These aren’t polished essays or tidy aphorisms. They’re scraps I’ve carried around this month—half-heard thoughts, borrowed lines, sudden recognitions—that refused to be forgotten. Zuihitsu literally means “following the brush,” and while my version is shorter and scrappier than the classical form, the impulse feels the same: to catch what drifts across the mind before it dissolves.
They’re not meant to be a system or a manifesto, just a trail of mental breadcrumbs. If any resonate, keep them. If none do, that’s fine too—next month’s batch will be different. For the full, ever-growing collection, grab the the fortune file.
- History doesn’t turn on hunger. It turns on humiliation.
- Transparency loses to power unless failure becomes unaffordable.
- Drawing is putting a line around an idea.—Henri Matisse
- The Earth was made round so we do not see too far down the round.
- The true effort is not creating rules, but creating the scarcity that forces excellence and ethical choice.
- Understanding without integration is entertainment.
- There’s a lot of narcissism in self-hatred.—David Foster Wallace
- Ninety percent of problems can be solved by a shower, eating, sleeping or relaxing.
- Wisdom emerges in the space between voices.
- People don’t have audiences, audiences have people.
- Vacation homes feel like wealth. They’re actually lifestyle anchors that bleed cash.
- If you run into one asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.
- Competent performers demonstrate, they don’t declare.
- After financialization, the bottleneck isn’t capital, it is talent.
- As a rule of thumb, everyone really good in infosec has a mental illness, and when you talk to them, you have about 30s to figure out which one or else you’re in danger.—Gwern
- Everyone may have a book inside them, but some should keep it inside them.
- Risk is not about predictability. It is about vulnerability.
- There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.—Frank Chimero
- It’s always easier to grab a tool and bypass the mess of coordination, even if that means doing more and doing it alone.—Frank Chimero
- [Y]ou can’t get enough of what you don’t need.—Frank Chimero
- Practice doesn’t make perfect. It makes it permanent.
- You just have to do it. You don’t have to dig it.
- Discipline equals freedom.—Jocko Willink
- People write because no one listens.
- Il n’est pas besoin d’espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer. Roughly, you don’t need hope at the outset or success to persevere.
- If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.—Meister Eckhart
- Your choices don’t have to make sense to anyone else.
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