Patricia Mou

1. Intellectual Curiosity.  Intellectual curiosity is a real-world superpower.

To some people, disagreements feel like conflict; they don’t have to be, and avoiding disagreements comes with a high price. It doesn’t have to feel bad to figure out where you might be wrong if you learn to disentangle your self-worth from your belief system.

More often, money showed up implicitly. It was the quicksand on which other desires seemed to rest. Money would provide freedom and security. Money would allow me to travel and pursue whatever work I found rewarding. Money was the wall behind which I could shield myself from the world’s pressures and do as I please.

More tools give you negative utility. They won't make the work go faster. But they will consume as much time as you are willing to waste.

There are Twitter threads made by anonymous writers which contain more insight than most published academic papers, and memes which capture the human condition better than most works found in art galleries.

The key to finding the right mission is finding something that is hard, like genuinely hard, because learning to love the struggle and the person it chisels you into is part of the magic that happens over time.

“As we’ve seen, all criticism, attack, insults, and judgments vanish when we focus attention on hearing the feelings and needs behind a message. The more we practice in this way, the more we realize a simple truth: behind all those messages we’ve allowed ourselves to be intimidated by are just individuals with unmet needs appealing to us to contrib... See more

10. Be Yourself.

Money was supposed to provide safety. Instead, an obsession with money made me feel anxious and inadequate...   I was also setting myself up to feel miserable. Because, frankly, I haven’t been very good at money—at making it, compounding it, keeping track of it, and protecting it. Using money as a scorecard was bound to lead to perpetual ... See more