A large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how t... See more

The day passed slowly at first — warm sun on the back patio and a short call with your grandparents. They miss us so much but the truth of being together keeps us apart. When we say I miss you we mean we miss how things would be if we were all just a little better than we are. A little more forgiving, a little more flexible, a little less stuck in ... See more

Start somewhere bad to get somewhere good. A few weeks ago, I interviewed psychologist Adam Alter about his book Anatomy of a Breakthrough . In it, he writes about the “creative cliff illusion,” the notion that good creative ideas will either come quickly or not at all. Unfortunately, our intuition has that one approximately backward. In studies of... See more

Here are some other techniques people use to access and maintain the zone:

• Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. Annie Ernaux writes about this in A Simple Passion, a memoir about how she becomes obsessed in a banal way with a man who is having an affair with her—the thought that others will read th

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Here we have an account of sublime experience that oscillates between feeling reduced to nothing in comparison with the great spatial and temporal expanse of nature, and then feeling elevated by two thoughts ‘that only philosophy makes clear’. First is the thought that as cognising, thinking subjects we in a sense create (support, construct) our ow

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“Being able to say ‘this is who I am’ when everything else feels uncertain, flimsy, prone to dissolution, may be the greatest comfort we have. Is anything more seductive, more empowering?/ To be alive is to subject oneself to the reality of being permeable/ so, while I welcome the pleasure of those moments when I feel like myself, I don’t think I w

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Making things is hard and I feel like that’s the most useful thing to say about it. You have to try to be consistent, you have to practice constantly, you have to read, and you can’t make yourself be interested in topics you aren’t interested in. And you have to accept that it’s always going to be challenging. My friend said this about her work, wh... See more

There is no heaven for newthings. There is no Hall of Fame. There is only memory and change. Nothing (the opposite of newthing) and no one are immune. The goal of newthing is to live as long as possible while staying true. To do this, newthing must counterintuitively accept that one day it will die. If newthing accepts the certainty of death, howev

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