Substrate

Read for joy and joy alone. That’s always the answer.

So if you feel lost or directionless, instead of making yourself pick a direction while lost at sea, consider drifting for a bit. Try things out. Open the unopened doors. Say yes to a few more things. And then when you feel the winds turning, set your sail to what feels right, indisputably and confidently right. It might take more time, and you might feel behind sometimes, but when you finally set off, you won’t need to look back.

The easiest way to do something big may be to never notice just how big it is in the first place, and start chipping away.

I think this is a powerful and motivating problem-solving tactic: assume that a solution exists somewhere out there, and do things that will increase the chances of you stumbling into one such solution in your exploration through the space of possibilities.

In this new and different kind of work, I need to spend more time thinking and less time making, and tweak my internal measurement of what feels like productive work. It’s gonna feel weird at first. But the things I make need to be the right things, and the best way to ensure that’s the case is to spend more time thinking about what I put on that queue.

This is how you build a truly valuable personal network – not just by knowing the people who are already successful, but more importantly, by helping the right people before anybody else will.

I’ve both experienced firsthand and heard from others that following this advice – working with the people who bet on you – is more valuable than simply working at the right company with the right brand name on the right project.

I came to view them as expressions of creativity, as artworks that one could wear and live with.

Our hearing evolved to hear even the faintest birdsong. And why? Because birdsong is a primary indicator of habitats prosperous to humans.

I would begin, instead, by tapping into our well of feelings to see what makes us feel peaceful, feel sublime, feel alive, to see what fills us with wonder and hope. I would begin, on other words, by tapping into what is beautiful.