To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.
‘Follow your passion’ is advice that doesn’t work most people. It’s far more nuanced than thought. In most cases, we’re better off trying to understand what we like, staying curious about those things, and see where we can do great work.
The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more
The more present we are, the more we relax into ourselves, the stronger a magnet we become for what aligns with us. That’s the paradox of the self: it is most potent when we are least focused on it.