Build a world. Make your projects and work a vessel for self-expression. Make your software match your vibe. Make reading your book feel like it feels to talk with you. Customize, make it bespoke, put yourself into it instead of doing what you feel you should. This has all kinds of benefits (reducing burn out for instance) but especially helps with... See more

We went public, and we have more than 50 percent American investors as shareholders. Before going public, I said to them, “Are you looking for a company that grows very fast, that makes profits that are too high, in our view, quick profits? Do not invest in our company. Do you want a company that grows in a gracious way? That allows suppliers to gr... See more

There's a cult. Anybody knows this. Go fly to LA and try to go to In-N-Out. Good luck. I was just in LA two months ago. Tried to go to In-N-Out twice because I read the book. I'm not waiting in that line. There's a cult around In-N-Out because the expression of the founder's soul is manifest in the product. People have In-N-Out tattoos. How many pe... See more

The problem with the Lean Startup as a mindset is that it leads to a Minimal Viable Life. And I know many people feel like they’re living one these days. The Lean startup is a mental model that is ultimately not helpful for human flourishing. There are metaphysical, creative, and moral issues with it.

To call iBooks a throwaway “feature” of iOS is too dismissive, but the output does not give off the impression of a thing that must exist in the world, and must exist at the highest level of grace.

The ultimate competitive advantage is actually giving a shit about the problem you're working on. When Airbnb had just a few dozen employees, Rocket Internet raised $90 million and hired hundreds of people to clone and crush them.

there’s simply no way around the fact that we’re pretty fed up with a certain philosophical framework in Silicon Valley. It has many names: the growth mindset. OKRs. KPIs. Even Minimalism — the predominant aesthetic of our era. But at its core, it all comes down to one thing: the relentless optimization of everything in our world.

this mindset has l... See more

Increasingly, the work that stand out will be more raw and incomplete (because — by definition — new ideas haven’t been optimized because…they are new).

Eno explains:

"[On one end, you have] auto-tune that perfectly puts music into tune…which is sort of flawless and faultless. [In contrast, the other side] is clumsy, awkward, crude and unfinished thi... See more