Erlank Pienaar

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do.... See more

Alexi Pappas on how the story you tell yourself is the most powerful one in the world.

“How you talk about your experiences will dictate how you feel about them. Reframing our goals and rewriting our stories are powerful tools. Nobody can tell us how to feel about something. We can make our shortcomings into something beautiful if we want to. How w

... See more

The examined life

What if our worst qualities are actually our best? Recently I listened to an interview with Irish theologist and poet John O’Donohue from 2006 in which he asked what would happen if the things we hate about ourselves, the qualities we despise and can’t stand, are actually the best things about who we are. It was a powerful reframe... See more

“It can be hard to appreciate just how much the world will give you what you want after you stop waiting for it to give you what you deserve.

Stop waiting for the world to recognize your potential; start giving the world something positive. Don’t wait for a friend’s apology; reach out and reconnect. Instead of waiting for the perfect partner, become... See more

Sometimes it’s nice to remember all the other people one has been. Especially when settling into hard-core middle-age. I love being this me, but I loved being that me, too.

The Gap Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stu ff , it ʼ s just not that good. It ʼ s trying to be good, it has potential, but it ʼ s not.

Meanwhile, some of the most serious people I know do their serious thing gratis and make their loot somewhere else. My dad, whose photographs sit at the top of every Experimental History post, quit his job at the newspaper and went to work as a postal carrier instead. Why? As he puts it: “I could afford better lenses delivering mail than I could ta... See more

But I see links.net as a model for the kind of website I want to build. The fact that Justin’s consciousness from almost 30 years ago is frozen into the Internet is perhaps the most interesting part of this whole story. Decades later, here I am, reliving his past in detail. His adventure is perhaps fresher in my mind than his, considering I’m the o... See more