The towers from the garden steps in Pacific Fair, Gold Coast. Two small observations have been rattling around in me this week, picked up from two unrelated quarters of my life. I want to resist the…

A number of people seem to freak out when I write a piece like this, but it’s a huge mistake to define ourselves by what we’re against, and darkness is not all that exists in the world. And we are…

I thought I was choosing between two women. Really I was running each future to its ending, to be sure I'd never be wrong—which is how you stay out of your own life.

The Law

Sometimes I'm fast-smart and sometimes I'm slow-smart (the rest is an uninteresting morass of confused incompetence). The fast-smart part is talent. I can't really account for it. The slow-smart part…

🔊 Listen to this post Tonight I found myself thinking about a comet. Not a metaphorical one. Halley’s Comet, the old celebrity of the sky, the bright visitor that swings through our neighborhood so…

Gifting can be fulfilling. The gifting person almost always gains something as much as the receiver of our present. Many of our actions are driven by motivation. Gifting is also one of them. Seeing…

Art is stealing. Stealing means blending your sources into something new: an artistic smoothie. Not that I consider my writing “art,” but here are 7 writers I’ve stolen from: #1. James Altucher. He’s…

Stating the obvious is surprisingly useful . Most of your knowledge lives below the threshold of conscious awareness, so it’s possible for a piece of writing to remind you of what you already know.…

Salty is not the opposite of sweet. They are separate receptors, separate dials, and salted caramel exists because you can turn up both at once. Most 'balance' advice is secretly slider-thinking. The…

When I was growing up, someone close to me labelled people. My brother was the creative one, the brave one. And by comparison, I was not, even though I wanted to be. One afternoon, they flipped to a…

The title for this post came from an X post by Ryan Singer , former lead designer at Basecamp for ~20 or so years. It got my attention because it answers “but where does quality come from?” so well.…

you are being rewarded for your purity and diligence. ( When won't it end ?) How can a Doorknob have that much energy — (you're ready to make That Decision .) we know just enough to be really…

George Musser, writing for Nautilus, ponders the nature of coincidence, particularly the more “out there” instances. Read about his repeated encounters with another backpacker, as he…

What is the ideal human being? Some people might say it's a rockstar. Some would claim it's a philanthropic billionaire. Others would answer that a genius doctor-scientist is the ideal. But when we…

I’m back to thinking about constraints. This time, Terry Godier’s great video The Feeling Music Used to Give You (hat tip to Robert). Having what amounts to an infinite library of background music…

I’m dating these references, but it’s to make a point. What’s happened in society when there are no more leading characters like Inspector Clouseau, Maxwell Smart, and my personal favorite,…

Alien Message To Mankind: “Do You Wish That We Show Up?” Each one of you wishes to exercise your free will and experience happiness. Your free will depends upon the knowledge you have of your own…

Work is inseparable from the human experience. It is the context in which we pour much of our energy and develop dimensions of our character that distinguish us within our communities. Work makes…

Why not? You dare not approach the woman you love, after all. You lurk in the shadows, convince […]

how groups make choices they can respect

Why envy never delivers what it promises, and always finds a new target.

By Allison K Williams “My story doesn’t have one climactic moment!” wailed a frustrated essayist. “How am I supposed to arrange all these pieces in my collection if not…

for how this all came to be? It’s not so interesting a story after all. You might imagine some writer, bored, or perhaps half-mad, but in that way wherein the line between madness and genius is so…

asserted without evidence. i have been tinkering with a mental model of taste as it relates to creating works of excellence. here are the explananda over which i'd like my model to emit adequate…

Pretending you are clever by disregarding what was plainly meant is just dishonesty.

Alongside emergent organizing (which I also have a bone to pick with), there has been a lot of talk about “abundance mindset.” It never sat very well with me. I tried in 2024 to make it my phrase of…

Other than earlier's post, it's been a while since I wrote.A funny thing happens when you get out of the habit. Your next post—those next words you plan to publish, grow larger in…

A reflection on art, authenticity, self-worth, and the power of embracing imperfections through creative self-expression. The post Stop Performing. Start Creating. appeared first on Eric Sandroni.

Ideas, likes matter, cannot be created or destroyed. Only rearranged.

Friendly Faces When I was a child, it was usually obvious who the authority figures were. The teacher was the authority. The police officer was the authority. The doctor was the authority. The…

The itch . It was where trade winds converged, ships were becalmed , and sailors lost their minds. The word came to me today. If life is a voyage, then time in the US is my doldrums. Stranded,…

While resilience takes us far in life, being antifragile takes us further. Here's what being antifragile means, and how you introduce it into your life.

AI agents can lower the cost of trying something. That doesn't automatically make it worth doing.

I've been thinking, and thinking, my worst habit and my greatest gift. A thought is a spiral. That isn't a bad thing; it's a beautiful, chaotic kind of motion. But you have to learn to stop it in…

Spider-Man started in a comic book. Nowadays you’ll find Spider-Man in big budget movies, stage shows, theme parks, children’s books, halloween costume contests, popular memes, backpack…

Listen to this post: Memory is most commonly understood to be something like a computer hard drive. Experience is stored by the brain like a computer writes to a disk. When memory fails, it is a…

Beware anyone who says they only want equality. Equality is undefinable and the only kind you can manufacture is the downward kind — snapping off whatever stands tall. Under 'make us equal' is an…

Strategies to protect people we are writing about and to protect ourselves By Lynette D’Amico When I started writing my memoir in essays Men I Hate, it didn’t occur to me to consider the questions…

An interesting thought.

Here’s a story that’s both totally absurd and a lesson on how not to think about risk. In the early nineties, the US Environmental Protection Agency got into a fight with a company over a toxic waste…

to be born is to have it happen more than once. to be alive does not mean one will always know the joy of it. i can feel the blood pumping through my body. it's a surprise. has it always felt this…

Most of what we chase rests on people we can no longer be bothered to need. A walk from the history of the clock, through the anthropology of money, to an uncomfortable place: the deepest cage isn't…

Recently I came across the “Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics”, a term defined by Jai Dhyani in a now-offline blog post: When you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed…

The scary part of Meditations On Moloch is not that evil people exist. The scary part is that evil outcomes can happen without evil people. Scott Alexander uses Moloch as a name for bad incentive…

Writing about someone who wrote for the sheer joy of it is not easy, but I will try.

vibe coding made building feel instant. but the interesting part was never watching code appear. it is choosing what deserves to exist.

Change terrifies people. That’s why we worship at the altar of permanence. Unfortunately, this is a false God that will terminate our prayers in tears. There is a reason the two most deeply…

Compounding effects have implications that are easy to underestimate; for example, a good habit will compound, thereby improving one’s daily life, sustaining itself as an internal cycle. A lateral…

a graduation speech