Sylvan Rackham

Worlding is the art of devising a World: by choosing its dysfunctional present, maintaining its habitable past, aiming at its transformative future, and ultimately, letting it outlive your authorial control.

To think about beginnings, we have to go back to the moment before a World is born, to the moment of a curious creator looking at Reality — chaotic, meaningless, scary, but latent with potential — and wondering what to do with it. Philip K Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” A World is conceived when ... See more

A World is a reality you can believe in: one that promises to bring about habitable structure from the potential of chaos, and aim toward a future transformative enough to metabolize the pain and pleasure of its dysfunction.

It is possible that the spiritual malaise and the epidemic of depression that has swept all the wealthy nations (Seligman, Reivich, Gillham, & Jaycox, 1996) have at their core the use of the shortcuts displacing the use of the strengths to produce positive emotion."

Linus Torvalds's style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who'd ... See more

Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question

When you stand on the precipice of something you’ve worked hard on finally seeing the light of day, the life of the project flashes before your eyes.

In those moments the practical concerns that consumed you during the creative process fall away. Instead we retrace the emotions. The elations of discovery. The moments of doubt. The day things turned... See more

T hinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing into a dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone persists. But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world. It informs the imaginary of peoPles, their varied poetics, which it then transforms, meaning, in them its risk becomes realized. Culture is the precaution of those who clai... See more

The sweet spot for startups is seeing 24 months into the future. This is a stone’s throw into the adjacent possible. It’s far-out enough to be asymmetric, familiar enough to be pitchable, and time enough to build.