Supritha S

And there’s another: The kindness of not seeking to maximize short-term personal gain. The kindness of building something for the community, of doing work that matters, of finding a resilient, anti-selfish path forward.

These three motives stem from the most basic and ancient parts of our brains — they are what promises a creature its best chance of survival and prosperity. They tend to trump everything else, and the behavior it creates is often so unconscious that we don’t realize quite what it is we’re after. Logic can’t compete with these drives, not without... See more

An NFT has zero utility. It’s simply an entry in the blockchain that shows ownership of something that anyone could see for free.

That is exactly the gentle ramp’s strength: you can live on it. You’re not trying to just get through it.The gentle ramp demands things of you that the boot camp doesn’t. Staying on it requires you to develop certain aspects of character. You have to accept, for example, that when you’re on a sustainable trajectory, improvement takes time, and that... See more

the things that tempt you towards trouble become considerably less tempting, and that’s the vital point here—tracking your behavior, without striving to change it, gently reduces the amount of willpower and self-scolding required to do the right thing.

For example…If a mother tells her daughter she looks like a tom boy, her daughter may react by choosing activities that she imagines a tom boy would do. Conversely, if the mother tells her she looks like a princess, her daughter might choose activities thought to be more feminine… the individual chooses activities based on expectations instead of... See more

I think the most useful idea in this third variation is the notion of evaluating projects according to ‘activation energy’. The more built-out the project is, the more the activation energy cost has been paid, and the easier it is to work on. And so you can evaluate projects based on how far they’ve come from zero:

It didn’t matter if he was motivated or not. It didn’t matter if he was writing great jokes or not. It didn't matter if what he was working on would ever make it into a show. All that mattered was “not breaking the chain.”