“A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said,” Amos Tversky says to Don Redelmeier (via The Undoing Project). That’s certainly true; it’s also part of good storytelling. Van Lathan writes in his latest book, Fat, Crazy, and Tired: “I grabbed the […]
So you might as well do what you want to do, and succeed at what you want to succeed at. You may think that there are two paths; an easier one (should) and a tougher one (must). In reality though, there’s no such thing as an actual easier option. Both are gonna be tough. The […]
For the new version of my book, my partner Bernice Liu (i.e., the artist Spime) blessed me and Holloway with the cover: Here’s an excerpt where I explain more about the cover. (I’m so happy that I can so conveniently link to these, it’s definitely a perk of publishing a digital book with Holloway. Print […]
There’s a narrative that artists and industries took more creative risks in the past; one possible reason for that was the businesses and industry just was able to cross-subsidize different work. If they made a commercial success, that would fund the critical one. Author and critic William Deresiewicz writes: In the past, one of the […]
In 2019, during Kawhi Leonard’s championship run with the Raptors, I learned about the term, “Load management.” The British Journal of Sports Medicine defines the objective in 2016: “The aim of load management is to optimally configure training, competition and other load to maximise adaptation and performance with a minimal risk of injury. Load management […]
In November 2020, I independently published my first book at Gumroad. I had spent four months or so full-time deliberately researching, writing, editing, proofreading, and designing a PDF of ~18,000 words. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but you could say I spent most of the 2010s researching it (starting with this piece […]
One of the most difficult emotions to come to terms with is doubt; it’s also one of the most realistic ones. It’s the allure of faking it till you make it: you’re making a promise against your doubt with the hammer of reality, and trying to get more people to believe in you to drown […]
When we make plans, we think with consistency, regularity, and uniformity as stand-ins for discipline, discernment, and judgment. “I’m going to do this everyday,” or, “My approach is this,” or “I’m going to reach this milestone.” This is helpful in that it helps us get things done. The career ladder is one representation of this; […]
I worked with the Fast Company team on a piece about saying no that ended up at the homepage. The key ideas from this piece came from my daily blogging; all it took was stitching them together, editing it, and making it more cohesive. Life is about saying yes, and saying no.
A person goes on vacation and asks their neighbor to watch their pet animals. The neighbor obliges. The neighbor writes a letter after: Good afternoon, This letter is regarding your vacation two weeks ago, and how you let me babysit Smokey, Oreo, and Jennifer. I’d just like to give you a letter of thanks. As […]