The energy of attempt

So much productivity is fueled by negative emotions. You're afraid of getting a bad grade as a teen, so you study for tomorrow's big test late into the night, mostly out of fear and with the knowledge that you'll be exhausted tomorrow. There's no joy in it, just a fear of not being good enough, of disappointing someone, of ruining your future.

As an... See more

Ambition is about the echoes you want to leave reverberating in the world around you. It's about finding the place in The Current where your heart, mind, and gut resonate with creation. Ambition is about living life as an art of devotion to the Process and Pattern, making reality more beautiful with your participation than it would be without it.

But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more

I used to know someone with epilepsy who told me that sometimes, after a seizure, he felt like everyone he saw looked familiar. I find that fascinating. It suggests that “meaningful adjacencies” might be a kind of error, a useful error. When I’m starting an essay, if it seems to only be about one thing, there’s often a kind of inertness to it. But ... See more

Great questions don't appear

suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes

them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is

not to search for them — not to wander about thinking, what great

discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd

have made it.

“I think writers’ expectations of these two kinds of progress are usually backwards: They believe their talent is basically static, and progress will come mostly in the form of their talent being gradually more recognized. But the healthier and more realistic way to think about your career is that your writing will probably get better over time — i... See more

The kind we love is focused, challenging, sustained, with a pen in hand, making note of new turns of phrase and peculiar, precise words, and feeling our brains get ever-so-slightly reconfigured by the text. The kind of reading we love requires a piece of text be worked over so many times that the author probably never wants to see it again. The kin... See more