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Quit while you’re ahead
1. “As soon as you buy something you lose the power to buy something,” Loftis tells Cooter in Exchange Value by Charles R. Johnson (via Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism). 2. “When we are in the gains, we have a tendency to quit too early in order to avoid the risk of giving those gains…
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Make your work the best practice, and let people copy it
People copy today. Incentives reward derivative work. Sequels, song covers, and newsjacking (including celebrity culture) are all signs of this. The most constructive thing you can do in this environment is to behave the way you want to see more people behave, and then to promote your work and make it a best practice. People…
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Red lights
A red light is not an obstacle getting in the way of your destination; it is the destination. You are constantly arriving at the destination, the place you’re meant to be. Even if it wasn’t the place you had in mind, or the place you want to go, you’re meant to be wherever you are,…
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Skimming a book can change your life
Usually, if you think something’s important to learn, you’ll want to dedicate time and energy to do it. You want to do this very intentionally: to set aside an extended period of resources to learn something. Maybe the next time you take a vacation, or have a sabbatical, or are in between jobs. While this…
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If you can’t prioritize it, make it a practice
Some things are just too important to ever prioritize or de-prioritize. They’re things you have to do every day-ish. The most fundamental example is eating, sleeping, and drinking water. Breaking any of these practices is simply not sustainable for your health, quality of life, or work. The same applies to practicing all sorts of other…
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Seeing the expectations you picked up
Expectations work like gravitational pressure. It feels similar to mimetic desire (perhaps the two are related!), like there’s no way to escape what’s being expected of you. The forces of these expectations have very real consequences. For example, if your teachers expected you to learn well and get high grades, they’d behave in ways that…
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Getting stuff done sets you apart
Completing and delivering a project, on time, will set you apart. This observation tends to surprise me, although it really shouldn’t. There are so many people who fail to meet this standard test. Scoping goes awry, they don’t communicate enough (out of a lack of skill, fear, or understanding), and projects fall apart. Think about…
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Flexibility cost
Sticking to the plan is usually the least expensive solution. However! Plans are just guesses. Sometimes we guess poorly. Or, circumstances change, and our guess proves to be wrong. For example, you planned to quit our job, and entrepreneurship turns out to be nothing like what you guessed it would be like. Or you started…
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Text generation
It used to be that typing was the only way to generate original text. By extension, you needed to actually know what you wanted to say before you could generate the text. Typing itself isn’t hard; the process of coming up with what you want to say, and then actually saying it, is the challenge.…
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Beef and A24
I just watched Beef this weekend, and it was really great. As much as I appreciate film and culture, I’m also well aware of how easy the experts make it seem to develop an opinion. For now, my eloquent, brilliant, opinion goes as far as this: it was really great. I greatly despise horror and…