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A few years ago I realized that if I’m too busy to take something on, I shouldn’t say “I don’t have the time”. In fact, I often do have the time. It’s not that hard to squeeze in some extra time for someone. What I don’t have – and what I can’t squeeze in – is more attention. Attention is a far more limited resource than time. So what I should say is “I don’t have the attention”. I may have 8 hours a day for work, but I probably have 4 hours a day for attention.

One summer, a guy wrote me out of the blue asking if he could intern for me. His email was great – clear, thoughtful, kind, inviting, confident but not pushy, and not too long (but long enough to say what he had to say without leaving anything out). He was studying at Harvard Business School and was going to be back in Chicago that summer. He asked if he could swing by and say hi. His email made it easy for me to say yes. So he did, and we had a great session. We spent maybe an hour or so together. I learned about his background, what kind of stuff he was interested in, what he wanted to learn, what he could teach us, etc. Then we riffed on a few ideas. It was natural, flowing, effortless. Really promising.

I realized I had the time. Every day is the same 24 hour cycle. Every workday around 8 hours. Surely I could have found even 20 minutes a day to work with him. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find the time. I couldn’t find the attention — especially sustained attention. My mind fills up with a few key projects and that’s it. I’m absorbed by those. That’s where my attention is. Had I made 20 minutes here and there for him, I’d be physically present in that moment, but mentally I’d be elsewhere. And that’s not fair to either of us.

Your comment actually suggests that your instincts tell you those things are not as valuable, but you might just be following habit and dopamine loops at the current moment. Which I guess is to say that GP's "follow your instincts" can also be as difficult as "set goals and hit them", just in different ways.

n00bdragon with a comment about the behavior of Grok and LLMs in general: LLMs are just bias engines. That’s literally what they do. That’s how they work. They find patterns (biases) and replicate them. Not all biases are bad. Sometimes you want a machine that can find biases so that you can question them. Sometimes you want a machine that can replicate biases, because assuming the way things have been done is the way they should be done again is a handy rational starting point. Hopefully it becomes pretty clear to the next generation that social structures and facts are no place for these things. These are areas that require judgement, which is the exact opposite of a bias, and something that LLMs simply aren’t designed to provide.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start with an anonymous comment from that same point. this time in response to a comment separating the violence of the murder from the company’s practices: The problem is that this framing can be perceived to depict that it’s only wrong to violently murder people, but it’s just a neutral act of business to functionally kill millions of people by setting up a systemic denial of life-saving service that they’re actively paying the company to provide. Why is the violent murder of one person morally more offensive than slowly murdering millions more?

comfort foods that make us sick, entertainment that numbs us into forgetting what we actually want, purchasing decisions that promise to solve problems we can't even name. We scroll when we could be reading. We busy ourselves to postpone making meaning. We perform productivity instead of engaging with what's right in front of us.

Saying no to someone I used to say yes to — then sitting in the awkward space where no one celebrated my boundaries. No justification, no quick repair. Just the rawness of not being the person who pleases. And finding out that I could live with it.

I came to see I’m more resilient than I thought, and the world is larger than I ever imagined.

Walking away from a title, a platform, a role that once made me important — and waking up the next morning with no one asking how I am, no one needing me. Just myself and the dull throb of identity withdrawal.

I'm not suggesting you seek out suffering for its own sake or turn discomfort into another performance of self-improvement. I'm talking about something more fundamental — the willingness to stop shrinking in the face of difficulty, to stop making every uncomfortable feeling into evidence that things are wrong.

Most people treat discomfort like a problem to solve rather than information to receive.

The resistance to starting that project isn't always procrastination — it might be the friction of a work that holds meaning.

The practice isn't complicated. Try this: sit with the feeling of wanting to check your phone without checking it. Eat something nourishing that doesn't taste like pleasure.

get into the space between the feeling and your reaction to the feeling. This is where choice is.

The territory beyond your comfort zone isn't a place you visit occasionally when you're feeling brave. It's where life is actually happening. Everyone else is still trying to control their experience, still believing that the right combination of circumstances will finally deliver them from struggle.

When you feel the pull to escape - from the conversation, the feeling, the moment of truth - what is that urge really trying to protect you from discovering about yourself?

How many times have you mistaken the call to stay for the permission to leave, interpreting your discomfort as evidence you're in the wrong place rather than the right one?

This isn't about becoming someone who enjoys difficulty. It's about becoming someone who doesn't let difficulty make decisions for them. Someone who has learned to distinguish between the voice that protects and the voice that imprisons.

Your body knows before your mind catches up. There's a particular quality of avoidance that feels different from regular procrastination — it's more like watching yourself walk around a hole in the ground, pretending it's not there while your entire route gets shaped by where you refuse to step.

resistance isn't a wall to be knocked down or a problem to be solved. It's information. It's your psyche pointing directly at the place where you've decided you end and something else begins. It's the exact spot where you're most invested in staying who you think you are.

The invitation isn’t to become fearless — that’s another performance — it’s to get curious about what you’re protecting by staying afraid. What identity are you maintaining by not touching this thing? What story about yourself gets to stay intact as long as you keep circling?

Most of what we resist doing holds grief just beneath the surface. We're mourning the version of ourselves that gets to remain small and safe and uncomplicated. We're grieving the luxury of not knowing what we're capable of. That grief doesn’t mean stop — it just means something old in you is being asked to end

the thing you're avoiding isn't usually as difficult as the elaborate system you've built around it. The email doesn't get longer the more you wait to write it. The conversation you've been dreading takes fifteen minutes. The project that feels impossible has a first step that takes an hour.

Your resistance has its own ecology. It feeds on distance and abstraction. It grows stronger when you think about it. In reality, it’s more like a shadow — one that only exists when you’re not looking directly at it.

turn around the way you might approach a spooked animal — curious, present, not trying to fix or conquer anything.

This is about discovering that you can be afraid and still show up. You can be uncertain and still take a step. You can feel like you're about to fall apart and still send the email, have the conversation, start the thing.

The change isn't in the doing — it's in being willing to be transformed by it. It's in letting yourself discover that you're bigger than you thought, stranger than you imagined, more resilient than your protective mechanisms would have you believe

It’s the trembling before your next becoming.

What you're avoiding isn't just a task or a conversation or a project. It’s the version of you that stops waiting to be more ready than this. It's the end of the story where you're too afraid to find out what happens next

Because “stupid” is a pretty stupid term, I should probably take a minute here to describe what I mean. It’s not really a matter of raw IQ, and educational achievement only partially captures it. Stupid people are those who don’t understand what is happening around them and have no interest in actually finding out. Active ignorance would be another way of putting it, but “stupid” just sounds better. Despite being very well informed about electrons and such, a competent chemical engineer with a master’s degree could be very stupid indeed if he/she still believes that trickle down economics is a real thing.

you gotta feel for them: You know how unpleasant it is to feel like you don’t understand what everyone else is talking about, to have things explained to you twice, to feel like your opinions don’t matter and that you’ve been written off. And knowing that, it’s not far to imagine what a light in the darkness it must seem when someone who is just like you comes in and changes everything.

But see, not everybody was thinking that Hillary Clinton was an alien, that global warming was a Chinese hoax and that what America needed most of all was a plywood wall stretching from Texas to California. Only the stupid people were. And suddenly, in an instant, the most powerful man on earth was thinking just like them. With his clueless smirk and unstoppable rise, he turned people whose stupidity made them feel like nobody into people who felt like everybody.

That’s why he’ll never lose him. Because it was never about what he did or didn’t do. All that stuff is very confusing and the Stupid-American community isn’t interested in the details. They love him for who he is, which is one of them, and because he shows them every day that Stupid-Americans can reach the social mountaintop.

There’s this story we tell ourselves over and over and over again in this country: A new group of immigrants arrive or emerges and everyone else dumps on them. They face discrimination and miserable conditions but they persevere: They work hard, they organize, they assimilate to America and America assimilates to them, they grow, they contribute, they become proud of their new hyphenated selves and then one day, they break that last barrier. This is a story we can tell without words. This is a story we feel. This story is who we are. It’s in there so deep that you almost find yourself rooting for Stupid-Americans.

Low-IQ stupidity might still be spread across both sides of the political aisle, but willful ignorance — the dogmatic cultish belief that loudmouths’ opinions are on equal ground with facts and evidence presented by informed experts — is the entire basis of the MAGA movement. A regular stupid person might say, “Well, I don’t know anything about vaccines, so I better listen to my doctor, who is highly educated and well-informed on the subject.” An out-and-proud Stupid-American says “I don’t know anything about vaccines either, so I’m going to listen to a kook who admits that a worm ate part of his brain, because I can’t understand the science but I can understand conspiracy theories.”