Paxton Shell
@paxiepants
Paxton Shell
My general rule is when I feel the twinge of distraction or boredom or exhaustion that urges me to put down my book, I must read ten more pages. (you can of course do five, or two, or twenty, or whatever feels right.) Typically i get so re-engaged over those ten more pages that I end up reading twenty or thirty. When talking about this to my... See more
How i read
how to live with the discomfort of learning (instead of running from it)
open.substack.com
Writing increases your rate of revelation. This is true irrespective of the subject because writing is a process of reflection, assertion, and iteration.
Writing clarifies your own ideas. Writing begets new ideas too. Writing lets you explore ideas in depth even if you won’t have time to act on them all. Writing shows people how you think and lets... See more
Writing clarifies your own ideas. Writing begets new ideas too. Writing lets you explore ideas in depth even if you won’t have time to act on them all. Writing shows people how you think and lets... See more
Anu • Writer-Builders
Books you read are sending you input. Your friends modeling behaviors for you. Newspapers. Tools. People you follow on Twitter. The architecture of a Gothic church beaming serenity into you—that is input too.
At the same time, you are also sending output to other nodes. Now, I am sending these ideas into my pocket notebook, which will send them to... See more
At the same time, you are also sending output to other nodes. Now, I am sending these ideas into my pocket notebook, which will send them to... See more
Henrik Karlsson • First We Shape Our Social Graph; Then It Shapes Us
We are made of the external world as much as our internal. Social technology, tools, we make and are made by the environment.
Slow down enough to see how life is good. Today is a good day to be alive.
The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it… [T]he work itself. It drives the spooks away.
-Bonnie Friedman
When a student asks Butler what the answer is to ending the suffering in the world, she replies, “...there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers–at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
A Few Rules for Predicting the Future by Octavia E. Butler
Love this feeling
Jim Simons: "I’m not an extremely fast thinker myself; I just work hard."
That was all I needed to do—work hard, not fast. A paper I published in '68 took me five years. But it has had 1,850 citations. For a math paper, that’s an awful lot.
There’s too much emphasis on a person’s being able to answer questions quickly."
Slow and deep thought is necessary