juliana ong

It is very tempting to believe that because you are twenty-something and struggling, the world is conspiring against you. But sometimes, the pain we feel in life is not from people holding us back, but our own inability to deal with their indifference.3 In other words: no one is out to get you. They just don’t care that much. This is both a little ... See more

Perhaps the most important insight is this: when we criticize our technology, we’re really criticizing ourselves. And when we try to imagine better systems, we’re really trying to imagine better ways of being human.

And you know, we have all these negative words for long-term commitment now. “Settling” has become a bad thing. But I love that word. Settling down. Settling your nervous system. Because only once you’re settled, can you play.

This is maybe the single most important core of human psychology - people want to reinforce narratives about themselves. If you’re marketing, don’t sell them a thing, sell them a self image that your thing happens to reinforce.

“independence is a prerequisite for the wisdom of crowds.” That is, if you want to use crowdsourcing to produce accurate information, you have to ensure that people make their judgments in private. If people provide their answers in a public setting where they can see everyone else’s answers, then the crowd can transform wisdom into madness.

“I think a lot about those whose lives I find fascinating, and it’s often they who tried new and varied things on the way to figuring out what they were great at: Christopher Walken was a lion tamer, Mrs. Prada is a trained mime artist. Maybe my future iteration is something in the circus. We’ll see. Perhaps after this swim.”

By yielding a generational wealth creation opportunity that was a strange hybrid of a lottery jackpot and self-made fortune, crypto created an ideological hold on its early entrepreneurs and workers. It had all the euphoria of a gold rush and all the self esteem of high tech meritocracy.

When you look back at the most fruitful moments of your life years from now, you’ll be surprised to discover how many of them unfolded amid a big loss or a crisis or in the face of a giant unknown.