Sonya Sukalski

But when determination, patience, and progress blend together, something amazing happens. The shape of the Great Plateau begins to change, and what was previously the flatness of despair shifts into an incline of hope. People really start to care, your audience regularly reaches out, and a viable career path emerges.

Belonging gives us the confidence to take care of ourselves, others, our planet, and all the members of our ecosystem. Knowing this, it becomes clear that building a community is one of the most important, generous, and creative acts a human can aspire to.

In our society, the spaces for adults to play are mostly constrained, for example, to sports, or going to the pub. And opportunities to live a life of imagination are reserved for exceptionally privileged people, like designers, actors, artists and film directors. This lack of imagination in our lives is an existential risk for society and... See more

The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months

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Recovering our common good depends on several things: It depends on establishing a new ethic of leadership based on trusteeship. Leaders must be judged not by whether they score a “win” for their side, but whether they strengthen democratic institutions and increase public trust. It... See more

Lost in a featureless wasteland of my own mortality, and finding no traction in the reams of scientific studies, intracellular molecular pathways, and endless curves of survival statistics, I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka,

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One of the things about the Valley that I find outsiders miss the most is that it feels like it's all moving so fast, and yet, any of the important companies or any of the important products take a decade or more to build. Everything important takes a long time, so a lot of it actually feels quite slow. Long-term orientation is absolutely... See more