Luc Cheung

These are the three necessary criteria for a great ferment: great ingredients, the proper environment, and patience. Without them, you will fail to create something funky and wonderful. With them, your creativity is the only constraint.

What makes fermentation so magical is that the most important ingredient is the one you can’t control: the bacter... See more

Simplicity is difficult because most of us are overcompensating for uncertainty. Adding something is easy. But removing something is hard, because it requires conviction. It’s easier to hedge against uncertainty, entertain multiple paths, and dilute your focus than to develop a strong opinion about what to exclude.

What is impossible, however, is concentrating on two tasks at once. Multitasking forces your brain to switch back and forth very quickly from one task to another.

This wouldn’t be a big deal if the human brain could transition seamlessly from one job to the next, but it can’t. Multitasking forces you to pay a mental price each time you interrupt one... See more

When a precocious yet nonconformist teenager asks why they need to learn calculus, what should you say?

You know they will never use it in adulthood, outside of certain career choices.

You could say, “It’ll help you get into college,” but then they’re left wondering why college cares if you know calculus. And once they’re in college, maybe you could... See more

Other books throughout the years kept changing my life in new and exciting ways, usually by changing the way I thought in some meaningful aspect. “Antifragile,” “Letters from a Stoic,” “Finite and Infinite Games,” “Infinite Jest,” “The Denial of Death,” “Words that Work,” “Seeing Like a State,” every now and then I’d pick up a book and come out the... See more

Jobs would often test people, asking them, “how many things have you said no to?” Ive was up to the task of answering, only he didn’t mean it, and Jobs read right through him.

I would have these sacrificial things, because I wanted to be very honest about it. And so I’d say, “Well, I said no to this and no to that.” But he knew that I wasn’t vaguel

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“My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn’t know they had.” — Edwin Land