flâneur

Shenghan Gao

7 followers · 9 following · 905 views

on the atlas — 22

highlights — 50

  • gradadmissions@sva.edu
    Gmail
  • “Their indigenous foods were already completely erased by white settlers,” she says. “I saw fried chicken and hamburgers. It scared me and I remember thinking how I didn’t want my own culture to become like that. My old mentality was that I wanted to pursue West[ern ideals]. But now I realized my life work is to decolonize my village. We are Taromak people. We should follow our own culture.”
    How One Restaurant Owner Is Fighting for Her Tribe’s Cuisine - Eater
  • if you were going to take a break from "serious" work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do? The answer is probably more important than it seems.
    How to Do Great Work
  • By being self-indulgent — by letting your curiosity have its way, and tuning out, at least temporarily, the little voice in your head that says you should only be working on "important" problems.
    How to Do Great Work
  • One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for someone else to explore. Then your subconscious won't shoot them down to protect you.
    How to Do Great Work
  • You do see it, subconsciously, but then another part of your subconscious shoots it down because it would be too weird, too risky, too much work, too controversial. This suggests an exciting possibility: if you could turn off such filters, you could see more new ideas.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Having new ideas is a strange game, because it usually consists of seeing things that were right under your nose. Once you've seen a new idea, it tends to seem obvious. Why did no one think of this before?
    How to Do Great Work
  • Don't divide your attention evenly between many topics though, or you'll spread yourself too thin. You want to distribute it according to something more like a power law. [17] Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more.
    How to Do Great Work
  • It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Changing your context can help. If you visit a new place, you'll often find you have new ideas there. The journey itself often dislodges them. But you may not have to go far to get this benefit. Sometimes it's enough just to go for a walk.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.
    How to Do Great Work
  • you're much more likely to have original ideas when you're working on something. Original ideas don't come from trying to have original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult.
    How to Do Great Work
  • If you actually want to discover new things, it's better to take the risk of telling people your ideas.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them. "It's easy to criticize" is true in the most literal sense, and the route to great work is never easy.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field. Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don't know what you're aiming for. And that is what you're aiming for, because if you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good.
    How to Do Great Work
  • (Exception: Don't avoid love.)
    How to Do Great Work
  • The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.
    How to Do Great Work
  • The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on?" When you're young it's ok if the answer is sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerous as you get older.
    How to Do Great Work
  • One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You're too busy to notice it.
    How to Do Great Work
  • It's usually a mistake to lie to yourself if you want to do great work, but this is one of the rare cases where it isn't. When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off.
    How to Do Great Work
  • I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach "staying upwind." This is how most people who've done great work seem to have done it.
    How to Do Great Work
  • In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of it.
    How to Do Great Work
  • The reason I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong. Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you're lost.
    How to Do Great Work
  • This takes some skill, because your brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simpler model of the world. Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted
    How to Do Great Work
  • But always preserve excitingness.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Volver (2006). The amusing, yet believable, comedic moments remind us that when life gets miserable enough, it starts resembling fiction. But when "drama" subsides and we are done hating each other, life goes back to a baseline of daily tenderness
    Female Chinese Filmmakers In Their Own Words: Introduction
  • People change in four seasons: when they hurt enough they have to, when they see enough they are inspired to, when they learn enough that they want to, and when they receive enough that they are able to.
    Gmail
  • The process of becoming yourself is not a corporate desk job, and it is not homework, and it is not an unticked box languishing on a to-do list. You do not have to treat your flaws like action items that must be systematically targeted and eliminated in order to receive a return on investment.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • When we insist that we could only ever effectively love someone who’s been perfectly “healed” — who will not struggle, accidentally hurt us, trigger us, say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, or participate in any other uncomfortable display of humanity — we are reinforcing, and perhaps projecting, our own beliefs that we have to be perfect in order to be loved.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • it insists that healing is a mountain to be climbed alone, and that relationships are the reward we get once we’ve reached the summit.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • Being an artist and inviting joy into your life requires you to take an UNFINISHED shape most of the time. You are a work in progress. You are here to receive this day’s inspiration. That takes patience and compassion for yourself. It’s not about getting somewhere else. It’s about being who you are and living where you are, every day.
    'I Want to Be Hannah Montana!' - by Heather Havrilesky
  • The joy lies in the work itself — in engaging with your craft and believing in it and talking to other people about it.
    'I Want to Be Hannah Montana!' - by Heather Havrilesky
  • What you want is the specialness of one small thing that inspires you and touches your heart. You need to relish the specialness of trying and often failing but continuing to try anyway. You need the specialness of deeper connections that are forged by telling your therapist and one or two precious friends the whole truth about exactly what a dreamer you are at heart, without feeling ashamed of it.
    'I Want to Be Hannah Montana!' - by Heather Havrilesky
  • Special is learning to tell people who you are and what you love. Special is daring to love your stubborn, hopeful self as you are right now. It’s a practice. It feels dumb at first.
    'I Want to Be Hannah Montana!' - by Heather Havrilesky
  • Joy requires hard work for everyone – the hard work of getting up and facing your life as it is, and being patient and gentle with yourself no matter how dreary reality looks some days. Joy requires going back to projects you abandoned and recognizing why you abandoned them, or, picking them up and daring to believe in them again. Joy requires starting new things without shame. Joy requires dabbling and proclaiming yourself a proud dabbler. Joy requires believing in who you are, as you are.
    'I Want to Be Hannah Montana!' - by Heather Havrilesky
  • In this final stage of the arc, grow your curiosities, but preserve your attention. Cultivate a beginner’s mind for the things you want to learn about, and the things that expand your intellectual horizons. Let your inner child roam free. Learn things for their own sake, and not for their utility. But when it comes to actually creating and making decisions, take your time. Use your hard-earned wisdom to your advantage, and slow down to give yourself the space to think. Remove everything that acts as a roadblock to your greatest asset, which is the attention you dedicate to creating. This is wh…
    The Arc of the Practical Creator
  • On one hand, you must continuously view your endeavor through the mind of a beginner. But on the other, you want to leverage the hard-earned wisdom you’ve picked up through years of experience.
    The Arc of the Practical Creator
  • Schopenhauer once said that humanity is defined by our tendency to restlessly strive, but I think he was only partially right. Striving is in our nature, but it doesn’t mean that it’s restless. In fact, wanting to diversify our interests, to create wonderful things, and to be more compassionate are fundamental to peace and longevity.
    The Arc of the Practical Creator
  • A big part of the creative journey is understanding that there is no finish line. Even if you reach the heights of success, you know that there is still more room to grow. That’s because your potential is not actualized through people telling you that it is. It can only be actualized through an internal commitment to improvement, which is perpetual because we humans have the ability to recognize our inherent flaws.
    The Arc of the Practical Creator
  • Confidence is when you believe that your potential can be actualized, whereas arrogance is when you believe that your potential has already been actualized.
    The Arc of the Practical Creator
  • Chantel Akerman I adore, especially News from Home. Edward Yang.
    Charlotte Wells on Aftersun, The Guardian’s best film of the year: ‘The grief expressed is mine’ | Film | The Guardian
  • Combining music, sound and picture allows you to do a lot of contradictory things at the same time. And I’m interested in contradictory things: people and emotions.
    Charlotte Wells on Aftersun, The Guardian’s best film of the year: ‘The grief expressed is mine’ | Film | The Guardian
  • because she’s a cool floaty gal with no schedule
    i like these youtubers but also I'm not sure if I do | The White Pube
  • So many big, cool cities are big and cool because they’re filled with people who left their smaller, less-cool cities — and people who want to leave where they’re from are disproportionately the owners of insecure attachment strategies.
    'Why Aren’t You Texting Me Back?!!' - by Heather Havrilesky
  • Capitalism wants you to be fine on your own because then you’ll move to the suburbs and buy your own washer and dryer and not live with grandma. You’ll break all these kinship bonds. Everyone will wind up in their own house, and you’ll all spend more money and also feel terrible and isolated and lonely.
    'Why Aren’t You Texting Me Back?!!' - by Heather Havrilesky
  • I think there’s a lot of advice that goes, what’s meant for you will find you. And I really, truly believe that it does. But that doesn't mean that everything is just going to work out without complications. When I decided to start writing I strongly felt it was the right choice, but I also didn’t fully understand how difficult it would be. When I met several of my close friends I knew we would be important to each other, but I didn’t know how the relationships would unfurl. And when it comes to dating, it’s always that Margaret Atwood line: “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”
    intuition vs execution - by Ava - bookbear express
  • I cannot stress how deeply I realize now that everyone suffers from execution problems. We don’t start out being good at things. And even if we do, there’s so much room to get better.
    intuition vs execution - by Ava - bookbear express
  • intuition is different from execution
    intuition vs execution - by Ava - bookbear express
  • Smart people often get caught in weird thought loops when it comes to intuition. One example is, “I’m really unhappy in this situation, but maybe that’s just because I haven’t applied myself enough, and if I tried really hard it would suck less.” Another would be, “I feel uncomfortable around this person, but I don’t actually have any real justification, and they seem really nice so I don’t want to be someone who makes judgments off a baseless feeling.” And theoretically that seems totally reasonable—people do fail to apply themselves, and do judge unfairly off first impressions. But actually …
    intuition vs execution - by Ava - bookbear express
  • s a grocer and he read the progressive grocer magazine, and he read articles on how to stock a meat department... What he’s really done is he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers an
    Curius / Onboarding