Real books change your very psyche. Not the self-help books. The long, difficult, soul-altering books. The Brothers Karamazov. One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Stranger. The Old Man and the Sea. Crime and Punishment. In Search of Lost Time. Writers who understood loneliness. Meaning. Human suffering. The quiet chaos inside the mind. Writers who sat alone for years and pulled something true out of their inner darkness and put it on a page so that one day you could read it and feel less alone in your own. They change the way you see people. They expand your perception. They upgrade your consciousness. That's what real books do.
They alter you.
The good thing about books is we have a lot of them. Hundreds even! Possibly thousands! You could pick only human-written ones and never run out even if you tried.
at some point you realize there's often very little merit to fame amongst the tech elite, just people who well positioned to soak up talent around them, and are extremely adept at rewriting narratives to build their own legends after "the work" is already done
for better or worse, there's somehow always a heavy selection bias for fantastic story-tellers everywhere, and the peak will never truly live up to the image they've created of themselves
or in other words, never meet your heroes
como. que. a. porra. de. um. cavalo. cai. dentro. do. sistema. de. distribuição. hidráulico. e. interrompe. o. acesso. a água. de. uma. cidade. inteira.
Never stop saying "dozen" and "half dozen". Never stop using the word you read in an old novella. Never stop using your regional jargon. Don't succumb to an internationalized English stripped of its whimsy and romanticism in the name of streamlining global commerce.
“I can’t shake the sense that something fundamental in China has changed.”
Journal correspondent Yoko Kubota reflects on how a distrust of foreigners has come to permeate everyday life in China. 🔗 https://t.co/l0PYs75zcG
I’m beginning to think that people don’t really want to work at companies. what they really want is to work at a research lab or a creative studio or a think tank or some other communal setup where likeminded people can do interesting things together