Minsuk Kang 강민석

"Do you think it's ever okay to lie?" I ask.

"I advocate never lying in personal relationships. But if you have Anne Frank in your attic and a Nazi knocks on the door, lie....I lie to any government official." (Blanton's politics are just this side of Noam Chomsky's.) "I lie to the IRS. I always take more deductions than are justified. I lie in... See more

There's another more subtle lesson in the list of fields with superlinear returns: not to equate work with a job. For most of the 20th century the two were identical for nearly everyone, and as a result we've inherited a custom that equates productivity with having a job. Even now to most people the phrase "your work" means their job. But to a... See more

Like Borges’s library, we are tasked with sifting through the internet’s “divine disorder” to find what is worthy of our attention. The question, now, is how to sculpt a better Library of Babel – a better information infrastructure – that lends itself to the advancement of knowledge and wisdom conducive to human flourishing.

That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it;... See more

Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second . Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The... See more