Sasha Tan

In providing a precise experience, you are necessarily polarizing. There’s a certain tyranny of NPS or averages you have to decouple from – where averages blunt a nuanced understanding of a product or experience. There’s that funny truism that the most authentic Chinese restaurants have the most 1 star reviews.

Distinctive features are not universal... See more

Other emotions—anger, fear, contentment—are deep enough to snorkel in, and if you keep swimming around in them, you’ll find all sorts of bizarre creatures that dwell in the depths and demand description. Bitterness, on the other hand, is three inches of brackish water. Nothing lives in it. You can stand in it and see the bottom.

This is why it’s very difficult to teach people how to write, because first you have to teach them how to care. Or, really, you have to show them how to channel their caring, because they already care a lot, but they don’t know how to turn that into words, or they don’t see why they should.

Instead, we rob students of their reason for writing by giv... See more

A good word for this is puppeteering : trying to solve your problems by controlling the actions of other humans. Puppeteering often looks attractive because other people's actions seem silly and therefore easily changeable. Funnily enough, it doesn't feel that way to them. They have lifetimes of backstory that lead them to act the way that they do,... See more

About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap : situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.

The mediocrity trap is a nasty way t... See more

Whether he names it or not, Hobart practices Systemantics , the discipline of noticing what a system really optimizes for.

And the one simple goal of any student of Systemantics is to answer the question: what’s really going on here?