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Like a finger trap, these desires for remedy plunge the user only further into the technological murk and its associated despair.

• I’m not here to say you should quit Twitter, or that no enjoyment remains in cavorting through the network. I’m only here to say, Twitter has no future, so please, enjoy it only and exactly for what it is — every decline is surfable — and do not disregard the alternatives to its timeline, when and if they appear.

You don't need to have an opinion on everything. It's perfectly reasonable to have no opinion on something that you haven't researched or don't understand.

Doing right by our users and our shareholders (including you) means embracing reality as it is.

The minute you start walking down a path toward a yak shaving party, it’s worth making a compromise. Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later.

By letting go, you’ve cleared up space for new quests. No more dozens of tabs open forever; you saved them, then let them go back into the ether. No perpetual thinking on an idea; you wrote it down, let your second brain remember for you.

you are procrastinating or being akratic or falling into perfectionism (closely related to procrastination), by deliberately overcomplicating something or trying to use fancy or shiny new techniques, which of course frequently lead to new subgoals because you aren’t familiar with them yet.

I think it’s a lot easier to actually pay attention and concentrate with someone when you’re working with something that’s as analog as a notebook. Being on an iPad or a laptop when you’re in-person – as much as I’d like to – can create a barrier between two people.

Writing is not the outcome of thinking, it's the place where thinking takes place. Only once your thoughts are out of your head can you begin to make sense of them.

Fifteen years from now sometimes seems like a million years from now but then I remember how quickly the previously fifteen years of life have flashed by and suddenly I’m terrified. It’s an absolutely wild variety of terror, this “oh goodness I only get so much time with these human beings while they’re young and what if I mess it all up” feeling.

Electronic keyboards came and went, but using them—lifeless, rickety, bereft of voice or vibration—was like cooking with earplugs in your nose.

The problem is that when it comes to sleep, unlike almost every other area of life, effort is not rewarded. In fact, it is actively punished. The more you try, the less you are likely to succeed.

Adoption is referred to as a primal wound by Nancy Verrier, a therapist specializing in adoption and separation research. She says that there is an indelible impact when the connection between a child and its biological mother is severed. The experience can manifest as a devastating loss, with impacts felt years into the future.

What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.

And while I do what I can to strive for good health and longevity, to stave off weakening muscles and receding bone, I have a mantra I insert into those reckless thoughts that try to derail me: I accept. I accept the marks and the loosening skin, the wrinkles. I accept my body and let go of the need to be perfect, look perfect, defy gravity, defy logic, defy humanity. I accept my humanity.

In Navajo culture, rug weavers would leave little imperfections along the borders in the shape of a line called *ch'ihónít'i*, which is translated into English as "spirit line" or "spirit pathway. The Navajos believe that when weaving a rug, the weaver entwines part of her being into the cloth. The spirit line allows this trapped part of the weaver's spirit to safely exit the rug.

Your attention is worth trillions of dollars for a reason: it might just be the most precious thing we own.

Part of the driving force behind many of these menus is chefs of color pushing back against the expectation that they must only cook the food of their families.

Y Combinator has more weapons than any other player in venture capital. No one else has such pronounced network effects, pricing power, and brand equity wrapped up in a single package.

I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.

You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.

Some parents argue that skipping screen time altogether is almost easier than budgeting it. It’s hard to say no to screens completely, but when a child gets used to the kind of rush that comes from using digital devices, they will learn to seek out the immediate gratification of a screen over the slow but more meaningful feedback of the real world.

It’s the flavor of ritual. It’s the taste of inclusion.

Drugs: do you do them? What do you think of them? – *Tom C. (Nottingham, UK)*

We all could use a healthier does of humility when we are too flush with great man hubris. The world is richer and more complicated than we give it credit for.

Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it's not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one. While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it's actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience.

By one estimate, 5 billion tons of carbon flow from plants to mycorrhizal fungi annually. Without help from the fungi, that carbon would likely stay in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the powerful greenhouse gas that is heating the planet and fueling dangerous weather. “Keeping this fungal network protected is paramount as we face climate change,” Dr. Kiers said.

There are now so few fires that there is double the number of false alarms each year in the US than genuine fires. The number of firefighters, however, has skyrocketed – primarily to meet medical demand.

You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.

New research shows that we judge future positive events as both farther away and shorter than negative or neutral ones, leading us to feel like a holiday is over as soon as it begins.

Each of us constructs our model of reality via the experiences, relationships and knowledge we encounter in our random walks through the world. Early in life, you’re eager to add on — to collect concepts and ideas and perspectives. It’s empowering to add tools to your tool chest, even if indiscriminately. After a while, though, it becomes more difficult to make changes and additions. You grow accustomed to the stuff you have and sensitive to your internal design. If your house is in a particular style, some additions just don’t fit. You don’t want to put that modern sofa in your old Victorian.

We think of certain kinds of challenges as *really hard* when they are, in fact, *completely impossible*. And then we drive ourselves crazy trying to deal with them – thereby distracting and disempowering ourselves from tackling the *real* really hard things that make life worth living.

The Musk School is as much about cultivating the individual executive’s brand as it is about running an actual company. Its practitioners see themselves as visionaries, and they can often point to the early success of their companies as evidence. But they also believe that the skills they perceive as having in one area are applicable elsewhere—in particular, the messy art of managing people.

There’s something magical about being big enough to have “big city” amenities (bike shares, public transport, bars, food music, etc..) while being small enough that there are not too many options for people to choose between.

any new technology is probably disruptive to *someone,* at some part of the value chain. The iPhone disrupted the handset business, but has not disrupted the cellular network operators at all, though many people were convinced that it would. (For all that’s changed, the same companies still have the same business model and the same customers that they did in 2006.) Online flight booking didn’t disrupt airlines much, but it was hugely disruptive to travel agents. Online booking (for the sake of argument) was sustaining innovation for airlines and disruptive innovation for travel agents.

The least successful people I know run in conflicting directions, are drawn to distractions, say yes to almost everything, and are chained to emotional obstacles.

Moving to Austin is the geographical equivalent of saying: “I don’t read the news anymore.” The people moving here are tired of others telling them what to think, which is why the people here are so much less likely to police your speech.

A truth that applies to almost every field is that it’s possible to try too hard, and when doing so you can get worse results than those who knew less, cared less, and put in less effort than you did.

Things you use for a significant fraction of your life (bed: 1/3rd, office-chair: 1/4th) are worth investing in.

Rushing through tasks and chores like we need to get to the next thing only creates an experience of life that blends together in a dull soup. But what if we could elevate the moments of our lives to something special, sacred, alive? What if cooking soup for dinner became a transcendent experience? A moment of transcendence is something each of us has experienced: when we feel incredibly connected to the world around us, when we lose our sense of separate self and feel a part of something bigger. It’s that moment when you’re at the top of a mountain looking with awe on everything around you, or looking up at the stars, or floating in the ocean, or having your breath taken away by a sunset or field of flowers. We can intentionally create these moments, with practice, in our everyday lives. As you’re doing everything on your list, as you’re washing the dishes or having a conversation, driving home or eating kale and beans … you can elevate that moment into one of transcendence.

This crash - to whatever extent it continues - may end up damaging many millions more lives than the ones in 2017/2018 simply because more people have been exposed to crypto through hucksters and celebrities telling them this was the future. And just like the rest of the startup world, the crypto industry massively overhired to deal with the rush of new money and excitement in the industry, with clearly no strategy to prepare for the thing that crypto is best known for - crashing.

When the company is the first to give a number, you always get the job, and you have a 50% chance of getting a high salary.

People are saying that value investing is dead. That Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are dead. They are not dead, and these ideas are not dead. They are timeless ideas. They are ideas that say that a business today is the present value of its future cash flows; that a business has a competitive advantage when there's something structural in its supply, or its brand, or its pricing power, or its ability to have a monopoly on intellectual property or government licensing. There's real things that make real businesses. And __the value that you provide to the customer is then in the pricing power that you have and in the margins that you make. And contrary to the scarcity of the word today, *profits* are a great measure of the value that you provide to people.__

In school, everything is planned for kids with strict rules. They’re constantly being evaluated and directed. They’re told what to do, what to think, and even what to wear! One survey found that the average kid has to follow twice as many restrictions as an active-duty Marine and an incarcerated felon.

Humans naturally copy the energy of the people they’re around. As a result, you can shape the conversation by *how* you say what you say.

Video games are essentially simulations. They give kids a chance to practice solving complex problems that mirror real life. The thinking skills they need to win games set them up for success as adults.

Research shows that kids who play games to escape real life (that is, to block unpleasant emotions or avoid confronting real-life stress) have a very difficult time translating their game skills to real life. This approach tends to increase depression, worsen social isolation, and in cases lead to addiction.

All too often, a metaphorical pillory is erected upon the Twitter platform, to unrelentingly bludgeon the Outrage Target of the Day™ with rotting projectiles, no clear purpose or goal in sight. Why ask for an apology if you won’t accept it when it is given? What correction can be made for a bad tweet besides removing the tweet? Is the goal to actually, truly address the specific offensive tweet and generally discourage online sexism and misogyny — or simply to stoke the fires by which the online rage mob can light their torches?

We each have a noise in our heads, an agenda and something urgent that’s grabbing our attention. And so, the amount of interest you receive (or don’t receive) has little to do with how interesting you are and a lot to do with how the people you seek to serve have organized their priorities long before you got there.

Productivity is a measure of the value of what we ship in the time we’ve got to invest. It’s not measured in drama.