David Pennington
@dtpennington
I write stuff. I’d like to write more stuff. Currently: reclaiming my brain.
David Pennington
dtpennington.com
I contend that the creator is an individual who manages a most formidable challenge: to wed the most advanced understandings achieved in a domain with the kinds of problems, questions, issues, and sensibilities that most characterized his or her life as a wonder-filled child.
Austin Kleon • Questions without answers
Most of us have a hard limit on the number of focused sessions we can do each day.
Chris Guillebeau • Executive Functioning and the Limits of Hyperfocus
Myth and Metrics: How Social Media Robs Us of Ritual, and How to Revive It
Alexander Beinerbeiner.substack.com
“You should never ask an artist about their art,” Maurizio Cattelan said, immediately on arrival. “The best art raises lots and lots of questions,” he added. “Not answers.”
Maurizio Cattelan Turned a Banana Into Art. Next Up: Guns
You might think of this chart as the shape of attention. After clicking to start, thousands rapidly exited, some immediately, some after a minute or two. But if you could make it past three minutes, you were more likely to finish than to give up. And once you hit five minutes, your odds of completing the exercise were very high. A quarter who... See more
Larry Buchanan • ‘Weird and Daunting’: 7,000 Readers Told Us How It Felt to Focus
Is our universe an empty forest or a dark one? If it’s a dark forest, then only Earth is foolish enough to ping the heavens and announce its presence. The rest of the universe already knows the real reason why the forest stays dark. It’s only a matter of time before the Earth learns as well.
Yancey Strickler • The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
We should all want to cultivate a thirty second mind that can absorb the essence of a problem and come up with insights based on deep fluency with how the world works. However, a different type of “thirty second mind” is far more common today. Nearly thirty years after the internet became mainstream, the majority of people in our society have... See more
The Rational Walk • The Thirty Second Mind
Thinking About Thinking and Mental Models
The detriment of going from a multi-disciplinary mindset to an attention vacuum.
The Cult of Done Manifesto
- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
- There is no editing stage.
- Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
- Banish
Thomas Deneuville • The Cult of Done Manifesto
Research has long shown that health and longevity come down to five fundamental lifestyle behaviors: exercising regularly, eating a nutritious diet, eschewing cigarettes, limiting alcohol consumption and nurturing meaningful relationships.