Forget what they say—instead look at who they marry.

This is a sure-fire technique, and it tells you important things about people you can’t learn any other way. A person’s choice of a spouse—or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner—is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public.

This choice tells you about their own

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John McPhee, Draft No4 : "If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments ... See more

I’ve never been much of a note-taker because memory is such a useful filter for interestingness. When I have an idea, I wait to see if it can survive in the wilderness of my mind. I only act on those that prove themselves via intellectual natural selection.

Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age : “Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it.”

Courage isn’t the absence of fear, it’s what’s required to overcome it. Just so, optimism isn’t about ignoring problems, it’s about choosing to believe that they’re soluble.

When you take a hike and you feel a sense of awe at everything that you're seeing, you're experiencing the sublime. In most of life, this sense of “smallness” is experienced as a humiliation. But the sense of smallness in the presence of the sublime has an oddly uplifting effect.

I love the idea of coming face to face with our cosmic insignificance ... See more

the right motivation is never a technology trend and always something far deeper and more personal, and the right question is never “What is your AI strategy” and always more like “If I had to solve this problem today given the technologies available, would the solution change?”

No easy answers—but perhaps a few new questions.

Don’t give it all away. Don’t even give most of it away. Retrench. Be clear. With yourself, but not necessarily with others. Let the fame wave pass. Live by the sea.

He said it again: “Deepen the mystery. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“The majority of my buddies are not in the business. I also love not working. And I think for me a lot of research as an actor is just fucking living , and, you know, having a normal life doing regular things and just being able to observe, and be , in that sort of lovely flow of humanity.