Natalie Audelo

“The more successful you become,” Flemings said, “the fewer people you can trust. The more successful, the less the public thinks of you; billionaire has become a pejorative word. The more successful you become, the harder it is to find someone who will look you in the face and tell you the truth.”

This is an amazing algorithm: do interesting things and magically arrive at a complex understanding of the world.

“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

OTS feels like a symptom of a deeply American addiction to growth: that we always have to keep pushing ourselves forward, no matter the costs, to feel some measure of success, some modicum of personal and societal gratification. It’s like turning all the worst late-stage capitalism work habits onto our bodies . It makes no sense, but it makes total... See more

Allowances — for grief, for pain, for childbirth, for illness — have been so hard to come by, I think, because we discount the body. Worse, we hold it in contempt compared to the mind, a proxy for religious spirit, so that the reality and risk of cruelty and brutalization are minimized and ignored.

A common misconception about generalists is that our broad scope of interests and experiences precludes us from achieving mastery. However, this couldn't be further from the truth. Generalists are capable of going deep; our path to mastery just looks different—more non-linear and richly textured.