The fastest decisions I’ve ever made are ones where I was confident in my taste; the slowest decisions I’ve made (or have yet to make) are ones where I question it. (And the latter tends to be a symptom of trying to overintellectualize my taste, to compare it to others’ taste, to judge my own taste — which defeats its purpose.)

Don’t do any task in order to get it over with. Resolve to do each job in a relaxed way, with all your attention. Enjoy and be one with your work.

—Thích Nhất Hạnh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation

“Confidence is belief in yourself. Certainty is belief in your beliefs. Confidence is a bridge. Certainty is a barricade.”

-Kevin Ashton

The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it… [T]he work itself. It drives the spooks away.

-Bonnie Friedman

When it comes to business and careers, the more interesting people will succeed and capture more upside than ever before.

Because the uninteresting ones will get commoditized (hello 🤖).

And by interesting I mean being capable of analyzing, deciding, and executing in a way few others can.

Generating more unique ideas, understanding complex things fast

Cuando los botánicos recorren los bosques y los prados en busca de plantas, decimos que salen de excursión. Cuando lo hacen los escritores, esa excursión es por las metáforas, que también abundan en la tierra.

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is what is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or person who explained it to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larg