Jake

Hop from cool thing to cool thing as you get better at determining which cool things will actually be cool before you start them. This is how live your ideal life.

“As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES. But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors— but that we must make the goal conform to the individual,... See more

Burnout is the ultimate agency-killer. This is so true that I’ve learned to identify a reduction in agency as one of the first signs of burnout, one that shows up even before I consciously realize what’s happening.

There is, however, a simple formula for checking if what you’re doing is sustainable: how long does it take on a vacation or weekend until you stop feeling anxious, and how anxious do you start feeling when you think about returning to work on Monday?

The most important active step you can take to cultivate your curiosity is probably to seek out the topics that engage it. Few adults are equally curious about everything, and it doesn't seem as if you can choose which topics interest you. So it's up to you to

find

them. Or invent them, if necessary.

hold your own view as just one in a collection of views. This requires an ability to hold multiple perspectives at once, a state of partial knowing that the poet John Keats called “negative capability”—in one author’s definition, “the innocence from agendas that enables one to become like what one observes rather than impose the self upon it, the... See more