Michael Brooks

If the proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality.

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... See more

Get good at asking the right questions. Elon said, the answer is usually the easy part. The hard part is asking the right questions. Questions are the only tool we have to inquire about this reality. It is our pickaxe to inspect the world we live in. It also happens to be the backbone of our cognition, we literally think in questions. Getting good... See more

My heart breaks for would-be homeowners priced out of housing markets across the country. We need to do something to bring the price of all houses down, except the house I own and plan to sell for one (or many) million dollars.

People deserve to buy a home at a price they can afford, a price that will somehow also cover my entire initial investment,... 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

The mathematical genius Alexander Grothendieck once had a metaphor for solving problems. He suggested that instead of forcing open an impossibly hard kernel with a hammer and chisel, one should simply let it sit in water and wait. Over time, the shell softens and opens with ease. This is also true in writing; time is the only non-substitutable... See more