Jake

The mathematical genius Alexander Grothendieck once had a metaphor for solving problems. He suggested that instead of forcing open an impossibly hard kernel with a hammer and chisel, one should simply let it sit in water and wait. Over time, the shell softens and opens with ease. This is also true in writing; time is the only non-substitutable... See more

Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid

curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at

random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up

entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always

asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of

drying up, curiosity... See more

In the early 1900s, psychoanalytic theorists speculated that people became bored out of unfulfilled unconscious desire. Midcentury existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, by contrast, saw boredom as a fundamental philosophical crisis, what Schopenhauer once termed "the feeling of the emptiness of life."

"A well-fed man keeps and calmly gives forth his infinitesimal portion of eternity. It sounds big in the summer night. And it is, as it always was down the ages, when there was a man with something to tell, and ones, quiet and wise, to listen." - Ray Bradbury