As the years unfold, you’ll see that all your questions aren’t so urgent. The only ones to care about are the ones you’ll never answer. And you don’t have to get caught up in your plans as you did when you were in your twenties.

That labor amounts to constant self-promotion in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — ... See more

If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.

This is, for many of us, the dream: unfettered commitment to externalizing our innards without concern for any gaze but our own. Reclaiming one’s time, you could say. But it requires nothing short of a battle.

It’s helpful to think in terms of: it’s only play. We’re here to play. We’re here to have fun. And to use the feedback of, you know, sometimes failure is the thing you need to know to get to where you’re going. So if you try to solve a problem 10 ways and they all fail, you can either decide I’m a failure or you can decide, okay, I’m now 10 method

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“In many ways the magic of Patagonia comes from the constraints we place on ourselves which are grounded in our deep sense of responsibility to do right by the environment and society,” Stanley told me. “We can't go to the Fashion Institute of Technology library and choose from 5,000 fabrics for the spring line. We have a couple hundred we can choo... See more

People say ‘be yourself’ because they want you to resist the impulse to conform to what others want you to be. But you can’t be yourself if you don’t learn who are, and you can’t learn who you are unless you think about it.

When we invest in different parts of ourselves, research shows that we’re better equipped to deal with life’s inevitable challenges. For example, in one study, Dr. Patricia Linville found that subjects with a more differentiated idea of themselves—what she calls having greater “self-complexity”—were less prone to depression and physical illnesses f... See more

Here’s the thing when you hang out with writers: We pay attention. We write things down. Much of what I write about are my observations. I always say I don’t have to make things up. I just need to pay attention.