Collections
When our curiosity is triggered, we think more deeply and rationally about decisions and come up with more-creative solutions.
Exploration often involves questioning the status quo and doesn’t always produce useful information. But it also means not settling for the first poss
Embracing Curiosity : Nurture curiosity as the key driver of great work. Use curiosity to choose fields, explore gaps, and drive progress. Paul Graham
Do not be distracted by surfaces; it is in the depths that all laws obtain.
“I don’t really pursue a destination,” he said. “I pursue a direction.”
Robin Williams - I used to think that the worst thing in life is to end up alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make
Elimination solves many problems. For one, you won't have to do the thing you eliminate. But also, you free up time, attention, and resources to do a
Writing is a great way to excavate an emotional reaction and find the why behind it.
Metamorphic words…attempt to change the author in unpredictable ways, which you can think of as an intrinsic reward of sorts…If you don’t like, or are
all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to
Because we learn through experience. Not incidentally, the capacity to learn from real world experiences is a hard and permanent difference between hu
At its best, cultural criticism is love and art that exists to give love to other expressions of art. It's beautiful in its indulgence.
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgm
Remember, there is a difference between a critic and someone offering a critique. The critic will level judgments against your writing, your chances o
‘Blog posts’ might be the answer. But I have read blogs for many years and most blog posts are the triumph of the hare over the tortoise. They are mea
I like the idea that, at the end of the day, it’s the reader who generates the book’s meaning as much as the writer, and it’s the writer’s job to star
One of the shifts in understanding I seek for students is for them to realize that bad sentences are not (primarily) a writing skill issue, but rather
“I consider myself or I think what I'm projecting to my kids is a liberal father. I want to come across as somebody who's approachable to them. I enjo
“It was quite an emotional and impulsive decision not long after Charlie was born, and I almost resented it for a few years there, you know. There was
Our children don't listen to us. Hell no. They watch. True. Depending on your approach to parenting, you constantly having to act and operate a certai
“I think the most distinctive thing that will mark your journey is the nature of your child. I have given birth to two very different humans. The rele
A great storyteller creates a movie in the minds of the audience.
Storytelling is not about a roller-coaster ride of excitement. It’s about bridging the gap between you and another person by creating a space of authe
“I realised that the storytelling was what built the brand and the storytelling is what keeps the brand so close to its customer now.” Tarryn Gill on
A slower approach to work is not only feasible, but is likely superior to the ad hoc pseudo-productivity that dictates the professional lives of so ma
Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time. Focus on creating something good enough to catch the attention of those
Journaling is the practice of self-discovery by writing to yourself.
Journaling is and has long been a path to self-awareness. It’s a way to understand who we are now and who we’ve been. It’s how we discover who we hope
Writing in a journal will help you connect the dots of your journey. It’s a way of keeping track of your thoughts, a tool for seeing and understanding
Nostalgia is memories minus the pain.
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out o
Memories can also be thought of as dreamlike. They’re more a romantic story than a faithful document of a life event. And there’s good content to be f
Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for
Writer and activist James Baldwin on the power of reading: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,
“Is reading Faulkner going to make you a better person? Absolutely not,” writes Jessa Crispin, “but the whole universe wants you to be optimized, prod
“The quality of your thoughts is determined by the quality of your reading. Spend more time thinking about the inputs.”
Life isn’t about finding yourself but about creating yourself.
The definition of insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. There is nothing sadder than a person who
I think life is a kind of laboratory where you can try anything.
“There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.” — Christopher Morley
Media on the incumbent web is in crisis. It turns out that paying publishers for clicks, endless loops of “content” and ads, all served on platforms f
The apparent limitation of the ad-supported media business model is that there will never be enough traffic to satisfy the beast. But while subscripti
I do think there is an opportunity for more focused engagement with small media companies and practitioners. I reckon the days of mass media have long
You can tell a lot about a person and how they think about their work based on whether or not they use “content” to describe what they do. A photograp
I don’t like being seen as a content creator. In fact, I don’t believe content creation or writing is an occupation, because it denotes that creating
“Content” is the black hole of the Internet. Incredibly well-produced videos, all sorts of songs, and articulate blog posts — they are all “content.”
At its core, intelligence can be viewed as a process that converts unstructured information into useful and actionable knowledge.
intelligence is not one-dimensional,
Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.
from Peter Watts: "We're not thinking machines, we're feeling machines that happen to think."
We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if
Seneca highlights the importance of “digesting” our reading so that we can make it our own.So it is with the food which nourishes our higher nature, –
We rarely set out to dominate other animals for the sake of domination itself. Instead, our all-consuming concern is to improve human life: to treat d
Many of the standards of living we take for granted today – even those we might see as basic rights – presuppose our ecological domination of
The egalitarian narrative has become the definitive narrative for our times in the Anthropocene. It seems to tick the boxes of being secular, science-
Human beings are a part of the animal kingdom, not apart from it. The separation of ‘us’ from ‘them’ creates a false picture and is responsible for mu