*Wirecutter* helped popularize a genre of lucrative recommendation content—where the site gets a cut of every purchase you make after you click on “affiliate” links to Amazon or other partner sites—and spawned a series of copycats. If you’ve ever searched online for the “best” *anything*, there’s a good chance that *Wirecutter*’s DNA was in almost every single article you found.
Here's a simple, actionable framework to get you started:
A multipreneur is someone who creates multiple products per year, with the aim of creating a company that creates companies.
With every decade children have become less free to play, roam, and explore alone or with other children away from adults, less free to occupy public spaces without an adult guard, and less free to have a part-time job where they can demonstrate their capacity for responsible self-control. Among the causes of this change are a large increase in societal fears that children are in danger if not constantly guarded, a large increase in the time that children must spend in school and at schoolwork at home, and a large increase in the societal view that children’s time is best spent in adult-directed school-like activities, such as formal sports and lessons, even when not in school.
millions of men lack access to that kind of power and success — and, downstream, cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood: Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious and directionless.
The pendulum had swung so far in the opposite direction that my drive had evaporated in thin air. This only led to more self-loathing—I began to view myself as soft, lazy, and a waste of potential. Underneath these subconscious attacks was shame and existential dread. What if I’m going to be insignificant and just fade out?
• Stay firm and unwavering, like you are being deposed and cannot change a single word of your answer every time it’s asked.
When we’re actually engaged in the flow of fascinating work, we don’t think in these terms. The task at hand fills our mind. The task itself is what keeps us up all night, not some extracted story of purpose.
David Lee Roth, the band’s lead singer in those early years, published an autobiography in 1997, titled *Crazy from the Heat,* in which he claimed that, *actually*, the bowl of curated candy had an entirely functional purpose: it was a quick way to see if the venue had actually read the whole contract, line by line.
“Edge City”, a term a friend and I use to talk about living on the edge of what’s normal, surrounded by others who are into weird, edgy stuff.
Aim a laser pointer at the moon, then move your hand the tiniest bit, and it’ll move a thousand miles at the other end. The tiniest misunderstanding long ago, amplified through time, leads to piles of misunderstandings in the present.
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
To build a creative environment, incentivize long-term thinking and experimentation. Making room for failure opens the door to much greater success.
The trusted advisor, with our permission, can simply watch and analyze the “digital exhaust” from our activities to develop deep insight into who we are and what is important to us.
Alda said in his interview: “If I have a difficult thing to understand, if there’s something I think is not going to be that easy to get, I try to say it in three different ways. I think if you come in from different angles you have a better chance of getting a three-dimensional view of this difficult idea.”
In the future, anything that’s used as a reference should become a chat bot. 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.
There aren't many hard-and-fast rules of time management that apply to everyone, always, regardless of situation or personality (which is why I tend to emphasise general principles instead). But I think there might be one: you almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.
In my book, big things are only worth committing to if the answer to the question “would you do this thing even if no one was watching?” is an immediate and unequivocal yes.
I’ve watched far too many friends flounder once they attain freedom for me not to mypothesize (Molly hypothesis) that this is an American culture problem writ large. After all, our Declaration of Independence says life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — but it gives basically no instructions beyond that. Any good editor would have told the founding fathers to go back and add more detail, for the love of god.
The point relevant to innovation overall is that the path that leads to discoveries, the ones that are most interesting to us, often are wildly circuitous and completely unpredictable.
that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect— between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.
I would add that if you don’t regularly feel utterly confused, if you don’t occasionally feel like you’re treading just above water, if you don’t ever feel misunderstood, then you probably aren’t living *in* life — you’re just observing it.
This means not waiting to find your story arc, but rather recognizing that there are stories that pop up which you can opt into if you recognize them and have the right skills and virtues. It is about being prepared for the call to adventure, and cultivating the ability to recognize it, rather than believing we can direct our lives from the perspective of some knowable, ultimate mission.
Roam the edge of practices, where they permeate several trends and communities, creating gateways between worlds of ideas; push the boundaries of knowledge by connecting seemingly unrelated ideas; direct your curiosity towards questions that haven’t even been formulated yet.
The self-centered voice of the ego has to be quieted before a person is capable of freely giving and receiving love.
Writing produces clarity of thought, because half-processed thoughts cannot create coherent writing. Writing out your fears turns possible "what ifs" into realistic outcomes.
You can choose to focus on your career. At that level, candidly, it will require support from your significant other, understanding from your family, and may affect your health. You may also need to make so much money that you can afford to support aspects of your domestic life via child care, personal trainers, elderly care, and other support. Do this on purpose, because you are in a zero-sum competition with people who are willfully sacrificing and find great joy in having a singular focus.
The best predictor of success for a startup is if people:
*Polyptoton*
So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of *extreme interestingness –* moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist.
The viability of AI-first products as stand-alone companies will rely on data moats, privacy preferences for consumers and enterprises, developer ecosystems, and GTM advantages.
as we age, our comfort with creative expression declines. We’re discouraged by the learning curve of creative skills and tools, by our tendency to compare ourselves to others, and by the harsh opinions of critics. As Picasso famously quipped, “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.”
The English poet Willam Blake described these thresholds as “doors between the known and unknown.” My daughter's birth is like a towering gate looming over me, quickly approaching and ready to swallow me. As I pass through, a part of me will die and another will emerge on the other side. With both feet firmly planted on the ground facing this certainty, my body is flooded with emotions—anxiety, fear, sadness, grief, excitement—because I treasure the road I’ve traveled, appreciate who I’ve become, and wonder how things will unfold.
Becoming or creating something new isn’t always a cake walk filled with rainbows, unicorns and lollipops—the path is often littered with darkness, solitude, and inner demons. But waiting for us beyond that shadowy road are new lessons, skills, creations, identities, and capacities, such as empathy and compassion.
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.”
Over the course of the potty training weekend, my husband and I repeated the goal to my son what felt like hundreds of times — and it wasn’t just “poop and pee in the potty” — he’d known he was supposed to do that for months now and that hadn’t motivated him. The goal now was to keep his underwear clean and dry. We reminded him constantly that to do that, he’d have to tell us when we had to go. Trust your child to do that even if you think they won’t — kids this age don’t like to be forced to do *anything*.
For years, science and conventional wisdom have stated unequivocally that looking at a device — like a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or television — before bed is akin to lighting years of your natural life on fire, then letting the flames consume your children, your community, and the very concept of human progress. Simply Google “screens before bed” and you’ll find thousands of articles, many from higher-education institutions and furious British people (they seem the most worked up about this issue as a nation). The message is clear: The blue light emitting from your devices is destroying your natural melatonin reserves, altering your circadian rhythms, and making you ugly. Watching TV or TikTok before bed is giving you headaches and making you confused, leading to depression, diabetes, cancer, and early death. If your offspring opt for the same crutch, they will never achieve greatness.
I'm of the camp that unpursued ideas are worth zero dollars. (Maybe less than zero, since they are occuyping brain space.)
We learned during our first year that to our surprise, 80% of our users were business travelers. This led to our first pivot, where we started to focus on business travelers exclusively.
We are all in control of how we experience time. We can let time happen to us OR we can make time work for us.
Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you. Most famous people go *off-script* early, usually in more than one way.