It’s hard to see history when you’re in the middle of it, harder still to distinguish Swift’s impact on the culture from her celebrity, which emits so much light it can be blinding. But something unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent. She deploys the most efficient medium of the day—the pop song—to tell her story. Yet ov... See more

But with less separation between art and commerce, Montgomery says, “there’s some self-censorship that happens. If you’re a little too knowledgeable about PR, you start to become way too aware of things like posting schedules, and it’s impossible to be punk anymore.”

Experience must be followed by reflective thought and an internal processing that links the experience with previous learning, transforming the learner’s previous understanding in some manner. Learning, therefore, takes place within a cycle that includes action, reflection, and application.

The Passion Job Burnout Machine is different than the burnout machines of, say, Big Law, or investment banking. With those jobs, you know who’s burning you out and why. It’s a very transparent trial by fire: a means to see if you can hack it with a very time-greedy job (that rewards you with very high pay). Passion jobs let you do the dirty work yo... See more

After all, not to be corny, haven’t we all become selective autobiographers in the digital age as we curate our lives for our own audiences of any size—cutting away from the raw fabric of our lived experience to reveal the shape of the story we most want to tell, whether it’s on our own feeds or the world’s stage?

I guess if we’re talking about joy, writing, and being a fully rendered person in the world, my main sources of liveliness are so human and obvious they might seem facile: 1) loving the people I love with full throttle abandon – my guy, our kids, my mom and dad, our gaggle of brothers, my army of girlfriends. So that’s advice, maybe: make as many g... See more

“I’m just thinking that ... nobody goes for a walk without there being something that supports that walk outside of ourselves. And that maybe we have a false idea that the able-bodied person is somehow radically self-sufficient.”

Generosity is not a loan to repay or a debt to settle. It's a gift to appreciate. Yes, you can reciprocate a favor by paying it back. But the best way to honor an act of kindness is by paying it forward.

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.