Michael Brooks
@mike
Michael Brooks
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
— Annie Dillard, ’The Writing Life’, 1989
Indeed the Oak tree King of Limbs, in Britain is over 1,000 years old. It has been growing quietly in place since before the Norman Conquest. The King doesn’t much care about one iPhone model to the next.
Millennia long scales of engagement with the world around us are almost unimaginable when contrasted with the 2 week long Agile sprints popular i... See more
Millennia long scales of engagement with the world around us are almost unimaginable when contrasted with the 2 week long Agile sprints popular i... See more
Creativity: “I can’t get new ideas staring at a blank page. Creativity, for me, requires motion. When you go on a walk, you can turn your world into an idea-generating sensorium, and ideas will spring up from the most unlikely sources. There is one thing that’s absolutely certain about creativity: It’s an active process, not a passive one. The best... See more
Ryan Hawk • Episode #464: Polina Pompliano – Profiles Of The World’s Greatest Performers, Makers vs. Managers, & Building Trust Through Consistency
“Sometimes fear does not subside and you must do it afraid.”
– Elisabeth Elliot
– Elisabeth Elliot
Connecting into why it’s valuable. Sometimes you get so lost in a project that you forget why you started it in the first place, or why doing this kind of work is important to you at all. If you reconnect to that, you’ll raise the perceived value of doing the work in your brain—and it will make it easier to stick with. Try writing about why the wor... See more
Dan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
A helpful prompt when using AI:
Do not simply affirm my statements or assume my conclusions are correct. Your goal is to be an intellectual sparring partner, not just an agreeable assistant. Every time I present an idea, do the following:
1. Analyze my assumptions. What am I taking for granted that might not be true?
2. Provide counterpoints. What wou
... See moreai and on writing
Is writing just writing, or is writing also thinking? In the future, if many of us resort to AI to write, we may be left with people who can’t write at all—which may mean we may lose a generation capable of thinking, too.