Interest

It’s not that I advocate for no note-taking. I just strongly believe in keeping it as elementary as possible, such that the note-taking itself doesn’t become the thrust of the endeavor. Leonardo da Vinci kept all of his notes in one big book. If he liked something he put it down. This is known as a commonplace book, and it is about how detailed your note-taking system should be unless you plan on thinking more elaborately than Leonardo da Vinci. Taping a bunch of cryptic phrases to the walls is also acceptable, or keeping a shoebox full of striking phrases on a jumble of papers, as Eminem did.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.

As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist,

“Step 1: Wonder at something.
Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.”

Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate.

What gives me anxiety is, what if there is a “nodal point” out there for me that I will never come across? What if “the one” is a piece of information that I will never get a chance to give my attention to?

...Before [a conversation Lauren Schwulst and I had with Damon Zucconi], I had this idea that if this is your body, and this is everything that is out in the world, then this collection of nodal points that changed your trajectory is “actually you.” Or at the very least, it’s the sum of those points that represent a unique perspective that is a reflection of you.

The nice part about this idea is thinking about the idea of “you” or your identity being out in the world. That the boundary between “you“ and the things that you love becomes blurry. The not nice thing is that it essentially is the same thing as saying “you are your interests” which feels superficial and reductive.

After this conversation with Damon I started thinking that it’s not the points that are the key part, it’s the line between you and the points. It’s the fact that you recognized the thing that is important, not the thing itself. It’s your radar.

...I like the idea of a person moving through “nodal points” propelled by an innate desire. I also like the idea of foregrounding agency from the perspective of the user or viewer or consumer. People often think about making work as if the person on the other side will have no choice but to enjoy it if the work is “good” enough, but it’s nice to think about the practice of viewing or consuming as an art form in itself. That understanding and honing your own perspective and how you see the world can be as active as making work is. I’m starting to see that understanding one’s own personal radar can take a lifetime.

Where I stand now is, if this is your body and these are all the nodal points in your life, “you” are “here.” Your radar is you. Not the things you focus on, but the orientation, the internal ruleset, your magnetism towards things, the natural intuition that you’ve had your whole life. The “desire lines” are you.

“You” are “here.”

I was looking at my digital clock last-night and it occurred to me that 4:56 is quite an interesting time.

4 uses four segments of the seven-segment display
5 uses five segments of the seven-segment display
6 uses six segments of the seven-segment display

Getting pigeon-holed as one particular thing often made me uncomfortable because I didn’t feel seen. My skill set is much broader and being called “just” anything felt constricting. Shifting my focus publicly reflected my different personal interests while ensuring an expanding broader audience (and maybe bring some people along for the ride, too).

...I’ve always enjoyed being more of a generalist while having a deep understanding of a number of topics—something I referred to as being U shaped instead of T shaped.

A place to find good blogs that interest you.

Thinking about the content creation side of the marketplace, Cowen is able to use the daily links post to increase demand for content that he himself wants to see more of. This is true in an indirect way, where simply directing traffic to certain content will incentivize creators to make more of it. We each, individually, produce this sort of impact on a tiny scale when browsing the web, and Cowen is able to magnify his own through sharing the sorts of content he enjoys most.

But more directly, by being so consistent in linking to content that matches his interests, Cowen further incentivizes his own readers to produce more of it.

What we’ve reviewed here suggests to me that among the groups of students who are talented enough to get positions where they work with Nobel laureates, the quality of mentor probably matters a lot (at least if you care about making outsized scientific impact).

Perhaps that’s not surprising. After all, doing high impact innovation often means understanding something that few others do; otherwise, someone else would have invented or discovered the thing before you. How does a great student learn something that few others know?

...Highly innovative people, willing to take on apprentices, but who have not yet settled down to write textbooks seem like a good bet.

Consider, from the Service's perspective, the advantages of the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex. The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it's interesting.

This association between predictability and badness is so strong that it is in fact a good heuristic to head in the directions with the poorest future visibility, if you want interesting things to happen. But that’s at best a near-sufficient condition. It is not the case that good directions are necessarily illegible and opaque.

Eschew anything beyond writing the content of a post. No art direction. No social media imagery. No comments. No webmentions. No analytics...Imagine stripping away everything in the way of writing until the only thing staring you back in the face is a blinking cursor and an empty text file. That’ll force you to think about writing.

...[And] write for you, not for others. And if you can’t think of what to “write”, document something for yourself and call it writing.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the mystery of blogging, it’s that the stuff you think nobody will read ends up with way more reach than anything you write thinking it will be popular.

So write about what you want, not what you think others want, and the words will spill out.

Most websites have a link that says “about”. It goes to a page that tells you something about the background of this person or business. For short, people just call it an “about page”.

Most websites have a link that says “contact”. It goes to a page that tells you how to contact this person or business. For short, people just call it a “contact page”.

So a website with a link that says “now” goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a “now page”.

A lot of people think dreams and drugs involve some magical inspiration. I think otherwise.

I rarely get inspired by dreams or drugs, but I have my own secret source of inspiration: mishearing other people. Somebody says something, I misinterpret it, and the misinterpretation is quite interesting – more interesting than anything I would have come up with on my own if asked to generate an interesting idea. Maybe it’s a clever joke or turn of phrase. Maybe it’s a neat idea. Sometimes I misunderstand people’s entire positions, and end up with positions much more interesting than the ones they were trying to push.

I have to think that “Against Rereading,” by Oscar Schwartz, is a massive troll, because the alternative — that Schwartz believes himself to be so omnicompetent a reader, so perfect in his perception, so masterful in his judgment, that he absorbs all that even the greatest book has to offer with a single reading — is unpleasant to contemplate. Or maybe there’s one more possibility: that — like Kafka’s hunger artist, who never found a food he liked — Schwartz has never been sufficiently interested in a book to return to it. 

But surely he makes one important point: the problem with our culture today is definitely all those people who don’t want ceaseless novelty. Definitely.

I’m almost certain he’s just trolling, though.

The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea.

The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.

I’ve seen that A/B test run time and again over the past twenty years with employees. The ones who are able to judo seemingly boring problems into interesting pursuits always end ahead on creativity and competence, and have more of it left over at the end of the day.

And a few years later, the person who discharged all their creativity against even the most trivial problems has grown their intellectual granary manyfold over the one who kept holding back.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

What's your favorite essay/blog post of all time? Looking for >2 years old, and that you think will be as good in a decade. Instant classics.

The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.

So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?

To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.

So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.