Kelli

I keep punting this, am I reinforcing a permanent employee-only mindset? Am I locking myself into a single-channel system where all my leverage depends on others' approval?

You launch the side project—even if in micro-form. The real win isn’t the project itself, but the shift into a system of self-authorship and compound leverage.

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

He told me to pay attention to what I enjoyed most about my lifestyle, and try to preserve it while I experimented.

Integrating AI into our workflows has created a "meta-optimization problem." When everyone suddenly gets 10x more powerful, the hard part isn't doing things—deciding what's worth doing in the first place.

Listening to yourself is the route to good taste, but so is listening to other people. We catch the fire of other people’s enthusiasm, which is rooted in their knowledge. That is how we discover newer, better things, be they novels, films, symphonies, cuisines, clothes.

Being alive consists of nothing more than the sum of what we pay attention to.

People read nonfiction to learn and to feel. My framework for ensuring a blog post accomplishes both is to start with a first draft that focuses on "novel" ideas.

A novel idea is one that's not just new to the reader, but also significant and not easily intuited. Think of it as new and worthwhile . I've identified five categories:

• Counter-intuitive —

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