Nate Stranzl

Always say less than necessary. Saying less than necessary, not interjecting at every chance we get — this is actually the mark not just of a self-disciplined person, but also a very smart and wise person.

“We were not [seeing] a passive silent brain during the ‘resting state,’ but rather a brain that was actively connecting thoughts and experiences.” Essentially, Dr. Andreasen found that the brain defaults to creativity. When we sit with boredom, when the mind is allowed to float freely, the brain engages in what she termed REST (“random episodic... See more

It’s a dividing line between people who are successful and people who are not.” Mastery, Robert said, requires boredom and tedium. It requires doing the same mundane things over and over and over. It requires sitting with the frustration of putting in work that doesn’t immediately pay off. It requires sitting with the torture of, am I going to... See more

Genius is infinite patience.’” What she’s talking about is the underrated power of clocking vast amounts of hours in the laboratory, at the easel, in the writing chair, on the court, or wherever you do your work. In a power law world, a subset of those hours inevitably yields something great. That’s all that happens.

“What matters,” as Picasso once encouraged another artist just starting out, “is that you make a large number of them. Your drawings must go out into the world.” Only then can the vital few emerge.

But if you want to avoid mode collapse, it will require sacrificing other things. It will require saying no to lucrative projects in order to explore things no one cares about. It will require looking stupid. It will require feeling uncomfortable. And it will require, in many cases, living hand to mouth from time to time.

As I was reading about Eno and others last year, I was sort of hoping to come across a clever trick you could do to keep going like this. But the truth is painful and simple. Eno is able to remain interesting because he’s willing to risk everything he’s achieved again and again.

It is an endless loop where:

1. Eno does something random that no one is

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Putting in real effort to create beautiful durable things that exhibit taste and craftsmanship, with zero tolerance for slop. As Thomas Paine wrote during the American Revolution: “What we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”

Showing real evidence for real outcomes, not flashy claims or... See more

“The value of print is actu­ally not about paper. It’s about the set of demands and offer­ings that that paper has,” Sloan posited. “Privacy, stability, reliability, sovereignty.”

Sloan offered other adjectives, too: Print was tactile, giftable, col­lectible, durable. Print can also be a little mischievous, whether as notes passed in class or

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