all the cliches of bad managers apply internally as well: “My manager doesn’t listen to me, keeps making promises of me he can’t keep, drives me too hard, never gives me a break, doesn’t praise me when I DO get things done, infinitely critical, is somehow both paranoid and clueless, is no help at all, keeps increasing my workload…”

Unpacking is a way of re-inflating all the little particulars that had to be flattened so your imagination could produce a quick preview of the future, like turning a napkin sketch into a blueprint

When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked. For example, in grad school I worked with lots of undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors. Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”

more likely, they weren’t picturing anything at all. They were just thinking the same thing over and over again: “Do I want to be a professor? Hmm, I’m not sure. Do I want to be a professor? Hmm, I’m not sure.” Why is it so hard to unpack, even a little bit? Well, you know how when you move to a new place and all of your unpacked boxes confront you every time you come home? And you know how, if you just leave them there for a few weeks, the boxes stop being boxes and start being furniture, just part of the layout of your apartment, almost impossible to perceive? That’s what it’s like in the mind. The assumptions, the nuances, the background research all get taped up and tucked away. That’s a good thing—if you didn’t keep most of your thoughts packed, trying to answer a question like “Do I want to be a professor?” would be like dumping everything you own into a giant pile and then trying to find your one lucky sock.

When you fully unpack any job, you’ll discover something astounding: only a crazy person should do it. Do you want to be a surgeon? = Do you want to do the same procedure 15 times a week for the next 35 years? Do you want to be an actor? = Do you want your career to depend on having the right cheekbones?

High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack because the upsides are obvious and appealing, while the downsides are often deliberately hidden and tolerable only to a tiny minority.

When you come down from the 30,000-foot view that your imagination offers you by default, when you lay out all the minutiae of a possible future, when you think of your life not as an impressionistic blur, but as a series of discrete Tuesday afternoons full of individual moments that you will live in chronological order and without exception, only then do you realize that most futures make sense exclusively for a very specific kind of person. Dare I say, a crazy person.

We tend to overestimate the prevalence of our preferences, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “false consensus effect”3. This is probably because it’s really really hard to take other people’s perspectives, so unless we run directly into disconfirming evidence, we assume that all of our mental settings are, in fact, the defaults. Our idiosyncrasies may never even occur to us.

whenever you unpack somebody, you inevitably discover something extremely weird about them. Sometimes you don’t have to dig that far, like when your friend tells you that she likes “found” photographs—the abandoned snapshots that turn up at yard sales and charity shops—and then adds that she has collected 20,000 of them. But sometimes the craziness is buried deep, often because people don’t think it’s crazy at all, like when a friend I knew for years casually disclosed that she had dumped all of her previous boyfriends because they had been insufficiently “menacing”

This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one: they don’t understand the craziness that they have to offer, nor the craziness that will be demanded of them, and so they spend their lives jamming their square-peg selves into round-hole jobs.

On the other hand, when people match their crazy to the right outlet, they become terrifyingly powerful. A friend from college recently reminded me of this guy I’ll call Danny, who was crazy in a way that was particularly useful for politics, namely, he was incapable of feeling humiliated.

Unpacking is easy and free, but almost no one ever does it because it feels weird and unnatural. It’s uncomfortable to confront your own illusion of explanatory depth, to admit that you really have no idea what’s going on, and to keep asking stupid questions until that changes.

Making matters worse, people are happy to talk about themselves and their jobs, but they do it at this unhelpful, abstract level where they say things like, “oh, I’m the liaison between development and sales”. So when you’re unpacking someone’s job, you really gotta push: what did you do this morning? What will you do after talking to me? Is that what you usually do? If you’re sitting at your computer all day, what’s on your computer? What programs are you using? Wow, that sounds really boring, do you like doing that, or do you endure it?

It’s no wonder that everyone struggles to figure what to do with their lives: we have not developed the cultural technology to deal with this problem because we never had to. We didn’t exactly evolve in an ancestral environment with a lot of career opportunities. And then, once we invented agriculture, almost everyone was a farmer the next 10,000 years. “What should I do with my life?” is really a post-1850 problem, which means, in the big scheme of things, we haven’t had any time to work on it.

If I am trying to be everything, will I end up being nothing? There’s a tension I incessantly carry: the pull between curiosity and mastery. I want to write beautifully till I run my own magazine. I want to draw till my pieces are installed in galleries. I want to understand the intricacies of chemical engineering till I become distinguishable in the industry. I don’t want to just dabble in these disciplines. No, I want to know them in depth, in profundity.

But what happens if I keep stretching myself across too many directions? Will I dilute my potential? Is there a point where breadth undermines depth?

Mastery is not claiming expertise, but in staying committed. In showing up again and again to each craft, even if progress feels slow with each, even if I am unsure where it will all lead. (I wasn't sure how to end this, but I had a thought: I wonder if, perhaps, instead of mastering each thing in isolation - engineering, writing, drawing - I can weave a larger net, one that forms nuance and connections among all of which, till it becomes something uniquely my own? Could that be its own kind of mastery? Well, only time will tell.)

The modern makers’ machine does not want you to create heavy things. It runs on the internet—powered by social media, fueled by mass appeal, and addicted to speed. It thrives on spikes, scrolls, and screenshots. It resists weight and avoids friction. It does not care for patience, deliberation, or anything but production. It doesn’t care what you create, only that you keep creating. Make more. Make faster. Make lighter. Make something that can be consumed in a breath and discarded just as quickly. Heavy things take time. And here, time is a tax.

even the most successful Substackers—those who’ve turned newsletters into brands and businesses—eventually want to stop stacking things. They want to make one really, really good thing. One truly heavy thing. A book. A manifesto. A movie. A media company. A momument.

At any given time, you’re either pre–heavy thing or post–heavy thing. You’ve either made something weighty already, or you haven’t. Pre–heavy thing people are still searching, experimenting, iterating. Post–heavy thing people have crossed the threshold. They’ve made something substantial—something that commands respect, inspires others, and becomes a foundation to build on. And it shows. They move with confidence and calm. (But this feeling doesn’t always last forever.)

No one wants to stay in light mode forever. Sooner or later, everyone gravitates toward heavy mode—toward making something with weight. Your life’s work will be heavy. Finding the balance of light and heavy is the game.4 Note: heavy doesn’t have to mean “big.” Heavy can be small, niche, hard to scale. What I’m talking about is more like density. It’s about what is defining, meaningful, durable.

Telling everyone they’re a creator has only fostered a new strain of imposter syndrome. Being called a creator doesn’t make you one or make you feel like one; creating something with weight does. When you’ve made something heavy—something that stands on its own—you don’t need validation. You just know, because you feel its weight in your hands.

It’s not that most people can’t make heavy things. It’s that they don’t notice they aren’t. Lightness has its virtues—it pulls us in, subtly, innocently, whispering, 'Just do things.' The machine rewards movement, so we keep going, collecting badges. One day, we look up and realize we’ve been running in place.

Why does it feel bad to stop posting after weeks of consistency? Because the force of your work instantly drops to zero. It was all motion, no mass—momentum without weight. 99% dopamine, near-zero serotonin, and no trace of oxytocin. This is the contemporary creator’s dilemma—the contemporary generation’s dilemma.

We spend our lives crafting weighted blankets for ourselves—something heavy enough to anchor our ambition and quiet our minds.

Online, by nature, weight is harder to find, harder to hold on to, and only getting harder in a world where it feels like anyone can make anything.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

if you say “my boss makes me crazy”, you will indeed think your boss is “making” you crazy. If you instead say “I am frustrated because I am wanting stability and consistency in this relationship” you may then think you can control your level of frustration and clearly address what it is you want. If someone else is making you crazy, there’s nothing you can do. If you control your feelings, you can take actions to change how you respond to causes. Words can be windows or they can be walls — they can open doors for compassion or they can do the opposite. NVC uses words as windows. Our language today uses them as walls. More on this later.

If I ask you to meet me at 6:00 and you pick me up at 6:30, how do I feel? It depends. I could be frustrated that you are late because I want to spend my time productively, or scared that you may not know where to find me, or hurt because I need reassurance that you care about me — or, conversely, happy that I get more time to myself.

It’s not enough to blame the feeling on the person whose actions triggered the feeling. That very same action might have inspired completely different feelings in someone else — or even in me, under different circumstances!

Incidents like the friend coming late may stimulate or set the stage for feelings, but they do not *cause* the feelings.

There is a gap between stimulus and cause — and our power lies in how we use that gap. If we truly understood this — the separation between stimulus and cause — and the idea that we are responsible for our own emotions, we would speak very differently.

We wouldn’t say things like “It bugs me when …” or “It makes me angry when”. These phrases imply or actually state that responsibility for your feelings lie outside of yourself. A better statement would be “When I saw you come late, I started to feel scared”. Here, one may at least be taking some responsibility for the feeling of anger, and not simply blaming the latecomer for causing such feelings.

the more we use our language to cede responsibility to others, the less agency we have over our circumstances, and the more we victimize ourselves.

NVC believes that, as human beings, there are only two things that we are basically saying: Please and Thank You. Judgments are distorted attempts to say “Please.”

NVC requires learning how to say what your needs are, what needs are alive in you at a given moment, which ones are getting fulfilled, and which ones are not.

You sacrifice your needs to provide for and take care of your family. Needs are not important. What’s important is obedience to authority. That’s what’s important. With that background and history we’ve been taught a language that doesn’t teach us how to say how we are. It teaches us to worry about what we are in the eyes of authority.

When our minds have been pre-occupied that way we have trouble answering what seems to be a simple question, which is asked in all cultures throughout the world, “How are you?” It is a way of asking what’s alive in you. It’s a critical question. Even though it’s asked in many cultures, people don’t know how to answer it because they haven’t been educated in a culture that cares about how you are.

The shift necessary requires being able to say, how do you feel at this moment, and what are the needs behind your feelings? And when we ask those question to highly educated people, they cannot answer it. Ask them how they feel, and they say “I feel that that’s wrong”. Wrong isn’t a feeling. Wrong is a thought.

When your mind has been shaped to worry about what people think about you, you lose connection with what’s alive in you.

The underlying philosophy of punishment and reward is that if people are basically evil or selfish, then the correctional process if they are behaving in a way you don’t like is to make them hate themselves for what they have done. If a parent, for example, doesn’t like what the child is doing, the parent says something like ”Say you’re sorry!! The child says, “I’m sorry.” The parent says “No! You’re not really sorry!” Then the child starts to cry “I’m sorry. . .” The parent says “Okay, I forgive you.”

Note, I think NVC is productive is for friendships and relationships, or anything where connection is the main goal, not for any work or organizations that primarily serve another mission.

NVC involves the following: 1) how we express ourselves to other people, 2) how we interpret what people say to us, and most importantly, 3) how we communicate with ourselves.

Some have suggested alternatives such as Compassionate Communication, Authentic Communication, Connected Communication.

One thing we read was a quote that I’ve known for years, and loved, from Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, who said that we can only understand our life backwards, but we’re forced to live it forwards. And I think that’s the confusion we all feel, is that we always learn too late. We go through things that are completely inexplicable and mysterious. And then years later, we realize.

She suddenly starts realizing how she is building an experience of relationships, and how all the paradoxes that you see specifically in the film show how she is trapped in one role in one relationship then takes on a completely different role in the next one—maybe even the role of the other partner in the first one. You’re on different sides of the fence in certain discussions, going forward. And you become a richer person through those sometimes painful experiences, a more whole person and perhaps a more accepting person in terms of accepting others.

There’s a great book by a British writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, which came out a few years ago, called Missing Out, where he says that, in the therapy room, what he experiences with people a lot is that he realizes that people live their whole life with this big, imagined part of themselves. All the what ifs that never happened. That relationship they think they might or should have had or would have in the future, if they only broke away from the relationship they were in. Or that job they’re going to start doing one day. And it actually becomes your self-perception and your feeling of identity. And, suddenly, life has passed. And that whole imagined self was also a part of who you were, but it was unspoken or unlived. And this is life.

I thought that was an interesting notion, the negotiation between the imagined self and the real self that plays out in time. That’s a big theme that I can make several films about, but this one was specifically through the character of Julie.

I don’t really believe that we can see ourselves fully. So much is subconscious. There’s so much history and so much memory that we can’t access.

That’s the feedback we’re getting from people who’ve watched the film, is that it’s okay to be ambivalent and feel that things are not in full order. If we can add a consoling notion around that, I think we’re good.

The idea in psychology of “good enough” can be fine. Maybe there is a life where not everyone becomes that unique snowflake that we are all raised to believe that we have to be to be anything. Maybe there is a place of acceptance in a simpler life, a less turbulent life, without feeling that we’re losing the progressivity of thought or humanity in our own personal life. Maybe the exterior appearance of that success is less interesting than fulfilling it on a more intimate level, in one’s personal life. I don’t know. These are big questions, and I don’t want to come off as pretentious. But I think you’re touching on something that we indirectly have talked about a lot in making this film. Julie is this slightly idealized child from early on. She has good grades. She got into medical school. And she feels this pressure to do something really special. That is complicated for her.

what if COVID allowed people to take that step that they had been yearning for, sometimes, to say that the meritocratic society that we live in—particularly in America but also in Norway, to a large extent—where we are feeling that we are so responsible for fulfilling the utmost potential of ourselves, and we carry that alone, that that is a quite a stifling notion for a lot of people? That’s quite a heavy burden to carry: to feel that if you don’t do the greatest thing you could do, you’re a loser.

When you’re enmeshed with someone, both their flaws and their positive qualities become your whole life. This is, I guess you could say, the downside of intimacy. Seen from afar, someone might look like a house you’d like to promptly move into—pretty, spacious, great wood floors. But when you’re actually living inside them the sound of construction coming from the upstairs window and the leaky ceiling make you crazy.

some people prefer to be bored in intimate relationships, and others prefer to be annoyed. I was noodling on it this morning, wondering why I'd always rather prefer to be annoyed.

would you rather be far enough away from someone to feel peace, or would you like to have your psyche entwined with theirs, with the downside of constantly being exposed to all their flaws?

In relationships, there’s some kind of balance you have to strike that’s personal to you—you want to be able to tolerate significant annoyance, because every person you can be truly intimate with is going to come with their own particular set of downsides, but you don’t want to end up in a state of permanent exasperation.

But people who are more organized and structured have a far greater number of internal partitions. It can hard for them to be as present, as soft and consuming and close.

Generally, the people who are most capable of expressing love are soupy, gushy, and disorganized. Their structurelessness can be unsettling—when I’m around them, I feel like I’m submerged in a warm and comforting swamp. But nevertheless a swamp!

When I was younger, I thought that love occurred as a result of comprehensible, desirable qualities. Like, I fell in love with him because he’s tall and beautiful and kind. In reality, I find that there’s some of that, but mostly we fall in love for reasons that have little to do with our partner’s virtue. It’s more that something about their way of being hooks onto us—their attachment style is similar to our mother’s, or the way they listen makes us feel deeply understood.

Romance is annoying. It exposes our vulnerabilities, our worst qualities, the patterns we like to pretend we’ve outgrown. Romance teaches you that what you claim to value is not what you actually value.

Their bad habits disturb any semblance of peace you once had. It’s relatively easy to remain calm around a pet or a child, because we don’t expect them to know better. But an adult knows better! How can it be that they are intelligent, capable, fully possessed of free will… and yet they use their free will to be annoying?

We are given aphorisms like “No one is perfect” and “relationships are hard.” We are given diagnoses like codependent and avoidantly attached and “the day-to-day entanglement of marriage is fundamentally opposed to the mystery that sustains sexual attraction.” Well, in trying to come up with my own theory of love, I’d like to submit: closeness is fundamentally annoying.

Closeness is annoying because it’s about the surrender of control.

I wanted to take care of everyone’s feelings. If I made them feel good, I would rewarded with their affection. For a long time, socializing involved playing a weird form of Mad-Libs: I wanted to say whatever you wanted to hear. I wanted to be assertive, but also understanding and reasonable and thoughtful.

I really took what I learned and ran with it. I wanted to master what I was bad at and made other people happy. I realized that it was: bad to talk too much about yourself good to show interest in other people’s hobbies, problems, and interests important to pay attention to body language my job to make sure that whatever social situation we were in was a delightful experience for everyone involved

I spent so many years of my life trying to live mostly in my head. Intellectualizing everything made me feel like it was manageable. I was always trying to manage my own reactions and the reactions of everyone else around me. Learning how to manage people was the skill that I had been lavishly rewarded for in my childhood and teens. Growing up, you’re being reprimanded in a million different ways all the time, and I learned to modify my behavior so that over time I got more and more positive feedback. People like it when you do X and not Y, say X and not Y. I kept track of all of it in my head and not in my body. Intellectualizing kept me numbed out, and for a long time what I wanted was nothing more than to be numbed out, because when things hurt they hurt less. Whatever I felt like I couldn’t show people or tell people I hid away. I compartmentalized, and what I put in the compartment I never looked at became my shadow.

So much of what I care about can be boiled down to this: when you’re able to really inhabit and pay attention to your body, it becomes obvious what you want and don’t want, and the path towards your desires is clear. If you’re not in your body, you constantly rationalizing what you should do next, and that can leave you inert or trapped or simply choosing the wrong thing over and over. "I know I should, but I can’t do it” is often another way of saying “I’ve reached this conclusion intellectually, but I’m so frozen out of my body I can’t feel a deeper certainty.”

It was so incredibly hard when people gave me negative feedback—withdrew, or rejected me, or were just preoccupied with their own problems—because I relied on other people to figure out whether everything was alright.

When I started living in my body I started feeling for the first time that I could trust myself in a way that extended beyond trust of my intelligence, of my ability to pick up on cues in my external environment.

I can keep my attention outwards, I don’t direct it inwards in a self-conscious way. It’s the difference between noticing whether someone seems to having a good time in the moment by watching their face vs agonizing about whether they enjoyed something after the fact. I can tell the difference between when I’m tired because I didn’t sleep well versus tired because I’m bored versus tired because I’m avoiding something. When I’m in my body, I’m aware of myself instead of obsessing over my state, and this allows me to have more room for other people.

in 2023, I switched gears to emphasize intimacy. Instead of statistical analysis and summative interviews, I sat next to individuals for hours, as they used one-off prototypes which I’d made just for them. And I got more insight in the first few weeks of this than I had in all of 2022

I’d been building systems and running big experiments, and I could tell you plenty about forgetting curves and usage patterns—but very little about how those things connected to anything anyone cared about.

I could see, in great detail, the texture of the interaction between my designs and the broader learning context—my real purpose, not some proxy.

Single-user experiments like this emphasize problem-finding and discovery, not precise evaluation.

a good heuristic for evaluating my work seems to be: try designs 1-on-1 until they seem to be working well, and only then run more quantitative experiments to understand how well the effect generalizes.

My aim is to invent augmented reading environments that apply to any kind of informational text—spanning subjects, formats, and audiences. The temptation, then, is to consider every design element in the most systematic, general form. But this again confuses aims with methods. So many of my best insights have come from hoarding and fermenting vivid observations about the particular—a specific design, in a specific situation. That one student’s frustration with that one specific exercise.

It’s often hard to find “misfits” when I’m thinking about general forms. My connection to the problem becomes too diffuse. The object of my attention becomes the system itself, rather than its interactions with a specific context of use. This leads to a common failure mode among system designers: getting lost in towers of purity and abstraction, more and more disconnected from the system’s ostensible purpose in the world.

I experience an enormous difference between “trying to design an augmented reading environment” and “trying to design an augmented version of this specific linear algebra book”. When I think about the former, I mostly focus on primitives, abstractions, and processes. When I think about the latter, I focus on the needs of specific ideas, on specific pages. And then, once it’s in use, I think about specific problems, that specific students had, in specific places. These are the “misfits” I need to remove as a designer.

Of course, I do want my designs to generalize. That’s not just a practical consideration. It’s also spiritual: when I design a system well, it feels like I’ve limned hidden seams of reality; I’ve touched a kind of personal God. On most days, I actually care about this more than my designs’ utilitarian impact. The systems I want to build really do require abstraction and generalization. Transformative systems really do often depend on powerful new primitives. But more and more, my experience has been that the best creative fuel for these systematic solutions often comes from a process which focuses on particulars, at least for long periods at a time.

Also? The particular is often a lot more emotionally engaging, day-to-day. That makes the work easier and more fun.

Throughout my career, I’ve struggled with a paradox in the feeling of my work. When I’ve found my work quite gratifying in the moment, day-to-day, I’ve found it hollow and unsatisfying retrospectively, over the long term. For example, when I was working at Apple, there was so much energy; I was surrounded by brilliant people; I felt very competent, it was clear what to do next; it was easy to see my progress each day. That all felt great. But then, looking back on my work at the end of each year, I felt deeply dissatisfied: I wasn’t making a personal creative contribution. If someone else had done the projects I’d done, the results would have been different, but not in a way that mattered. The work wasn’t reflective of ideas or values that mattered to me. I felt numbed, creatively and intellectually.

Progress often doesn’t look like progressIt often feels like I’m not making any progress at all in my work. I’ll feel awfully frustrated. And then, suddenly, a tremendous insight will drive months of work. This last happened in the fall. Looking back at those journals now, I’m amused to read page after page of me getting so close to that central insight in the weeks leading up to it. I approach it again and again from different directions, getting nearer and nearer, but still one leap away—so it looks to me, at the time, like I’ve got nothing. Then, finally, when I had the idea, it felt like a bolt from the blue.

Real life doesn't start tomorrow, or on the weekend. It doesn't start when you graduate, or when you land a job, or when you quit your job. It doesn’t start once you get a handle on your anxiety, or fix your sleep schedule, or finish all the tasks in your to-do list.

Real life is made of moments like this. It’s waking up with dread and clutching at your phone for relief. It’s being mildly frustrated at all your friends for the various ways in which they don’t understand you. Real life is wiping the lint from your dryer, it’s scrubbing the same pan clean for the hundredth time, it’s being surprised that even with all the fun of a friday night, you’re just as sad to say goodbye, just as sad as when you were a child.

We spend most of our time waiting, and very few precious moments feeling like we’ve finally arrived. We defer our willingness to bask in reality to tomorrow, and then the next day, and then the next, until we forget we ever deferred anything.

But what if you don’t need to wait until you’ve meditated for decades, what if you’re closer to that than you think? What if you were more often baffled by the fact that you’re still alive, if you began to ask of this moment, of every moment: what do you have to teach me?

You know that feeling you get when you hear the good news you’ve been waiting for, or when you’re so enthralled in conversation you forget that you haven’t checked your phone for hours, or when the rain has settled and you step into the forest and the freshness of the air wrests your lungs open and everything feels perfectly in place?

You’re inflight, you’re falling through the sky, everything feels half-complete, there is so much more you meant to do, there are so many things you’re behind on, so many things you haven’t said. I’m right there with you. This is it, the madness we were born into and have no choice but to face. Real life is more and more of this and then it’s over.

When you observe a human life from a far enough distance, all the trials and tribulations just become rounding errors.

Dostoyevsky said that to love someone means to see them as God intended, so why on earth shouldn’t you also be a ‘someone’? This makes me think that sometimes you have to try to look at yourself through the eyes of God: how tiny and lacking, yet how precious and important; how flawed and powerless, yet unique and loved.

There’s something very calming about believing that nobody cares about what you do, that you could just be whatever you want to be. It grants you a kind of unlimited confidence, like flooring the gas pedal on your free will. It’s liberating to think that you’re not special — not because you aren’t valuable, but because you aren’t as offensively powerful as you might think. Humility, or the simple act of focusing less on yourself without reducing your sense of self-worth, can be the ultimate source of peace.

I want to see, in hindsight, that misfortunes haven’t hardened my heart — I want to look back and see a survivor. I want to see that heartaches have not smothered my passion and that sadness was not able to keep me down for long.

You may be existentially “trapped” in the present, but your perspective doesn’t have to be. With enough distance from your own timeline, every mistake blurs into a minor miscalculation, and every letdown diminishes to insignificance. Even a bad memory, with enough time, will appear trivial — it might transform you but its colors will fade into a wistful sepia.

There’s a flipside to the wonder of childhood, though: things can be as terrifying as they are mesmerizing. In fact, when I think about childhood the feeling that usually comes up is not wonder, but terror. I was afraid of everything as a kid: of my parents dying, of burglars breaking into our apartment, of the dark and dirty hallways of my elementary school. Even the shows I loved would scare me: there was a character in dragonball z, his name was broly, and even to this day thinking about the image of his face sends the faintest shiver down my spine.1 This is why I always say I’m happy to have grown up: life is less scary now that I’m older, now that the world is more predictable.

These two things seem to come as a package deal: life as a child is both mesmerizing and terrifying. I think there is something fundamental here. It’s the same reason why when people take LSD, they will either describe it as the most blissful experience of their life, or the most harrowing—and often both. Someone asked recently whether babies are tripping all the time. I’m sure they are.

a child’s experience is an endless explosion of vividness. Slowly we start to make sense of the world, we start to notice repeating patterns, we start to establish boundaries between “me” and “you” and “this” and “that”, and we get better at predicting what will happen next. Life becomes a little more manageable, but a little more dull. Our ideas about experience harden into rigid stories we can’t shake.

There are two ways to make the world more mesmerizing: to seek out new and increasingly intense experiences, or to loosen the filters that make ordinary experience “ordinary”. You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving.

As the “am I ready?” question continues to ricochet off myself and others, I’m finally viewing it for what it is: a clever, creative way to procrastinate self-actualization. If you’re asking yourself whether you’re ready, or finding reasons why you aren’t, it’s a sign you have let the gap grow too wide between idea and action. Your mind is probably convincing you that there is some existential reason for that buffer, when in reality, you’re just scared to do a new thing wrong or to look weird doing it. That’s okay. Now that you’ve noticed your inaction, you can act. You are as ready as you’ll ever be, because ready-ness is not measured by thinking, it’s measured by starting.

If you keep waiting for permission from some external source long after anyone is responsible for giving it to you, your ideas and ambitions will whither while you become bitter that no one is letting you do what you wanted to do. But in the end: it’s your responsibility to give yourself permission. This doesn’t need to be daunting. It can be the most liberating epiphany of all to realize that you can start now.

are you ready? to be in the relationship? to start the business? to say i love you to your partner? to forgive the person you resent? to have the hard conversation? to tell the truth? to publish the piece? to admit you were wrong? to create the life you imagine? to do what scares you?

what I’ve leapt at before I felt ready has consistently lead to the most expansive journeys of my life. Pursuing jobs I was too young for. Applying for scholarships that seemed impossible to get. Reaching out to people that I had no business knowing.

The whole notion of needing to be ready is highly corrosive to action. Because how can we really measure ready-ness? What if the only measure of “being ready” is just… starting? Trying? Doing the thing. What if ready is something you prove to yourself you are while you’re making the attempt, instead of trying to prove it before you start? What if being ready is not something you can cognitively analyze, but something that can be only demonstrated through action.

The reframe I am now internalizing is that ready is a felt state you can consciously bring yourself to.

You can imagine what the version of you that is ready would feel like and fill yourself up with those feelings. Or to make it even simpler: you can just start. If it doesn’t work, you can ask why, integrate your learnings, and try a different way. Or move on. Or whatever. But action—action!—is the path to ready-ness, not more thinking.

limiting beliefs. Poor attempts at protecting me from some imagined danger. Blocks created by my mind, designed to keep my ideas inside me and keep my creativity away from the world—away from reaching you. I’m now weeding out this ready-ness block and seeding the belief that the ability to imagine is the only sign of ready-ness you need.

You can go back later to refine what you’ve done. But by then, you’re already in the act. You’ve done it instead of remaining stuck in thought. So, the next time you find yourself wondering if you’re ready: don’t. Instead: start. We become ready by trying, not by thinking. Because ready-ness is a question of boldness, and as Bradbury so eloquently reminds us: intellect doesn’t help you very much there.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.

At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game.

Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances.

To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others.

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Robert Pirsig’s definition of Static and Dynamic Quality:Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It’s an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.

Words can only approximate Quality, but never fully encompass it. A static thing can never fully capture a dynamic thing.

We create problems for ourselves by using static language (e.g. judgements) to capture a reality that is dynamic & ever changing — by mixing observations and evaluations.

The caveat to keeping your identity small is when you want to identify as a positive trait – “I’m a kind person” – so that you’re forced to live up to it, especially when this is an unchanging desire.

Gatekeepers could see themselves not only as talent hunters for their own organization, but also as managers of society’s collective supply of ambition. We could demand that they consider it a responsibility to waste as little of their applicants’ ambition as possible. That they strive to redirect and allocate that ambition wherever it is most needed.

In practice, there isn’t any single solution. Rejection is a facet of life, and everybody needs to figure out their own strategies to cope with it. The most I can offer is that it’s better when you’re aware of how it works. It isn’t enough to know, on an abstract level, that rejection is typically random and impersonal — but it helps.