sari

The purpose of flex commerce is to establish one’s status as distinct and superior to others. Unlike other forms of commerce, it’s unrelated to the cost of goods and services, but to their intangible, symbolic value. In flex commerce, price is secondary. Primary are the cultural, social and environmental capital that a good or service carries.

If you are low-EQ, everyone you work closely with must know … because most of these people will come into any relationship with the expectation that you are adept at reading non-verbal cues. If they know you cannot read their faces (reading faces is highly correlated with EQ), they will work with you to compensate in other ways.

Knowing something and actually living your life in a way that follows that knowledge are two very different things.

One of the best ways I’ve found to organize one’s thoughts about a huge swath of intellectual and creative space, is to write a syllabus

So it’s useful to ask what absolute power would reveal about Israel and Hamas. In other words, what would each side do if it had nukes and its enemies didn’t? Based on Hamas’s history, and its charter, which calls for the total obliteration of Israel, we can be confident they’d nuke Tel Aviv. And yet, if Israel had nukes, they wouldn’t nuke Palesti... See more

Most people’s mental models of energy are flawed: they think there’s a ‘tank’ of energy that gets depleted as you spend it. This may be roughly true for physical energy, but mental energy is different: spending mental energy on things that you consider productive or important gives you more mental energy for other things: a positive feedback loop.

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Very loosely, a bulls--- job, by Graeber’s definition, is one that could be erased from the Earth and no one would be worse off. It’s also phenomenological. If you feel your job is bulls---, it probably is.

Mass schooling attempts a systematization of skill and knowledge transfer. The results are predictably mediocre—systems at scale must function with and cater to the lowest common denominator, and the process of standardization loses all sensitivity to context. Since everyone must do the same things, it is difficult for any student to do exceptiona

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Fadeke: These creator side hustles often transform into full-time occupations. For example, Alexis Gay worked at Patreon while creating humorous videos about the tech industry. Now she’s a full-time comedy creator and podcast personality. Mario Gabriele started his newsletter, The Generalist while working at a VC firm. After seeing significant grow... See more