Collections

“The finest line of poetry ever uttered in the history of this whole damn country was said by Canada Bill Jones in 1853, in Baton Rouge, while he was

"when the data and anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. it’s not that the data is miscollected, it’s that you’re not measuring the rig

Right now, as you read this, someone is profiting from your temporal poverty.Not your lack of hours—you have the same 24 as everyone else. But your in

Looking at quantitative vs. qualitative effects: stimulants and simple sedatives primarily cause quantitative changes in timing (people err in one dir

So, beyond pharmacological clock modulation, drugs that alter consciousness broadly often secondarily alter time perception by changing what the mind

I don’t want to wait for the world to change.I want to live it.

Right now, as you read this, someone is profiting from your temporal poverty.Not your lack of hours—you have the same 24 as everyone else. But your in

In early 2021, while most founders were chasing quick exits, I was laying the foundation for something more sustainable. The digital fingerprints are

I don’t want to wait for the world to change.I want to live it.

"There is no way to happiness - happiness is the way." - Thich Nhat Hahn

Right now, as you read this, someone is profiting from your temporal poverty.Not your lack of hours—you have the same 24 as everyone else. But your in

It's funny because personally I always thought the math was what was blocking people. Imo the piece missing is experiential, and that's why rigorous

Anne Helen Petersen once memorably described this as "LARPing your job"—performing a theatrical version of productivity. Workers engage in elaborate d

In early 2021, while most founders were chasing quick exits, I was laying the foundation for something more sustainable. The digital fingerprints are

I don’t want to wait for the world to change.I want to live it.

"There is no way to happiness - happiness is the way." - Thich Nhat Hahn

Good use of attention up the chain of society is rewarded. Bad use of it is punished. This system creates “sustainable marketing pathways”, a kind of

Through this work, we can create economies that truly serve human flourishing rather than merely extracting value from human activity—economies built

What we have long called the creator economy is evolving to become more of a “meaning economy,” where the creators and brands and experiences that eng

Anne Helen Petersen once memorably described this as "LARPing your job"—performing a theatrical version of productivity. Workers engage in elaborate d

Good use of attention up the chain of society is rewarded. Bad use of it is punished. This system creates “sustainable marketing pathways”, a kind of

What we have long called the creator economy is evolving to become more of a “meaning economy,” where the creators and brands and experiences that eng

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a plan that helps you define your ideal customers, coordinate your messaging, and position your product for launch. A

In GTM, you aim to find a winning intercept between the needs of the target audience (called a minimal viable segment, or MVS) and your solution (call

As an example: my book, nothing about it sucked. There was no pain. Sometimes I would get stuck on a word or paragraph, but I would just take a break

I still did have to go through some “suck” but it wasn’t the actions I was avoiding, it was the emotions I was avoiding

Maybe that's where the new scarcity lies - in the capacity for genuine human experience and connection.

“Wotan, the All-Father, understood that violence without wisdom leads to destruction, while wisdom without violence remains impotent. To gain true kno

Friendships provide a safe place to be vulnerable, uncomfortable, ask “stupid questions,” and genuinely contribute to each other’s development, empath

Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”—C. S. Lewis

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson

This was a table of 8 people: 5 people who had known each other for over 20 years. Then there were 2 of us who had known one of them for a few years.

Creation is a messy process. You don't know how long it's gonna take. You don't know exactly what it's gonna look like in the end. All you know is tha

"I want to take this information and store it somewhere, then basically cut it up into the most notable parts and distribute it out. What I'm creating

Sublime: To rebuild the joy of code in a world optimized for everything but. We're bringing back the weird, human touch that made us fall in love with

Many manifestos—and humans, for that matter—end up consumed by one or the other as they grasp at certainty and control.

Bridge energy, therefore, is the capacity to hold the old and new stories simultaneously, then choosing to dance between them in the present moment. B

The Rise of SNARFSNARF stands for Stakes/Novelty/Anger/Retention/Fear. SNARF is the kind of content that evolves when a platform asks an AI to maximiz

Sublime: To rebuild the joy of code in a world optimized for everything but. We're bringing back the weird, human touch that made us fall in love with

Human Insurance gives you the regular so that you can be violent in your work.

"Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer" is actually an excellent and life-affirming attitude

Find a cash business that pays the bills (and then some), but only invest enough time to keep it humming.

Efficiency doesn’t necessarily reduce our workload—it expands it. The more we’re capable of producing, the more we expect of ourselves and others. The

The danger is in misdiagnosing which type of business you're building. I’ve seen this a few times with online courses or “creator businesses” in parti

Efficiency doesn’t necessarily reduce our workload—it expands it. The more we’re capable of producing, the more we expect of ourselves and others. The

it seems that I’ll probably succeed financially a little less

Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces ri

Most anxieties about the future are really about the present.

"Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer" is actually an excellent and life-affirming attitude

These two modes have drastically unequal visibility from the outside, which means if you had an equal amount of suffering between men and women in a s

Most anxieties about the future are really about the present.

A large portion of users said they would pay money for TikTok and Instagram to not exist, suggesting these products have negative utility for many peo

"Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer" is actually an excellent and life-affirming attitude

The Pareto Chart demonstrates a power law relationship between the rank of a quality issue and that issue’s contribution to cost. This means one can f

In the US, this began with the launch of TikTok.

Similar to Zhang Yiming, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care very much about the content on his platforms and is much more interested in technology and AI.

A large portion of users said they would pay money for TikTok and Instagram to not exist, suggesting these products have negative utility for many peo

The Rise of SNARFSNARF stands for Stakes/Novelty/Anger/Retention/Fear. SNARF is the kind of content that evolves when a platform asks an AI to maximiz

If hazards stop being rare, stop being predictable, and/or produce damages that aren’t easily reparable (or suggest that a building should not be rebu

Most anxieties about the future are really about the present.

Each technology not only unlocks a new state of expanded acceleration (that will be hardcoded into our lives as the new basis for our survival), but w

They value me as a resource, someone who GSD and makes things happen. They value that I know how to do stuff, so they don’t have to. But they don’t ac

Creators make money so they can make stuff, instead of the other way around.

Your financial reality can shift dramatically in a short period of time and often due to things outside of your control.

Freelancing is one of the best ways to make money in a strong economy, but it’s also one of the quickest things to disappear when companies are cuttin

Earn money in as many different ways as possibleBuild a portolio of income streams that act as a high probability “floor” of income

it seems that I’ll probably succeed financially a little less

Competition is an outdated concept. Instead of trying to ensure you win, try to help everyone win. There's plenty to go around. Refusing to share is j

By adopting a human-centric approach, a new structure or infrastructure – whether it’s a bridge, playground, park, or reservoir – isn’t simply a phys

Your financial reality can shift dramatically in a short period of time and often due to things outside of your control.

The economy ranks as the most important of 22 issues that U.S. registered voters say will influence their choice for president. It is the only issue o

For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

That is, we should be building systems for universal simulation.

Visualization more broadly is a very important part of the Hoffman process. They mention the study where three different control groups shoot free thr

To be ludic is not to be ludicrous.

The only thing “free” about so-called free time is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything.

To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.”

Creation could become recreation.

The act of measurement changes the behavior of the thing being measured.

we are finite beings living amidst infinite complexity, anything we make is going to be invariably incomplete

They value me as a resource, someone who GSD and makes things happen. They value that I know how to do stuff, so they don’t have to. But they don’t ac

Instead of competing in the algorithmic feeds, create the content that is the most uniquely yours. Create the content you are interested in creating.

Mentors and friends have always warned me that employers will never care about you. But what if that’s a story we decided was true, one that doesn’t h

something my six year old said today: a tongue has no bones but it can break hearts

I buy products based on rational understanding of their benefits and drawbacks.

Finite games are won with intensity. Infinite games are won with consistency. -Shane Parrish

You can't win as much money if you sit at a table with small blinds. You'll get cleaned out if you sit at a table with players much better than you. T

Becase this freedom comes at a cost - in fact you'll probably need to die a little death.

But even if I had a word like it, the nerd never disturbedIt's absurd but I'm looking 'round and ain't nobody verse meI don't think a mothafucka's eve

I see time to be directly linked to attention. You can fuse with your surroundings (archaic time), lock into one object (magical time/flow/addiction),

Technology changes fast, people change slow

In other words, the faster you try to change, the more likely you are to backslide. The very pursuit of rapid change dials up a wide range of countera

Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accr

A Harvard psychologist once asked Amos Tversky why he became a psychologist. “It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” he said. “The big

Decentralized Web Platform

when someone tells me to keep writing, it feels like a command to keep living.

“What should I do with my life?!?!” Here is what I wish I’d known every time I felt lost. TOP TIP: Don’t try to figure it out all on your own. That’

most of success comes from doing the mundane and often distasteful stuff, like identifying and dealing with problems and pushing hard over a long time

Viktor Frankl wrote dozens of books, but only one,  Man’s Search For Meaning,  was not aimed at commercial success. Frankl wrote  Man’s Search For Mea

How to Be Successful

Winston Churchill hit the nail on the head when he said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

Here is my definition of imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is the persistent, unrealistic, fear-inducing, fucking ridiculous belief that you are su

Sometimes the prize feels closer, other times farther away. Still other times it feels like we are drowning in aimlessness and exasperation. An identi

"Failure is a data point." Amy Buechler, Founder Coach at YC

"Failure isn’t an indictment of your basic worth but rather a piece of valuable feedback." Amy Buechler, Founder Coach at YC

the best relationships consist of a series of unbreachable private understandings

convinced that adults have totally forgotten how to have fun in conversation. every conversation is either "checklist catch up on life events" or "gr

What is love? Ask 19 geniuses. Get 19 answers. • Plato: It's remembering a soul. • Freud: It's desire in disguise. • Buddha: It's letting go. • Nietz

ubiquitous connectivity and our media environments naturally lend themselves toward an influencer-and-fandom dynamic. If the system is built to inspir

In the new cultural economy, the culture is the product. It is composed of practices, ideas, and discourses. Products are auxiliary, supportive, but n

…and look. I think that it is perfectly reasonable for people to be normal music fans and to have a normal relationship to music. But…if you want to g

It’s about the same trap in professional life: doing the thing for years, getting more experienced, and staying stuck at the same level. You can work

I don't know if I'm ever going to get rich doing this but I am going to keep making things that I want to exist, in a way that seems fun and to a leve

What we see as an agency in our work with creatorsWe work with a lot of creators around the world for different brands, markets and niches and the one

So who survives?First, creators who publish citable work. Newsletter writers who go deep on one thing. Analysts who publish original data. Technical w

when someone tells me to keep writing, it feels like a command to keep living.

Everyone wants to be picked, but no one wants to organize the collective ‘we’. It’s the ‘we’ that creates a school of thought, a movement, a network,

And I realised that if you ever hear someone explaining things in terms of a long list of caveats, the odds are good that you’re looking at tacit know

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone.Think about riding a bicycle. Riding a bicycle is impossible to teach through

A democratic cultural politics would be developmentalist — oriented to learning, growth and discovery — rather than presentist. All kinds of resources

Some assume that a fundamental property of the internet is that it is globally connected, but countries, such as Iran and China, who have built their

The Rise of the AI Engineer

www.simonstalenhag.se

The text actually moves back and forth between all of these. Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

surprise may be a better proxy for creativity than quality. A polished output is not necessarily creative, but a surprising one might be. Yet even sur

Doing all of the things you genuinely love doing seems like it wouldn’t be hard but it is. This is for many reasons (that I am discovering and writing

Through DJing, sampling, mixing, music embodies so much of what we’re exploring. It’s our job as builders to find references that “re-unlock” the valu

All authors are just very refined plagiarists, recombining tokens based on formulas to produce strings that copy patterns found in their input. “Intel

When something fits into a lucid, logical continuum, it’s generally remembered for how it (a) reinterprets the entity that influenced its creation, an

“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give th

HEY Email

A good life doesn’t ask you to be good at everything. It asks you to find the small circle where you have unusual leverage, and to be peacefully avera

My father was a Sarkari Babu (government officer with basic salary) his entire life, he was at one job throughout his life. He drove a Bajaj scooter

Communities = Human Search Engines?

Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are sti

insight from Gurwinder Bhogal: People want to belong to a tribe, and one way that people belong to a tribe is by having the same beliefs as the member

We still instinctively long for this kind of belonging, as our sacrifices to sports teams, fraternities, or churches demonstrate.

Eleven propositions to the question: What is contemporary about craft?

Principle 2: Break up the conversation based on how, not whatNow that I’ve told you not to over-complicate your community architecture by introducing

There is often no compelling reason, even in online communities, to suggest people go into different rooms to discuss different topics.

A more sensible way to think about where conversations need to be broken up, that’s not topic, is format. In a physical space, the analogy might be—if

Intro to EGP

See beyond yourself whenever possible. See what happens when you de-center your own singular life and show up for the pains and joys of other people.

hanging out as a way to reclaim time as something other than a raw ingredient to be converted into productivity

Our fates, whether we like it or not, acknowledge it or not, are intermingled. Though it is not immediately legible, we sink or swim together. Still,

So we all know that the hard boundary we place between ourselves and the world is somewhat artificial. Sure, on one level you are a separate being, di

“People think that intimacy is about sex. Intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to the

This project is inspired by the transformative power of intimate gatherings. Most of my transformation has happened in intimate group settings where m

It’s rare for a member to convert from a lower tier to a higher tier. In most cases, it’s not worth it to have a way for people to pay you $2, $10, $5

To me, a membership is something you pay for to get access to a benefit you’re after. That benefit can be a community of your peers, but it doesn’t ha

We earn trust by stating our business model upfront – instead of ads, we monetize by charging directly. Directly charging creates high expectations fr

In a model, agents are interchangeable. Consumer A and Consumer B have different preference curves, yes, but they respond to the same incentive struct

Web3 Starter Pack

A Political History of DAOs

The existence of AI models means that openness is a bigger liability for user-generated content companies. The existence of a successful company in so

The natural end state of marketplaces and social media is the eventual shift from user generated supply to professionalized supply/content. They can f

The usual cycle with social media sites is that they start out being very flexible and open, and are happy to have users even if those users are shari

We no longer learn about the world from institutions, or even the illusion of them. We learn about the world from people we care about. This binds our

The problem with non-hierarchical models is human beings are not non-hierarchical creatures. Like all anarchist ideals, the dream of infinite digital

I like thinking small. I like thinking of my reader as an individual.And even if I did this out of sheer stubbornness at first, I’ve come to think thi

Similarly, I wonder whether the creator economy, as it matures, will resemble less of its original promise (a way for people to do the things they lov

When I think about editing images, a vast array of options come to mind: contrast, saturation, sharpen, blur, airbrush, clone stamp, etc. Even basic i

Reading is alluring. It has a nameless quality beyond satisfying desires for information and pleasure. Despite more colorful and interactive media, re

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

pastagang

The subscription model means content providers are paid regularly no matter the quality and quantity of the product. Makes sense – being paid on a reg

What tradition or practice from another culture or era do you think we should widely adopt?I wish patronage were widely adopted as an explicit social

Media and Machines.

the answer for publishers in the age of AI is no different than it was in the age of Aggregators: build a direct connection with readers. This, by ext

We live in a world where movies aren’t considered art, but intellectual property. They’re “content,” little chunks of stuff that can be licensed, exte

If Twitter had to start over without its graph, on the other hand, it would be dead (which speaks to why Twitter clones like BlueSky which are just Tw

Twitter became about arguing, Instagram became about showing off, Facebook became about people you went to school with saying weird things. The most

Social media has also proven to simply not be that efficient in terms of matching high quality content with a relevant audience. Just because people c

people think the solution to the web becoming a big performance stage is to have lots of fragmented smaller communities. But finding the right communi

So when people opt to devote their energy to tracking the latest TikTok star or scrolling content instead of nurturing interpersonal relationships, th

Social media stopped being primarily about connecting socially a long time ago. People still use a range of technologies to connect to friends and bui

Taste for Privacy: How Context, Identity, and Lived-Experience Shape Information Sharing Preferences

The social-platform layer offers the feeling of encounter with the friction surgically removed. As one analysis of Gen Z’s parasocial turn put it, onl

Zoom’s simplicity is a strength when it comes to the company’s ability to grow its network. When the product concept and value is simple to describe,

The best software businesses are networks. When every new user that joins makes the network more valuable for the other users, it leads to a sort of a

On the one hand, Octavia Butler has this to say: “The only lasting truth is Change.” On the other hand, Bill Bernbach would counter as such: “A com

pretty clear that collecting cultural ephemera is a new consumer behavior that’s going to become a core part of life on the internet

Something I’ve noticed, however, is that exclusively using TikTok doesn’t mean I’m only exposed to TikTok-specific trends and culture. In fact, many o

Introducing a Rocks, Sand, and Water Framework for AttentionWe always talk about consumers’ attention as being finite, but how is it divided?I imagine

We all know we’re overstimulated and want to stop, but we can’t. We use app blockers, throw our phones away, and build rigid routines. But none of it

humans don’t have fixed identities. we’re constantly testing. trying different versions of ourselves. seeing what gets rewarded. adjusting based on fe

I feel like there’s something so soulless about our culture—something deeply, deeply missing in people’s experience of life, a kind of superficiality.

The Science Finally Catches Up: New Research Confirms ADHD as an Evolutionary Advantage, Not a Disease