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We see something that works, and then we understand it “We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper

At some point while I was trying to write a dissertation as a parent of a preschooler and an infant, I attended a workshop from which I remember exact

I find that changing mediums is always good for my writing, so often I will go from the manila folder to a sheet of paper to a Word doc to a Scrivener

i think too many people are assuming that they can turn on a "artist" switch after years of making money doing something. probably most confusing whil

Stuff happens. Your stories about it determine whether it’s manageable or not.

working with limits + obstacles and making them a spectacular opportunity

“Every group of people who think for a living is going to be sad. Ignorance is bliss. So what’s the opposite?” – Chris Rock

completely crazy the extent that the world is bottlenecked by motivation

Moral clarity creates market opportunities. Notion thrives by enhancing users' ability to organize their thoughts rather than maximizing time-in-app—i

one thing LLMs have over social media is that you can't really use an llm without an intention you can't doomscroll an llm

Don’t forget this: Nothing is truly ever ordinary. I’m telling you, Protect the truest things about you and it will become easier to hear the truth ev

Have you ever told a lie and then forgot it was a lie? When you tell a story for long enough, you begin to believe it. We adorn ourselves with any num

If you want to decipher who you are, it’s good to begin with the question of what stories have been told about you. Do this not because they are true

Simone Weil said, “Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes. Instants when everything stands still, instants of contemplation

Whatever emotion you try to avoid, you end up inviting into your life - in the exact way you try to avoid it.

The way to find what that emotional blind spot is is to ask yourself: “If I couldn’t feel judgement at this moment, what emotion would I have to feel?

Imagine waking up and feeling curious about what the day might bring. Imagine feeling that subtle excitement about getting to know yourself more. Imag

Stop assuming that people are mad at you. Stop attempting to read people's minds. Stop trying to manage the thoughts and emotions of others. Let peopl

my sense is that people who take a long time to respond to messages, or tend to go into shame spirals about them, often put a lot of pressure on thems

Conversational Canyons

i think too many people are assuming that they can turn on a "artist" switch after years of making money doing something. probably most confusing whil

Similarly, I wonder whether the creator economy, as it matures, will resemble less of its original promise (a way for people to do the things they lov

the best relationships consist of a series of unbreachable private understandings

convinced that adults have totally forgotten how to have fun in conversation. every conversation is either "checklist catch up on life events" or "gr

What is love? Ask 19 geniuses. Get 19 answers. • Plato: It's remembering a soul. • Freud: It's desire in disguise. • Buddha: It's letting go. • Nietz

Mastery is not a function of genius or talent; it is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.

No amount of productivity will quench our inner fears about self-worth and helplessness.

My most effective life hack has been to learn to be with my inner experience, just as it is. It changes everything. Unfortunately, most people want

Non-dual thinking: Sometimes the answer isn't this OR that but this AND that. Hard work AND rest Stability AND change Acceptance AND problem solving

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to cho

The value of a position in chess consists of its probability of victory for the player. Moves are evaluated according to how they affect this probabil

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about

We need more vocabulary around the experience of thinking, as in: -thinking qua “directing my inner monologue along certain pathways” - thinking qua

Tesla is the first US car manufacturer to mass-produce vehicles without going into bankruptcy in the past 100 years (and now has a larger market cap t

Pessimists see problems. They worry about what could go wrong in the future. Optimists see possibilities. They focus on what could go right in the fut

“Notice that, while lots of people are happy to tell you about Golden Ages, nobody ever seems to think one is happening right now. Maybe that’s becaus

There is a Tibetan form of spiritual hyperstition that is more powerful than any of the modern day forms. It works by living and believing as if you

Decades later, scientists are starting to unravel how our wet, spongy, slippery organs talk to the brain and how the brain talks back. That two-way co

For instance, studies on meditators have shown that their somatosensory perception is more sensitive to subtle internal sensations, potentially leadin

Distractions divert you from your goals, while opportunities align with and propel you toward them. For example, Americans spend an average of 11 hour

re: many genAI apps can do 'anything and everything' i used to tell this funny story to a lot of consumer founders: when one-shot TTS first started

A lot of companies don’t make it because in the process of trying to get many things right, they don’t get anything right.Why are they in such a hurry

Startup Marketing Resources | SYSTM

Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (19

the nervous system is not only a biological entity but also a complex network highly responsive to personal interests. This concept suggests that when

Making systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack. A truly optimized, and th

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

Vadik Marmeladov's Codes of Practice: 1. Wear the uniform 2. Think long term (like 30 years from now) 3. Build stories and languages, not things

You must never trade honesty with relatability.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, a

That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe

5/ You try to figure things out rather than feel through them How do you drop a hot frying pan? You feel it, and you will let go. All your bad hab

“The way we experience the world around us is a direct reflection of the world within us.” – Gabrielle Bernstein

Our external struggles with life mirror our internal struggles with integrity.

What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions, is internal discipline and toughness. No one can teach you this skill; you cann

what really matters is the tone and the content of the voice in your head

Fulfillment... is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal... It has an end. It comes to the end and has to star

it’s so easy to derail our own joy by looking around at someone else’s life or worse — the imaginary life we think we should have by now

Meditation Tips for a Lifetime of Practice

When we’re mindful of what we feel in our body, she says, our mind naturally settles in the present. This happens without effort—and it makes us calme

Jerry Seinfeld: "You must master waiting. 'Show's gonna be delayed a half hour.' Fine. Plane's gonna be delayed two hours. Fine. Career's gonna be de

The hyperreal doesn’t mimic or imitate reality. It replaces reality altogether, making it nearly impossible for us to determine what is real, what isn

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

Addictions are attempts to attain bliss without releasing defensive patterns.

I don’t think back on those days too often, but with Matthew Perry’s death, the memories have coiled around me because of how honest he was about his

The lowest level of choice is not making a conscious choice at all, which happens when you don’t notice that you even could make a choice. In this cas

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

That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe

Traumatisation is most usually presented as anunassailable, concrete fact, and this is where I need to be respectful. If someone brings a firmconvicti

when the trauma label has been appliedby outside mores – when an event like an explosion, an assault or a sexual event has taken place andour culture

We’re meant to experience emotional pain so we can release it. No other reason.

The summary of all self-help is to focus on the long-term in everything you do!

Many of us, in pursuit of the spiritual, become woefully neglectful of the physical.

According to him, the word “natural” has become a “sort of a secular stand-in for a generalized understanding of goodness, which in religion you’d cal

Meditation Tips for a Lifetime of Practice

feelings are basically anything non-verbal you can access through introspection. A lot of this corresponds to actually physical sensations in your bod

Can you rationalize why a piece of art moves you? Why you have chemistry with one person over another? Why you like one piece of software more than an

Blaming and complaining are mixtures of genuine grief and defensive anger.

The crucial point is: by changing ourselves, we change the world. As we become more loving on the inside, healing occurs on the outside. Much like the

A leading indicator of personal growth is how curious you are able to be with all your emotions - especially the ones you weren't allowed to feel as a

a big theme from opening sessions at @bowmansschool is the importance of paying attention to your feelings a few people have said they don't have acc

How to be more emotionally intelligent (without trying so hard) 🧵 for @threadapalooza

The most competent people I know are pretty good at basically anything they put their minds to, because they just design a process and run it. I think

Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs

Blaming and complaining are mixtures of genuine grief and defensive anger.

A few lines from my eclipse diary entry, if anyone wants to say them out loud with me: I lovingly and peacefully call all of my energy back to me now

A lot of people are just trying to get to tomorrow and don't have the luxury of getting to think about how good they can be. And so if you are in a pl

yep, we've been doing it at the end of our morning routine so we're usually already sitting down, outside & after meditation, then we just turn to fac

what i had to do was a combination of exposure therapy (spending a bit more than felt comfortable) + emotional work: i’d notice my tendency to choose

You’ve been duped into thinking you can create a life without danger, one liberated from constraints and uncomfortable emotions, and that such a life

1/ Boundaries are not saying no. Or making sure something doesn't happen. Or distancing. Or even letting yourself have wants in the face of others'.

the depth of a conversation depends on how deeply seen you feel, not on the topic of conversation

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.

One of the problems with being "rational" in your own estimation is that you are probably only being rational about one dimension of a surprisingly co

I imagine there actually are plenty of things stopping you, as there were for me. The biggest thing is that if you grew up in a largely Westernized, s

To ask, every day, "What matters, in the end?" is to create the possibility of differentiated choice, the potential to overthrow the tyranny of our hi

On the one hand, Octavia Butler has this to say: “The only lasting truth is Change.” On the other hand, Bill Bernbach would counter as such: “A com

There is a huge problem when it comes to "changing the system":When you go deep and help people reframe the paradigms, myths and worldviews at the cor

“Luck never sent a few hundred emails, wrote an autoresponder, handled a contract negotiation, etc, but both people who do these things and people who

“Specificially, pursuit of novelty creates “luck”, and curiosity is the emotional manifestation of novelty. If we’re more open to what attracts our at

Collecting and archiving are ways to reclaim and own our attention—they are acts of meaning-making. These practices are rituals: habits and skills tha

Parnell shows that authors of color and queer authors are much more likely to have their work flagged as “adult content,” largely due to problems with

The whole thing about the Kardashians — the resistance they’ve kind of induced in people — is that it doesn’t feel consensual. You absorb information

We’re meant to experience emotional pain so we can release it. No other reason.

Psychology research is clear that the most reliable way to overcome psychological pain and discomfort is not to avoid it; it’s to gradually dimish the

The term “psychological safety” has been around since at least 1999, when Dr. Amy Edmondson of Harvard University published this influential paper on

Believing we’re separate, we seek control to remain safe. Releasing that belief, we discover our safety always lies in cooperation.

The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle*

Believing we’re separate, we seek control to remain safe. Releasing that belief, we discover our safety always lies in cooperation.

To me, that’s healthy competition: an inherent call-and-response between artists in which one artist’s output inspires the other’s output, which catal

Folk Interfaces

Why So Many of the World’s Oldest Companies Are in Japan

The short-term crowd is always too distracted to notice the long-term crowd slowly compounding. An investor obsessing over daily economic data misses

All you have to do is just be 5% better than everyone else who’s really bad at it. You don’t have to get everything perfect… you just have to be a lit

“Gnosis should be an experience of your own life, a plant grown on your own tree. Foreign gods are a sweet poison, but vegetable gods you have raised

Market forces incentivise us to get on the property ladder, and then to set fire to the rungs beneath us so that nobody else can climb up. Moloch need

“True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyful

The fundamental issue is that these are subtle and esoteric arts. These ways of experiencing and interrogating reality depend (almost) wholly upon our

People with an optimistic mindset are associated with various positive health indicators, particularly cardiovascular, but also pulmonary, metabolic,

Umwelt, as I learned from Ed Yong’s book, An Immense World, is the world as it is experienced by a particular organism. How does the organism that is

What you allow your milieu to feed into your mind is what you will be processing. It is what will carve the pathways of your brain. This is perhaps we

PEOPLE IN SYSTEMS DO NOT DO WHAT THE SYSTEM SAYS THEY ARE DOING. University professors chase grants, not student enlightenment. VCs nurture personal b

What the humans like is responsiveness - by Sasha Chapin What the humans like is responsiveness

my favorite feeling in the world is “I’ve done everything I could, and whatever happens from now on is not my fault so I can just relax”

I must admit, idling accounts for some of the most relaxing moments of my day. They’re not joyful, nor are they ultimately restful (I’m reading Twitte

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 Science Finally Catches Up: New Research Confirms ADHD as an Evolutionary Advantage, Not a Disease

Burning Platforms

A trend is a fad whose demand is not satisfied. A fad is a trend whose demand is satisfied too quickly. The lesson? If you experience success, do not

This is silly simplified but people who work in “Brand” are typically valued for their taste and ability to forecast and predict trends. They see the

One of the surprising and counter-cultural truths about modern-day marketing, which I suspect drives many efficiency-minded people practically insane,

The stages of CEO & how to evolve as your company does:

5/ You try to figure things out rather than feel through them How do you drop a hot frying pan? You feel it, and you will let go. All your bad hab

94. if U have a problem, consider having conversations about the problem. like, a lot of conversations. talk to a lot of people about the problem. t

But there’s two parts to what I said about moving a step at a time. One, that it’s towards what I’m drawn to. At that point in time, with the informat

You Can Just Do... Many Things

Digital Object ApplicationsFor the first time in human history, blockchains empower any digital object to enjoy the properties of verifiable scarcity,

Kind Words is arguably the best game for any person feeling lonely, as it can be enjoyed even by non-gamers. The objective is to write and receive let

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

it is very Good™️ to have many many small moments of connection - a hello, a goodbye, a ‘have a good day’, a bit of chitchat - with each person we enc

i live my life this way. almost every day is full of multiple tiny interactions with no aim beyond a hello, a how are you, a smile and then i continue

See beyond yourself whenever possible. See what happens when you de-center your own singular life and show up for the pains and joys of other people.

hanging out as a way to reclaim time as something other than a raw ingredient to be converted into productivity

Our fates, whether we like it or not, acknowledge it or not, are intermingled. Though it is not immediately legible, we sink or swim together. Still,

So we all know that the hard boundary we place between ourselves and the world is somewhat artificial. Sure, on one level you are a separate being, di

Sometimes, earning less and bringing back time is just as precious as making more money.

Art critic Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7 explores how we entered a culture that battles against rest and time itself. A nonstop 24/7 culture that never t

most of success comes from doing the mundane and often distasteful stuff, like identifying and dealing with problems and pushing hard over a long time

Viktor Frankl wrote dozens of books, but only one,  Man’s Search For Meaning,  was not aimed at commercial success. Frankl wrote  Man’s Search For Mea

How to Be Successful

Winston Churchill hit the nail on the head when he said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

Exploiting Productivity Momentum

HEY Email

A good life doesn’t ask you to be good at everything. It asks you to find the small circle where you have unusual leverage, and to be peacefully avera

My father was a Sarkari Babu (government officer with basic salary) his entire life, he was at one job throughout his life. He drove a Bajaj scooter

Oliver Burkeman – Time Management for Mortals

In large part this is because education, like most social systems, is slow to adapt, iterate, and evolve to be relevant for changing times. The glacia

generative AI is but the latest in a line of innovations that draws attention to the flaws of the modern education system, leaving us to question how

The humanities, rightly understood, are the things that technology cannot take away or substitute for. Of course, I don’t mean ‘humanities’ in the way

Among the troubadours, there was a different class of people, called knowms. Thecouncil was told that the knowms had some special skills that may help

information becomes knowledge only through processes of verification and critical analysis.

This is what knowledge decay looks like. Not burning libraries, but a slow, structural dissolution of the connections between claims and their sources

Expected elation. Society has built a world that defines what's appealing and what's not. What success should look like. I spent years chasing this id

What impresses you? Why? Money? Cars? Fitness? Abilities? Intelligence? Influence? I often find myself feeling impressed by something and desiring it,

“The modern man is always claiming a self-sufficiency which he is unable to achieve. He constantly compares himself with other people and, afraid that

What is your relationship to objects and their connection with desire?

Just a moment...

7 Ways to Retain More of Every Book You Read

ideas only become clear once you begin to work on them

The friction between idea and ability that AI evangelists promise to eradicate is not a problem suffered by a disadvantaged few. It’s the fundamental

the choice humanity faces in every age is between the idea of power and the power of ideas

“I would make sushi in my dreams. I would jump out of bed at night with ideas.” Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Ferrero, and Colin Chapman all did the s

Part of what I feel is important right now is to be in the system and to be creating these pockets and spaces and kind of stretching the constraints o

It’s also important to acknowledge that the systems change or innovation scene is not the only place where change and innovation is happening. Real ch

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

We should be skeptical of both utopian and dystopian technology predictions. New tools will amplify both our virtues and our vices, just like every pr

We see something that works, and then we understand it “We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper

Burnout is not what it presents: it’s not about working too hard for too long, burnout is about working in the face of a goal that seems too far out,

design is the embodiment of values. Design is the ultimate commitment to or compromise of one’s values. And this is how we go about the world. We make

When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the typeface of least resistance.” Ti

It is predictable, then, that users are consistently fooled into believing that their AI companions are conscious persons, capable of feeling real emo

Interestingly, many users who emotionally mourned the ‘loss’ of GPT-4o expressed complete awareness of its lack of consciousness. And yet, in many cas

One might point out that movie characters or videogame NPCs give off a similarly deceiving impression of being conscious, and yet it would surely be e

people turn to AI with existential questions and complex, unresolved scientific problems because they think that the mystical processes in AI systems

This is what nobody tells you: commitment is an act of agency. We often get through life comforted by the thought that we have the ability to make cho

our ability to bind our future selves to a future is what makes us agentic, rather than just moment-to-moment responders. Maybe the total inability to

the fear of commitment is really a failure of agency, of taking full responsibility for our choices and their consequences. A kind of learned helpless

The older I grow, the more convinced I become that commitment generates a kind of experiential wealth that can't be brute-forced into existence. There

Tractors and Computers

Glance Back

Feedback is ineffective if it does NOT result in the other person taking action in a way they or you feel good about. As the remixed Dostoevsky quote

The most important ingredient for giving effective feedback is care for the other person. Your intent must to be genuinely help the other person. You

When delivering tough feedback, use this framework: Start directly: “I want to chat with you about [specific issue]” Share observations: “What I’m hea

When pursuing a 1-of-1 vision, you aren’t going to be the most popular or celebrated person. You’re going to be an oddity that the most in-the-know pe

It’s possible for other projects to be sexier, more lucrative, and more attention getting, however their purposes are less unique than yours.

I appreciated Nvidia’s founder talking the other week about what it means to work in a zero billion dollar industry. It means really believing in some

Doing all of the things you genuinely love doing seems like it wouldn’t be hard but it is. This is for many reasons (that I am discovering and writing

What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a t

What education does is provide a curated experience to help you learn. Done well, it sifts through the myriad resources, possible paths, and common e

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

I spent seven years building a kid/ed-tech product and one critical thing I learned about the industry is this... No matter what they signal, most pa

Communities = Human Search Engines?

Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are sti