“Our point is that you can you spend your whole life keep breaking on through. You can’t just break on through once and think, well, I’ve made it, I broke through.
There’s a million membranes to break through. There’s a million places to go. You know. You move to another direction, another dimension. Big deal. We went ... See more
You don’t need a vacation — you need 6 months of ambitious underemployment, of relaxed discipline, of productive exploration, of intentional meandering, … of hard leisure.
Every app wants your decision in seconds. Every employer wants results this quarter. Every investment platform profits when you trade. Meanwhile, the boring investor who indexed and touched nothing decades ago owns your neighborhood. Who's winning?
The patient inherit everything the impatient leave behind.
Remember, people are often drawn to things that are done imperfectly. Whether it’s art, movies, or books, people tend to talk more about the flawed things that get stuck in their heads than they do the obvious, perfect things.
As Malcolm Gladwell says, “You want an aftertaste, and that comes from not everything being perfectly blended together.”
I asked Kelly about the tradeoffs of focusing on a single thing if you want to be great (which is what I had been getting at before). “Greatness is overrated,” he said, and I perked up. “It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in. Steve Jobs was a jerk. Bob Dylan is a jerk.”