Minsuk Kang 강민석

The late surgeon Sherwin Nuland, in his classic book How We Die, lamented, “The necessity of nature’s final victory was expected and accepted in generations before our own. Doctors were far more willing to recognize the signs of defeat and far less arrogant about denying them.” But as I ride down the runway of the twenty-first century, trained in

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Elon Musk is building SpaceX because he can’t buy a trip to Mars. You can have all the money in the world, but you can’t buy a trip to Mars. One hundred years ago, the richest man in the world couldn’t buy an iPhone. That’s the kind of progress I care about.

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

I think that every writer should have a question they can ask that there is no end to the pursuit of. Every writer should have questions big enough and pressing enough and multi-faceted enough and unanswerable enough that they occupy their entire life, however long or short it is

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