Patricia Mou

What I really want in life are experiences, activities, and states of being, not possessions.

The apparent happiness of Africans, against all horror, seems to derive from a sense of connectedness, or as the Zulu put it, "ubunto." This word is often translated to mean community, but one of them gave me what I think is a more accurate definition: "I am because we are; we are because I am."

There is a common misperception of what makes life meaningful. It is the idea that we have a special purpose in life – and that once we find it, all our confusion ends.

Choosing the right set of Lego blocks for your thinking is the key, and it's harder than it may seem. There is so much knowledge out there – how are you supposed to decide whether something goes into a "first-principles thinking tool-chest".

Often, there’s a desire to cling onto how we thought life should go, sometimes until it outweighs the reality of how it is going — what makes us happy, versus what we feel should; what is truly stimulating or fulfilling, versus what we’ve been told should be chased and sacrificed for. A question I ponder is: How do we untether ourselves from the... See more

First principles are the Lego building blocks for thinking. These Lego blocks, once carefully assembled with forethought, are reusable. With the right set of first-principles, you can start mixing them in ways you couldn't before allowing you to think better and faster. 

There are Twitter threads made by anonymous writers which contain more insight than most published academic papers, and memes which capture the human condition better than most works found in art galleries.

Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle