It’s not that there’s some metaphysical concept of beauty that rules the world — beauty is a human experience. It’s something that has to do with how humans react to the world and perceive the world. And it’s notoriously thought to be subjective, but it’s not entirely subjective. There’s a very rich history of art objects and music and what people ... See more

Compliments are an other-oriented token that don’t demand a response from the person they are directed to. They also don’t usually require the receiver to reveal anything — the compliment affirms that what they chose to reveal has been seen and noted.

I might have approached the librarian with something along the lines of, “I love your dress. I had ... See more

"There are two ways to make the world more mesmerizing: to seek out new and increasingly intense experiences, or to loosen the filters that make ordinary experience “ordinary”. You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving. Either way, I think what we’re seeking is an escape back into what we used to be... See more

I think our competitive aim is always been... This is going to sound like very basic but it’s true. It’s just we do what we say we’re going to do when we say we’re going to do it. We just try to practice extreme reliability. And it’s an accruing advantage because the more people know that you’ll do what you say you’re going to do, you’re going to t... See more

Alchemize the pickle. You will be relentlessly confronted with conundrums, situations, pickles, and dumpster fires for which you do not yet have the knowledge or skill set because you have not had to navigate it before.4 Take a moment to reflect on why, check whether your privilege has anything to do with it, then send a sweet, loving, and forgivin... See more

We have a public imagination that cannot conceive of what exactly to do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be useless, and so they shuffle through a decade of busywork. Partly, the length of schooling has increased simply because it could—because we no longer

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But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is o... See more