Collecting these little ideas has become a major focus. Here’s this month’s installment.
- You can’t be what you can’t imagine, and imagination is often limited by our sight, or vision.
- He who cannot howl will not find his pack.—Charles Simic
- Most deliberate misinformation from authorities—especially in places that are mid-range in terms of institutional trust and strict licensing—comes from omission, not saying the truth, rather than outright lying.
- You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you would like them to go.”—Jeannette Rankin
- People are broken, technologies are broken, cosmologies are broken, gods are broken — everything is broken.
- The internet, like bureaucracies, homogenizes.
- A weak heart breaks more easily.
- Reality is a very subjective affair.—Vladimir Nabokov
- Asking for help is a great way of getting help. If you are unsure about how to help, start with little things.
- Thinking is not experiencing.
- Meditation is not about turning a human being into a stone. It is about turning a stone into a human being.
- Our emotions are not a problem. Our denial and misperception of them is what makes them look like problems.
- Secrets are things you (or others) don’t know. Mysteries are things nobody knows.
- We haven’t come anywhere close to scraping the bottom of the barrel yet.
- It is easier to meditate than be good.
- The better you know someone, in other words, the higher the stakes of your relationship, the harder it is to reveal the deepest and strangest things about yourself.
- It’s a large world, we’re never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented, what we feel has always already been felt, again and again, without beginning or end.—Garth Greenwell
- I don’t know where we are going, but I know exactly how to get there.
- Science is being; philosophy is meaning.
- The difference between magical realism and science fiction might be whether you went to college and what you majored in.
- Life is a near-death experience.—George Carlin
- The heart of discrimination (against people) is dehumanization. The heart of discrimination (against ideas) is reality testing.
- Privilege is synonymous with apathy.
- Never make important decisions when you’re tired, emotional, distracted, or in a rush.
- Never let anyone define the problem for you.
- Seek out information from someone as close to the source as possible, because they’ve earned their knowledge and have an understanding that you don’t.
- Be less busy. Keep a learning journal. Reflect every day.
- Act as you would want an employee to act if you owned the company.
- Intimacy at scale is an oxymoron.
- Be faithfully present. Don’t ask for a lot; don’t demand attention; but be comfortingly, reassuringly there.
- Bureaucracies by their nature seek to standardize which fosters homogeneity.
- People are magicians and can self-hypnotize themselves into any delusion.
- “What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”―Ursula K. LeGuin
- Find ways to say yes to people that matter to you and no to those that don’t.
- Most systems get worse as they scale.
- How do you avoid emergent sclerosis in the mental models we build?
- We often forget that what we know of the world is entirely dependent on our view, our vision of the world, which is possible to evolve and transform into inspiring aliveness, or to stagnate and atrophy into sinkholes of cynicism.—Alex Grey
- autonomy, when you can decide both rules and exceptions.
- Price isn’t everything.
- To speak truth is to create falsehood.
- Our present era of decimated attention demands contraction and diminishment.
- Underneath your tattoos you’re still a mainstream cunt.
- This person was a deluge of words and a drizzle of thought.
- Be confident enough in your vision to commit to it.
- Pretending to be above and beyond politics is by itself a political position; in adopting it, one has aligned with the state and sided with the powerful.
- What is invisible might as well be dark.
- One can journey to the end of Earth and the edge of time, but never leave the narrow corridors of prejudice.
- When in doubt, nuke the whole thing and start over.
- America is a terrible place to be stupid.
- “Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.”—Pablo Picasso
- Make more and better with less.
- Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse.
- Trivialise what you do, or lower the stakes.
- Two out of three: 1) KNOWLEDGE: Will I learn something? 2) FUN: Is it fun? 3) MONEY: Is it financially worthwhile?
- Conflict provides information.
- When you have power, you don’t have to talk about what you can do. You do it.
- Who, or what, is laying eggs in your brain?
- Suffering less? Then, you’ll focus more on what remains.
- Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an email.
- Most people overestimate what they can do in one year, and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
- Everybody’s ideas seem obvious to them.
- We all underestimate our ability to massively change our life when it’s gone off track. Do things differently. Do what scares you.
- There’s a benefit to being naïve to the norms of the world — deciding from scratch what seems like the right thing to do, instead of just doing what others do.
- To say something means it’ll be misheard, misunderstood or misrepresented to others.
- Don’t drink poison in the hope the other guy gets sick.
- Few great performances happen without great audiences.
- Know how to win or know how to stop.
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