A Unified Theory of Fucks

Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attent

Yet Taggart’s question remained a daily companion: “If work dominated your every moment, would life be worth living?”

The benefits of embracing the spirit of a gift economy are invisible to the people who ask me how I plan to monetize, scale, and grow my business. I’m not in the business of being a business. I’m embracing the work of building a life and all of the connections that will make that meaningful.

This was what I had begun to grasp, on that park bench in Brooklyn, and I still think it’s the single best antidote to the feeling of time pressure, a splendidly liberating first step on the path of embracing your limits: the problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just for enough of what feels important—is that you