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But of course the idea that I would know what I or anyone deserves is just another manifestation of my own outsize ego, right? That I should be the ar

You talk about breakups as useful, if not altogether happy, opportunities to celebrate what was gathered over the course of a relationship. Most of my

I used to believe rigor and love were mutually exclusive, or that they somehow worked against each other, that love was supposed to feel like somethin

For the first year of our love, I fastidiously kept a note in my phone titled, “Sweet nothings.” I wrote down every romantic thing you said to me. I w

Over the past few years, it’s become obvious that trends are trending. At this point, I think we can all agree that the frenzy around “identifying” an

I’ve found that writing is a great way to process higher-level concepts — the sorts of big-picture ideas that there isn’t really an appetite for at my

Chaos is where great strategies are born.

You can just do things. What’s the future you want to see? Making reclaims agency amidst lost meaning. So, don’t escape this reality — design the one

Silicon Valley, firmly planted in the Third Estate (the bourgeoisie), has attempted to take on the First Estate (the church), the Second Estate (the e

I don't want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.

The fastest way to attract what’s meant for you is to express yourself so honestly that everything misaligned falls away on its own.

A total eureka moment; the files are in the computer. I felt like a beautiful Benjamin Franklin with a key and a kite. Was this boundaries? Manifestin

Actually the chicest thing I’ve ever heard > But my favorite signature hostess gift of all time comes from Jack Nicholson. Every time he was invited

Unfortunately, if you want to do new things, you'll face a force more powerful than other people's skepticism: your own skepticism. You too will judge

The reason you might be having trouble with your practice in the long run—if you were capable of building a practice in the short run—is nearly always

The best way to not let a project’s spectacular success get you too high or its spectacular failure get you too low, Ryan likes to say, is to be alrea

In Lauren Oyler’s essay about anxiety last week, she referenced a late 19th century diagnosis known as Americanitis, which described “the high-strung,

Resilience means enduring. It also means absorbing a whole lot of excess shit in your body — in your hair, in your back, in your joints — in ways you

People who don't pause exist more in their head than their body. The mind is top-down, rigid, quick, enforcing an established view. The mind is waitin

I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?”

a simple, reductive truth: your brand is just a person, talking to other people, about something you’re both interested in.

You have a brand (e.g. perceptions, associations, a reputation) whether you’re building it with intention or not.

The essence of positioning is sacrifice. You must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position. Nyquil, the nighttime co

the truth is when you're posting online it's to a really specific vibration of people, and everyone who gets mad about it is simply eavesdropping from

Message overload. You’re inundated with messages all day long: ads, emails, app alerts, texts, tweets. It’s easy to think that personal branding is ne

Consider now that someone comes into the interview and they have a clear, defined personal brand. Just by looking at their website or business card or

Life is an endless string of problems that compound into meaning when solved and suffering when ignored.

thinking has two parts:expanding. generating chaos.collapsing. finding order.

Curation leads to expertise. Through curation, you better understand yourself, history, and unlikely connections across fields. Increasingly, we will

In the old days—old days for us anyway—when you were doing the washing up or mowing the lawn, you’d have time to think. And these days, we increasingl

We’ve lost gradients of intimacy, a concept from architecture, the ability to loiter and meander through a space, engaging when we want in varying lev

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that in San Francisco I’ve made close friends who have had very unusual lives where they’ve sought a lot of autonomy

Then everything changed. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a new bourgeois class that, when not reeling from the latest market crash, had time an

No one benefits from you scrolling on your phone and feeling sad and then going to Starbucks.The antidote is figuring out what you care about, what yo

some people, unable or unwilling to replace what they have lost, simply learn to live with the absence, with the empty space where belief once was. th

And when I’m dealing with someone who keeps pushing me to reach some predetermined conclusion, like it’s not just uncomfortable but it’s aggravating f

Of course, we rarely approach relationships with such wisdom. Instead, we spend years failing to fully commit to any one relationship—either by findin

In working so hard to become independent, we forget how much satisfaction we get from the sense that others depend on us, and the meaning we can creat