Jake

I also try to stick to the default assumption that “everyone is an A player at something.” It’s a more effective and more dynamic way to approach an interview—a live, fascinating puzzle to discover what the elephant and the rider do well—rather than going in with the purpose of determining whether someone is an A player in a binary, Manichean way.... See more

The physical world and the cognitive worlds become linked through metaphors.

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

“The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn’t. Hard means worry: if you’re not worrying that something you’re making will come out badly, or that you won’t be able to understand something you’re studying, then it isn’t hard enough. There has to be suspense”

When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a

paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it

interesting. That's what you need to do: find a question that makes

the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same

world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's

compellingly mysterious.