simon

In Syracuse, 2,500 years ago, there was a famous teacher of rhetoric named Corax. This new discipline was in high demand: mastery of persuasive speaking, it was hoped, led to fame and wealth. As the story goes, Corax’s most talented student was Tisias. Corax agreed to teach Tisias with the understanding that the student would pay when he won his

During the Covid pandemic, Pete and I spoke by phone. In the beginning, I made the mistake of trying to advise him about how he could lift his depression. He had earlier gone to Vietnam to perform eye surgeries for those who were too poor to afford them. I told him he should do that again, since he found it so tremendously rewarding. I did not

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

—Terry Pratchett

If a person is strong, every failure they experience is taken to be a useful lesson, making them tougher and more experienced. Find joy in all parts of your world and you will transform it into paradise. This is of course a very unusual way of behaving but it fits the unusual goal of becoming your own genie and making all your wishes come true.

We’ve grown so used to the idea that social media is damaging our democracies that we’ve thought very little about how we might build new networks to strengthen societies. We need a wave of innovation around imagining and building tools whose goal is not to capture our attention as consumers, but to connect and inform us as citizens.

Less wanting, more joy.

We associate this “wanting desire” in our mind with a certain kind of pleasure. But there is a much greater ease in not wanting, than in wanting. When you find that out, you can let the wanting mind have its talk without obeying to it. After the talk you can rest again in peace and tranquility. The more you can do this the