flâneur

Kaneera Uthayakumaran

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on the atlas — 6

highlights — 9

  • The thing is, it’s hard to be inside ourselves, day in and day out. Harder still to be the only ones to digest the cinema of our lives. How refreshing it feels to view the angles we can’t otherwise see. Our hidden slants. Our potential. The robots may be impressive to some. But their contributions are not nearly as beautiful as when we catch a glimpse of ourselves through the eyes of a friend.
    Thank You for Being a Friend - by Caroline Cala Donofrio
  • If you want to solve hard problems, stop trying to solve the hard problem directly. Change the context such that that's a background assumption: all your actions are going to be pointed roughly in the direction of solving-the-problem; what next? What's the next thing that needs doing? Work on that.
    Stop trying to try and try
  • I'm assuming myself capable — not consciously, but as a background assumption. I'm not assuming success — either I can run a research institute or I can't, the jury's still out on that one — but my capability is not the focus of my attention.
    Stop trying to try and try
  • Switching contexts such that your actual goal is in the background rather than the foreground — such that pursuing it is not a conscious choice that you need to reaffirm every time you find a stopping point — is a powerful tool.
    Stop trying to try and try
  • By contrast, I think mastery looks much more like teaching mode — it looks like someone operating in a context where their knowledge and their skills are not the focus, but are just unconscious assumptions in the background.
    Stop trying to try and try
  • I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
    What You'll Wish You'd Known
  • Say “I don’t know” or “I don’t have an opinion” when you don’t
    Milan Cvitkovic
  • Jack spends so much of his time looking up at the great things that will come his way and planning his future happiness and not nearly enough time looking down and thinking about how badly he used to want so many of the things he currently has.
    Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel — Wait But Why
  • You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid. What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.
    Ursula K. Le Guin — A Left-Handed Commencement Address