the right words can make seemingly impossible outcomes achievable — so effectively, it must be magic.

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I know spells are effectively words but it didn’t hit me at the time so let’s not make it a big deal, please and thank you.

shashaank

“Traveling leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”

—Ibn Battuta

Venkatesh Rao 🔹 (@vgr.bsky.social)

bsky.app

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

– John Steinbeck

You should be continuously running from the pack of ravenous dogs while dropping a trail of fresh meat behind you.

Always learning, always teaching

“Strategy is accepting that you are doing something better than the other and the other is doing something better than you. You have to pick your fight.”

- Axel Dumas, CEO of Hermes

Though many customers start a conversation asking for deliverables, it’s really because they don’t know what to ask for. No one was born a client, and most don’t even know what questions to ask.

Pricing Design — A book by Dan Mall

No one was born a client.

This just changed how I look at established roles we play. We are actors on the world’s stage, like Shakespeare said. I just didn’t know it was quite literal.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, w... See more

Farnam Street • This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)

Historically, software has treated the words on your screen as a black box. To the computer, it’s just an arbitrary sequence of characters. But of course getting the right letters in the right order is all that matters.

We named “Lex” after “lexicon,” because we don’t treat your writing as just an arbitrary string of letters. Our goal is to build a... See more

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We need to stop treating people as brains on a stick and pay more attention to what motivates people: What does this person care about, and how driven are they to get good at it? We shouldn’t just be looking for skillful teenage test-takers; we want people with enough intrinsic desire to learn and grow all the days of their life.

Venkatesh Rao 🔹 (@vgr.bsky.social)

Always learning, always teaching

Pricing Design — A book by Dan Mall

Farnam Street • This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)

Inbox (292)

David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America