Subscribe to The Red Hand Files

There’s a concept in ecology of ‘niche creation.’ And the idea is: it’s not the case that a species will sort of come along and go, ‘oh, I could do well here, there’s lots of food,’ and things like that. A species comes along and just does his thing, and by acting in the world, he sort of creates the very environment he needs to survive.

It was when

... See more

Finally, be patient. In a famous letter to his friend Hume, Hunter S. Thompson argued that searching for the right path in life was important, even if it required many attempts. He told Hume that if he tried eight different paths and failed, that he must keep searching: “you must find a ninth path.”⁠28 Embracing the pathless path can be a slow and

... See more

I love Corbin’s description of the way he came to trust his intuition in the aftermath of this disaster: “I felt like I was walking along a razor-back ridge on a high, high mountain, in the middle of the night, surrounded by heavy fog. One wrong step in either direction, and I’d fall a thousand miles. And the only way I could tell where I was going

... See more

As you help them, you continually feel for the “groove” of your purpose. You might have a few false starts. But, eventually, you find that dozens of non-profit groups are telephoning you, asking for your advice. It feels as if the universe is supporting you in this direction. You have no idea whether you can earn a living doing this, but it feels r

... See more