Laura Pike Seeley

How many of these things we produce is not productivity. How you spend your life is.

In the past few years, museums across the US, Europe, and Australia are trying to tackle the challenge of decolonizing their institutions. Museums are taking on this important work to try to make their museums reflect the diversity and the voices of the people within their collections and around them.

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time.

What you allow your milieu to feed into your mind is what you will be processing. It is what will carve the pathways of your brain. This is perhaps well-understood, in theory if not in practice.

But it is equally important to consider who and what you are sending output to.

Writing is important, of course, and hopefully, the dialogue, anti-description, and subtext I created illustrates the enormous chasm between a human’s turn of phrase and that of a machine. But even so, if that chasm were to close — years or decades into the future, if ever — I hope every copywriter reading this finds solace in the fact that writing... See more

Your milieu is not the same as your sister’s. It is an ever-shifting, individual configuration of information flows. The Twitter feed you have curated is a milieu. Your friend group (which is not the same as the friend groups of the other people in that group!) is a milieu.

It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself.

Both public and private failures bring their own problems and their own kinds of pain. But private failure is unique in that it often depends on your own, unseen reserves of resilience and fortitude. It is a kind of test between yourself and yourself, with yourself as the judge. And so, it’s easy to cheat. It’s easy to give up and claim it as a... See more