Matt Little

The goal hadn’t been wrong. It had just been handed to me, implicitly, by a world that measures progress in forward motion and not in depth.

That was the moment I began to question the entire architecture of ambition. Not whether it worked, but whether it asked the right things of a person. Whether a life could be constructed from milestones rather... See more

brand isn’t just memory. it’s trust through repetition . it’s showing up the same way every time until your presence becomes gravity.

most people whisper their message once & hope the world listens. the ones who win understand that in a media saturated world, you either become unmistakably yourself or you become invisible.

the deeper game here is... See more

We told ourselves that liberal individualism would liberate the soul. But it dissolved the old anchors and offered little in return. It gave us autonomy without telos. Expression without ethic. Identity without obligation. The result isn’t a lack of community—it’s a lack of coherence. We’re surrounded by content, but starving for character.

This is... See more

The internet has created new forms of leverage analogous to the printing press, democratizing access to information and tools for creation. Digital platforms enable network effects that would have been impossible in earlier eras. Computational power (AI, etc) allows us to solve problems systematically in ways that would have seemed divine.

But the... See more

this is the rarest skill in the world: to think big, & execute small.

not as a philosophy.

as a lifestyle.

most people operate on noise.

either they’re all vision… intoxicated by scale, directionless in practice.

or they’re all execution.. efficient but hollow, building without knowing why.

the first group floods you with ideas.

the second floods you with... See more

AI is a tool, and like any other, it should follow the golden rule: All tools must enhance, never erode, your most important one—your mind. Be curious about AI, but also examine how it shapes your habits and your thinking patterns. Stick to that rule and you'll have nothing to fear.

Against “Brain Damage”

AI doesn't damage our brains, but unthinking use can damage our thinking. What's at stake isn't our neurons but our habits of mind. There is plenty of work worth automating or replacing with AI (we rarely mourn the math we do with calculators), but also a lot of work where our thinking is important. For these problems, the... See more

“I didn’t want to lose anything. That was the main problem,” Sarah Manguso writes on the opening page of Ongoingness , her short book about learning to let herself forget things . She long fears being “lost in time,” until finally she realizes (as I’ve quoted once before), “the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life.” In... See more