mckinsey consultants “learn” your business by strip mining you. they have already done the same thing to your competitors. then they package everyone’s secrets as best practices & sell them back into the same market like some bizarre intellectual arbitrage. remarkable.

Almost a decade ago, I asked Tyler Cowen: "What should I be learning about to understand the world better?" He said: "Learn about styles, especially architecture." This seemed like odd advice at the time. The visual arts? How could they be useful? But I've come to realize that

the only way to bypass the shitty corporate hierarchy or playing the promo game is to create & publish thoughtful writing/work publicly. it’s like a magical skip the line & bs button. visibility almost always beats permission.

a huge part of success is simply not becoming blackpilled for as long as humanly possible. i know so many guys that could have achieved great things but get lost because they confused cynicism for wisdom. you must not get blackpilled, do well, and we'll all be saved at the end.

It seems a common experience in the lives of people with high agency is that they, at some point, metaphorically, lean against a wall and discover that there is a hidden door. That some constraint they’ve been told about turns out not to hold, and this allows them to experience

My friend Brad Stulberg has a new book out this week that’s the perfect antidote to our age of bullshit-peddling grifters and gurus. It’s called THE WAY OF EXCELLENCE and it’s absolutely wonderful. amazon.com/Way-Excellence…

Contrary to popular belief, current startup top-down 996 grind culture is not because “AI is important” or even a pushback to COVID-era remote work. It arrived in Silicon Valley when a very specific demographic came of age: the cohort of smart Gen Z who went to top schools.

People all grow up with a certain amount of "training" about what is possible for them. You should do whatever it takes to bend your mind, and break your training. You can be bigger than you think.

the best posts on here land like a punch to the gut or a warm hug. ppl don’t tend to remember what was smart. they remember what felt real. pain, love, joy, loss... this is the stuff every human recognizes instantly. the best writing drags someone into your world & makes them

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."— Anaïs Nin

my problem w the popular conception of agency is that most people are trapped not by an inability to act but rather by an inability to conceive of a wider range of things to use their free will on. their actions are constrained by the aperture of their desire

The ability to manipulate reality with your thoughts is forever inaccessible to skeptics, because the only true superpower is belief.

ultimately it’s rumination that will haunt you. introspection doesn’t if you do it right. i think of introspection as game tape. you watch once, extract the signal, & close the tab. whereas rumination is the same clip on loop w/ no new information being processed. it’s

The older I get, the more I realize intelligence is overrated. Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They hide behind motion that doesn't create progress. They fear the judgment of others if they're proven wrong. The truth is that

The older I get, the more I realize that speaking your mind bluntly and directly is the fastest way to build relationships with the right people.

Why manager-driven cultures are destined to eventually fail:

the meanest thing you do to yourself is pretend you don’t want the things you want. shrink the desire before anyone can see it. call it unrealistic before someone else does. and then walk around with this low grade starvation you can’t name because you buried the appetite so deep

Just a reminder of Astera Institute's open essay competition about identifying and overcoming scientific bottlenecks. Deadline for entries is May 1!

most people operate on a model of gain, it's almost universal. their usual thought patterns revolve around questions like what do i get out of this? what do i win? what's in it for me, to make this move, start this thing, etc? i think the inversion is more interesting & way more

You need to be careful of overconfident scientists and CEOs in the AI/bio space. Every conference I go to has someone boasting about an AI that is 99% accurate at predicting some bioactivity. When you ask more questions, it turns out that they used a very easy dataset with a