Fulfilling work

[I]f I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy an... See more

Frederick Buechner • Listening to Your Life — Frederick Buechner

Creativity has two parts:- Creative discovery mode: shuffling things around, exploring. Playful.- Implementation mode: creating something robust and concrete.- Revisit the work the next day in an alert state and assess whether it is ready for linear implementation.

Andrew Huberman • Optimize Your Learning & Creativity with Science-based Tools

In the novelist’s profession, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics’ praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What’s crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you’ve set for yourself. Failure to... See more

Write For Yourself

One: You have to train yourself to notice things. It's not 100% natural at first – it certainly wasn’t for me – but raising those antennae is a very worthwhile thing to do. And it snowballs: once I got started taking notes, I ended up taking more and more of them.

Two: Be very liberal about what you keep. If you're going through your notes, cross ou... See more

Dan Shipper • Tasting Notes With Robin Sloan

A lot of woo is actually true.

We just lack the mental capacity, the frameworks, the language, the ease of articulation, and the consistency of evidence to make it philosophically coherent and scientifically grounded.

But we will get there.

Disregard culture punishing you for taking this seriously. It's just a social fad that comes from the collective... See more

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Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do.”

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

— Howard Thurman

Starlight Leadership

Sublime Principles and Culture (shared internally with the team):

Be fanatic about product excellence

We're not in the business of creating software - we are in the business of building a product people love. Most organizations lower their standards in an effort to move things along and get things off their desks. We have to fight that impulse every

Our ideal outcome as a company is not becoming the next Facebook (god forbid), it’s becoming the next Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot spring hotel in Japan, and one of the world’s oldest businesses (founded in 705 AD).