Minsuk Kang 강민석

Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”

What if animals could speak words?

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

In order to fund unproductive departments, administrators and faculty at universities have created a new class of shareholder: donors. It may be a good thing, bringing some private sector accountability and common sense to an insular culture. When donors speak, the university may choose to listen, but when they “close their checkbooks,” as Rowan... See more

To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Be careful not to discover a career before you’ve discovered yourself.

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”