When a client or friend says they’re lost, I don’t tell them where to go, how to proceed or who they should talk to. That wouldn’t serve them! In fact, I challenge them—you're not literally, physically lost, but you’re feeling a sense of lostness and we have to decipher what that means for you. I want them to understand themselves, their experiences, and where they’re coming from. Only from that place can they make sense of their lostness, create new maps, and see the path forward.
Wirecutter, Eater, and more should all be accessible this way so that when I have a product I want to buy, or I’m in need of a restaurant to visit I don’t have to scroll through a list of articles with lots of options. Instead, I can just ask, “What’s a good place to eat in Fort Greene tonight?” and get a response that’s based on the latest Eater reviews in my neighborhood.
Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
Parents can help children get the most out of play and use it to strengthen the parent-child bond. But you don’t want to help too much. “Guiding play can be fine, but one needs to be careful to give enough room for the unknown to take shape,” Alcée says. Here’s what that means on a practical level.
what matters is who you are, not when you do it. If you're the right sort of person, you'll win even in a bad economy. And if you're not, a good economy won't save you. Someone who thinks "I better not start a startup now, because the economy is so bad" is making the same mistake as the people who thought during the Bubble "all I have to do is start a startup, and I'll be rich."
Screenwork has been hit by a Weimar scale inflation
Smart Questions are, typically, kind of dumb. And, just as typical, questions that might initially seem dumb or underinformed, or downright unintelligent, are the smartest way to learn stuff if you’re a journalist, an academic, or anybody else.
The biggest obstacle to our capacity to love each other is that we fear the asymmetry of giving and not receiving. But the heart is a muscle: you can make it bigger by training it, and the bigger it gets the less it cares for symmetry or saving face. Instead of repetitions of lifting weights, you train your heart with repetitions of *directing compassion at things*, like that friend who's less available to see you than they used to be, or the crush who ghosted you after several nice dates.
As an important aside, if you try to learn on your own, it can be really hard. You’ll hit some weird ruby error and give up. It’s important to have someone—a friend, a teacher at a coding bootcamp, etc.—that get you through these frustrating blocks.
David Whyte nailed this in *Constellations*, writing, “Ambition left to itself, like a Rupert Murdoch, always becomes tedious, its only object, the creation of later and larger empires of control.”