Johanna

Let me summarize. You've got to work on important problems. I deny that it is all luck, but I admit there is a fair element of luck. I subscribe to Pasteur's ``Luck favors the prepared mind.'' I favor heavily what I did. Friday afternoons for years - great thoughts only - means that I committed 10% of my time trying to understand the bigger... See more

What a fascinating little paragraph on nightmares, dreams, and the nature of consciousness. I could read 10k words on every sentence. So interesting to think about nightmares as our consciousness engine running amok without the braking system of sense data.

First off, goals have an endpoint. This is why many people revert to their previous state after achieving a certain goal. People run marathons, then stop exercising altogether.(...) Second, goals rely on factors that we do not always have control over. It’s an unavoidable fact that reaching a goal is not always possible, regardless of effort.(...)... See more

Only the best researchers in a field actually make progress, and the best researchers are already in a field, and probably couldn’t be kept out of the field with barbed wire and attack dogs. If you expand a field, you will get a bunch of merely competent careerists who treat it as a 9-to-5 job. A field of 5 truly inspired geniuses and 5 competent... See more

Workers are just inputs to the economic machine. When we create an identity around labor, we’re treating people as mere inputs. But people are more than just inputs. The economy is here to serve us, not the other way around. What matters is what we can get out of the machine. The people’s needs come first. Everything else is secondary. The economy... See more

In the pandemic, we (at first) didn’t have enough masks or tests, then we didn’t have enough vaccines or pills. We don’t have enough homes, immigrants, doctors, or microchips. We’re not lacking in scientific breakthroughs. The U.S. is languishing because many of our policies are designed for scarcity. What we need is the opposite: an abundance... See more

High school taught me big words. College rewarded me for using big words. Then I graduated and realized that intelligent readers outside the classroom don’t want big words. They want complex ideas made simple.

Let yourself become more ambitious—figure out the most interesting version of where what you’re working on could go. Then talk about that big vision and work relentlessly towards it, but always have a reasonable next step. You don’t want step one to be incorporating the company and step two to be going to Mars.