Michael Brooks

If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding .1 Put simply:

• I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people

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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

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

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.