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The faster you’re moving the more you’re in fear. The more you’re in fear, the more you’re thinking about yourself. The more you’re thinking about you

I think high-performing people generally fall into this trap: we obsess about the external world while neglecting our internal world.

Easy to spot a yellow car when you are always thinking of a yellow car. Easy to spot opportunity when you are always thinking of opportunity. Easy t

I recognize the irony here of describing understanding through words, and you being the person that’s internalizing it as knowledge. But with that sai

Writing increases your rate of revelation. This is true irrespective of the subject because writing is a process of reflection, assertion, and iterati

Ad legend Bill Bernbach letter on creativity, written in 1947: Dear ________: Our agency is getting big. That’s something to be happy about. But it’s

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.

No one talks about the way in which the world, in all of its bewildering capability, is, at every second, offering some detail that might lead to a ne

“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certai

hello, i'm v good at asking questions. it's one of the things i get most complimented on i think what i do is simple & easy for anyone to do: 1.

Intelligence is a form of friendship with the world. It can’t be cultivated out of fear of it.

when someone tells me to keep writing, it feels like a command to keep living.

“What should I do with my life?!?!” Here is what I wish I’d known every time I felt lost. TOP TIP: Don’t try to figure it out all on your own. That’

I say please and thank you, not because I believe it matters to him, but because it matters to me. If I am going to use natural English to communicate

Every phase of life can be shopped for at Costco. Where else can you purchase a wedding ring, a baby carrier, and a casket? It follows your own life s

when i'm tied up in consumption, creation is lost to me; i am no longer the writer, the creative, the poet, the artist, but the eater, the viewer, the

I want to push for the idea that a record doesn’t have to mean something. That the point of music isn’t always to decode it and extract meaning from i

when someone tells me to keep writing, it feels like a command to keep living.

Everyone wants to be picked, but no one wants to organize the collective ‘we’. It’s the ‘we’ that creates a school of thought, a movement, a network,

The man we call an adventurer...is one who remains indifferent to the content, that is, to the human meaning of his action, who thinks he can assert h

I didn’t know that all the therapy and journaling and meditation and “work on myself” I did would eventually start to pay off, and that after a lifeti

“Every journey is a question of sorts, and the best journeys are the ones in which every question opens into deeper and more searching questions.” — P

Anything is possible if approached with conviction. Konosuke Matsushita (founder, Panasonic)

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an ex

www.simonstalenhag.se

The text actually moves back and forth between all of these. Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

surprise may be a better proxy for creativity than quality. A polished output is not necessarily creative, but a surprising one might be. Yet even sur

The problem (or at least one of the problems) is that the twin edicts to simultaneously optimize your team and life and to be flexible in light of an

But you can’t optimize systems in a context that’s changing, especially if it’s changing in unpredictable ways. Removing inefficiencies when circumsta

Against Optimization

Novelist Charles Kingsley on happiness: “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us hap

And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed hu

Don’t shrink the vision to fit the doubt

Hanlon’s Razor is a useful mental model which can be best summarized as: ‘Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by negle

We should all want to cultivate a thirty second mind that can absorb the essence of a problem and come up with insights based on deep fluency with how

On Being Lost

There’s a phrase making the rounds online: “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.” I’ve been wondering if its resonance reveals a quiet fatigu

I am not less capable because I refuse to live in constant activation. I’m just less exploitable.

My body was not an obstacle to ambition, but the barometer for what sustainable ambition could look like now.