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

"If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known"

In the past, I felt like I needed to protect my time more so that I could do things that I wanted, and it obscured the fact that what I wanted was a sense of connection and meaning, and in order to get that I would have to do something that looked like giving my time away. - Jenny Odell

The world is filled with polite, shy, inscrutable, unintelligible, tight lipped, superficial, dishonest and also honest people who for one reason or another do not say what they think. The search for freedom of speech has barely begun. Many do not reveal their thoughts because they are not sure what they think. Many would be braver in their speech

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the human condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncer

“I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us unless it’s inside a frame.” - Abbas Kiarostami

Everyone has ideas, but ideas are cheap and easy. Knowing the real problem is rare and precious and strategic. If you’re in an organizational setting, if you want to be seen as different and valuable, be the person who’s going, “What’s the problem? What are we really trying to solve here?”