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A good life doesn’t ask you to be good at everything. It asks you to find the small circle where you have unusual leverage, and to be peacefully avera
My father was a Sarkari Babu (government officer with basic salary) his entire life, he was at one job throughout his life. He drove a Bajaj scooter
The fundamental issue is that these are subtle and esoteric arts. These ways of experiencing and interrogating reality depend (almost) wholly upon our
People with an optimistic mindset are associated with various positive health indicators, particularly cardiovascular, but also pulmonary, metabolic,
Umwelt, as I learned from Ed Yong’s book, An Immense World, is the world as it is experienced by a particular organism. How does the organism that is
What you allow your milieu to feed into your mind is what you will be processing. It is what will carve the pathways of your brain. This is perhaps we
If you have a theory that’s been working pretty well for a while — it made good predictions, it solved real problems, it explained a lot of mysteries
Real explanations will sometimes sound weird, crazy, or too complicated because reality itself is often weird, crazy, or too complicated. It’s unfortu
Things change as contradictory evidence piles up, but even then, it doesn’t mean you should scrap the theory you started out with. Everyone back in th
Lots of theories have been tried, and lots of them have been given up because of something that looks like contradictory evidence. But the evidence mi
If you have a theory that’s been working pretty well for a while — it made good predictions, it solved real problems, it explained a lot of mysteries
Real explanations will sometimes sound weird, crazy, or too complicated because reality itself is often weird, crazy, or too complicated. It’s unfortu
Things change as contradictory evidence piles up, but even then, it doesn’t mean you should scrap the theory you started out with. Everyone back in th
Remember in the before times how on hard days you could grab your work bestie and go have lunch blocks away from whatever was bothering you?
Like many people I thought Covid, with its stopped clock and blunt force, would bring a major reckoning. A reckoning with small things, like what we w
This is what nobody tells you: commitment is an act of agency. We often get through life comforted by the thought that we have the ability to make cho
our ability to bind our future selves to a future is what makes us agentic, rather than just moment-to-moment responders. Maybe the total inability to
the fear of commitment is really a failure of agency, of taking full responsibility for our choices and their consequences. A kind of learned helpless
The older I grow, the more convinced I become that commitment generates a kind of experiential wealth that can't be brute-forced into existence. There
If there's any kind of lesson in all this, it's mostly some advice I want to give myself. The lesson is simply: speak up. It's OK to slip into advocac
look at how the word “community” itself has been warped in recent years into a cynical marketing cliché to rival “storyteller” — annexed as the torche
to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
LY Corporation has been digging through the data for Pokémon Sleep, and the overall results show that users have been resting easy and well since the
Two weeks of 20-minute yoga nidra sessions led to a higher percentage of delta-waves in deep sleep and better memory, decision-making, and abstraction
The study found that mindfulness helped the nurses experience fewer negative emotions and less rumination — repetitive negative thinking.
Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress - by kyla scanlon
The game has shifted, and the winning strategy with it. It’s no longer about understanding specialized details; it’s about grasping the high-level glo
What we do with our freedomThe examples of the excruciating etiquette of the aristocratic courts, the marriage market Rhimes dramatised, the civil ass
New Media is opinionated about the internet’s infinite scale. It chooses to reject or play with the internet’s scale, opting to be handmade, limited q
The ‘tetrad’ or ‘laws of media:’ enhances: awareness of inclusive, structural process obsolesces: dominance of logical method reverses into: techno
The ‘laws of media’ can’t tell you everything about any medium, but it does give us something remarkable: predictability. We know that anything we can
We should be skeptical of both utopian and dystopian technology predictions. New tools will amplify both our virtues and our vices, just like every pr
We see something that works, and then we understand it “We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper
anyone who prioritizes the wellbeing of the “future of humanity” in the abstract over the dignity and care of individuals in the present cannot claim
Consider one more possibility: that the people who seem to slow us down and hold us back are actually preventing things from happening too fast. Imagi
Our metrics of progress have continuously abstracted: from the tangible bushels of wheat in agricultural economies (with natural physical limits), to
Meditation Tips for a Lifetime of Practice
When we’re mindful of what we feel in our body, she says, our mind naturally settles in the present. This happens without effort—and it makes us calme
Jerry Seinfeld: "You must master waiting. 'Show's gonna be delayed a half hour.' Fine. Plane's gonna be delayed two hours. Fine. Career's gonna be de
When pursuing a 1-of-1 vision, you aren’t going to be the most popular or celebrated person. You’re going to be an oddity that the most in-the-know pe
It’s possible for other projects to be sexier, more lucrative, and more attention getting, however their purposes are less unique than yours.
I appreciated Nvidia’s founder talking the other week about what it means to work in a zero billion dollar industry. It means really believing in some
What people think are winning backgrounds: - Ivy League grad - good grades - after school activities Actual winning backgrounds: - compet
How the Greatest Entrepreneurs Hire (h/t David Senra) Steve Jobs stated that each new hire became a percentage of the company, so why wouldn’t you tak
What is “talent?” Well, I suppose it’s the ability to do that which is excellent (that which astounds, amazes, and so on). It’s a bit circular, real
So much value and love for the process of writing and what it does for the coherence between heart, brain, imagination, lived reality, unseen, and see
You can’t write a viral essay that says “it’s complicated and I’m not sure.” But this is the only path to truly novel insight.
Writing is a task that takes both objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs ace the objective parts the same way they ace every test; you can’t faul
Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress - by kyla scanlon
What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply ch
Many people were outraged by what they regarded as his non-parliamentary use of medieval laws to raise money. The most notorious was ship money. This
Through DJing, sampling, mixing, music embodies so much of what we’re exploring. It’s our job as builders to find references that “re-unlock” the valu
All authors are just very refined plagiarists, recombining tokens based on formulas to produce strings that copy patterns found in their input. “Intel
When something fits into a lucid, logical continuum, it’s generally remembered for how it (a) reinterprets the entity that influenced its creation, an
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give th
most of success comes from doing the mundane and often distasteful stuff, like identifying and dealing with problems and pushing hard over a long time
Viktor Frankl wrote dozens of books, but only one, Man’s Search For Meaning, was not aimed at commercial success. Frankl wrote Man’s Search For Mea
How to Be Successful
Winston Churchill hit the nail on the head when he said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe
Traumatisation is most usually presented as anunassailable, concrete fact, and this is where I need to be respectful. If someone brings a firmconvicti
when the trauma label has been appliedby outside mores – when an event like an explosion, an assault or a sexual event has taken place andour culture
If you don’t have time to clean up, you don’t have time to cook Professionals understand that the project is the whole project, not simply the fun
Hindsight is 2020I don’t mean “hindsight is 20/20.” I’m talking about the year 2020.See, early in 2023, I wrote an article about starting and growing
A solid foundation requires a robust team structure. Hiring individuals who not only have the requisite skills but also align with the company’s cultu
ideas only become clear once you begin to work on them
The friction between idea and ability that AI evangelists promise to eradicate is not a problem suffered by a disadvantaged few. It’s the fundamental
the choice humanity faces in every age is between the idea of power and the power of ideas
“I would make sushi in my dreams. I would jump out of bed at night with ideas.” Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Ferrero, and Colin Chapman all did the s
the best relationships consist of a series of unbreachable private understandings
convinced that adults have totally forgotten how to have fun in conversation. every conversation is either "checklist catch up on life events" or "gr
What is love? Ask 19 geniuses. Get 19 answers. • Plato: It's remembering a soul. • Freud: It's desire in disguise. • Buddha: It's letting go. • Nietz
This is pretty good, and strangely consistent with my own idea of good taste Tasteful people pursue stuff with purpose, have an appreciation and curi
On paper, taste = discernment. In practice, taste = your sense of self, made visible.
For Kant, judgment is the mental faculty that connects particulars to universals—the capacity to say “this thing is an instance of that category.” But
A system optimized for noise elimination is hostile to the genuinely new. It converges on what works, on what has worked. That convergence might produ
Feedback is ineffective if it does NOT result in the other person taking action in a way they or you feel good about. As the remixed Dostoevsky quote
The most important ingredient for giving effective feedback is care for the other person. Your intent must to be genuinely help the other person. You
When delivering tough feedback, use this framework: Start directly: “I want to chat with you about [specific issue]” Share observations: “What I’m hea
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, a
That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe
5/ You try to figure things out rather than feel through them How do you drop a hot frying pan? You feel it, and you will let go. All your bad hab
Hanlon’s Razor is a useful mental model which can be best summarized as: ‘Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by negle
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
On Being Lost
One of the problems with being "rational" in your own estimation is that you are probably only being rational about one dimension of a surprisingly co
I imagine there actually are plenty of things stopping you, as there were for me. The biggest thing is that if you grew up in a largely Westernized, s
There’s a phrase making the rounds online: “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.” I’ve been wondering if its resonance reveals a quiet fatigu
I am not less capable because I refuse to live in constant activation. I’m just less exploitable.
My body was not an obstacle to ambition, but the barometer for what sustainable ambition could look like now.
The five principles of prompting I developed work equally well as management techniques for humans: Give direction. Describe the desired style in de
People who are good at solving poorly defined problems don't get the same kind of kudos. They don’t get any special titles or clubs. There is no test
2) Clear Roles & Decision Rights Without clear swim lanes and decision rights, individuals on teams feel disempowered and projects tend to stall out.
What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a t
The more upset I became, the more I felt that my sensitivity towards the paintings was the same sensitivity I held when I was the subject of the photo
To spot weird signals, you need to go down rabbit holes. Follow your intuition. And remember, pursuing rabbit holes is not always an act of procrastin
Gen AI for music has captured ~$300M in funding so far this year across several high-profile deals, the majority of which either focus on rights man
1. It doesn’t have to be new. It just has to be fresh. The toy brick was invented (and patented) by British toymaker, Hilary Fisher Page in the 195
90% of Claude’s code is now written by AI, and this has completely transformed how they build products. The bottlenecks have shifted from engineering
hottest companies in Silicon Valley, famous for one thing: they made an extremely boring product extremely beloved. He speaks about how «technology ma
Among the troubadours, there was a different class of people, called knowms. Thecouncil was told that the knowms had some special skills that may help
information becomes knowledge only through processes of verification and critical analysis.
This is what knowledge decay looks like. Not burning libraries, but a slow, structural dissolution of the connections between claims and their sources
In large part this is because education, like most social systems, is slow to adapt, iterate, and evolve to be relevant for changing times. The glacia
generative AI is but the latest in a line of innovations that draws attention to the flaws of the modern education system, leaving us to question how
The humanities, rightly understood, are the things that technology cannot take away or substitute for. Of course, I don’t mean ‘humanities’ in the way
People who don’t take themselves too seriously. They have to be able to laugh at themselves to succeed. What to look for: This is usually very easy to
The #1 thing I look for when hiring people is FIO. "Figure It Out" You can get pretty damn far just by being: - Resourceful - Reliable - Results or
@mckaywrigley I have a bunch of questions I ask. What would you build for yourself? What did previous companies you've worked for need? What are you a
“People think that intimacy is about sex. Intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to the
This project is inspired by the transformative power of intimate gatherings. Most of my transformation has happened in intimate group settings where m
Most AI backlash is economic anxiety coated in a veneer of social justice. Alfalfa farming consumes 19 times the water that data centers do; there’s n
“Diffusion lag” reflects a lack of product-market fit. Even AI optimists are still hitting practical roadblocks. That’s why detailed case studies are
Here are some things I’ve asked chatgpt recently: “why is Toblerone so popular at airport duty-free stores?” “give me a recipe for a chickpea tagine
Collecting and archiving are ways to reclaim and own our attention—they are acts of meaning-making. These practices are rituals: habits and skills tha
Parnell shows that authors of color and queer authors are much more likely to have their work flagged as “adult content,” largely due to problems with
The whole thing about the Kardashians — the resistance they’ve kind of induced in people — is that it doesn’t feel consensual. You absorb information