articles

The billionaire investor sees the apocalypse coming. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on your tolerance for excitement.

One answer, and 5 tricks to help

You can’t give general advice. If I do, millions of creators are going to see this and then they’re going to do it and I’m going to fuck them over.

Let's do more of those

“You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”

“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”

Hemingway, Didion, Baldwin, Fitzgerald, Sontag, Vonnegut, Bradbury, Morrison, Orwell, Le Guin, Woolf, and other titans of literature.

How do we solve hard problems? A deep dive into one of the most influential theories of how people figure out difficult things.

Here are the people who have most greatly influenced my thoughts on learning.

Can you learn more efficiently by making things harder for yourself? These three strategies let you learn faster (even if it feels slower).

I get this question a lot. From Tim Stoddart’s personal newsletter: "I love newsletters. They are great businesses, I enjoy writing them, and they are lucrative. However, I’m still unsure about the format. I have two options… Do you prefer the lighthearted and more entertaining style of the

One of the unsung disasters of contemporary academic life is the death of the physical library. There are so many disasters in current year academia, I doubt as anyone else grouses much about this,…

Look for single decisions that remove hundreds or thousands of other decisions.

Put On Your Art Eyes Talking to the comedian Mike Birbiglia, the visual artist Wendy MacNaughton said that the job of the artist is just to "put on art eyes.” “Most of the best drawing in the world,” MacNaughton said, “has nothing to with making a quote-on-quote good drawing. It has to do with seeing

Sheehan Quirke went from working at McDonald's with 0 followers to over 1.5 million Twitter followers in 18 months.

A series of instincts, thousands of tiny adjustments, hundreds of drafts … What is the mysterious process writers go through to get an idea on to the page?

I have two exemplary pieces of 21st-century writing that I want to share with you. Neither is hot off the CMSes; they've both aged just a li

A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) is a formal proposal to change Bitcoin. The BIP process organizes the Bitcoin community in the absence of a centralized leader. BIPs can propose changes to Bitcoin's consensus layer, community standards, or the development process.

Byron Katie developed a process of self-inquiry which is called, The Work. It involves asking four simple questions about each belief that causes us pain.

Use the Ladder of Inference to explore the seven steps we take in our thinking to get from a fact to a decision or action, and challenge them.

The big lesson of survivor bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor. You can’t win if you lose – so learn to not lose. Most major failure conditions are avoidable with a little bit of foresight, planning, study and so on. Analyze failures and take conscientious steps…

The following are a set of notes from my tweets. I may eventually flesh this out into some sort of coherent blogpost.  Some preamble: “solve for distribution” is a phrase I came up…

There is an art to replying and commenting, and probably like 60-70% of people I’ve seen on the internet fail at it. The important thing is not to speak your mind, but to “support” the OP. You can support them by disagreeing well & you can “mis-support” them by agreeing…

“Do 100 Thing” is a phrase I came up with when riffing around the idea of being prolific, making lots of stuff. It’s obviously not an original idea – Nietzsche suggested it, /r/thexeffect could be thought of as “do 49 thing”. I was also influenced by the parable of the…

Maurice Sendak’s Banned, Burned Book.

"I feel the person I was is someone I know intimately but isn’t me now. The monster lies dormant, though, and could be very easily awakened."

Problems are typically richer than our preconceived notions about how to solve them.