Maja Wilbrink

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on the atlas — 59

highlights — 386

what if I don’t have a Manager as a last line of defense? What if my slide goes directly to the meeting with the CEO and senior partners? Is this good enough?
How to create great slides - by Ryan Quassary
I would imagine the most demanding and sharpest Manager I ever worked with.
How to create great slides - by Ryan Quassary
→ I'd put on my ‘manager hat’ before sending my slides. I tried to critically review the slide like my manager would do. Anticipate any obvious comments or questions.
How to create great slides - by Ryan Quassary
Each personality system has an origin story, and the Big Five’s is particularly credible. Two professors took every word in the English language that could be used to describe someone, put them into categories, and reduced them to as small a set of factors as they could. For instance, if lots of people agreed they could call someone both gregarious and outgoing, the researchers decided that was the same thing; they kept reducing that down until they got extraversion as a primary factor.
What's going on here, with this human? - Graham Duncan Blog
Even if you’re not leading a company of wildly creative people, there’s wisdom in identifying a destination without providing the map. It creates room for others to take ownership of both the route and the results.
To be a great leader, rethink your default behaviors | by Deirdre Cerminaro | IDEO Stories | Medium
design that makes your heart flutter
Anson Yu's Personal Site
throwing life-changing events, match-making, cultivating the potential of people around me, raising baby ideas
Anson Yu's Personal Site
But the the more I researched, the more it turned out that many of the Great People of history were characterized by rich lives, full of romance and hobbies.
Effective altruism in the garden of ends - EA Forum
Treat everything that happens to you as material and write it down. Don’t let someone tell you your experience doesn’t matter—you’re the one who gets to decide if it matters. Give yourself agency.
how to avoid half-heartedness - by Ava - bookbear express
. Pay attention to your feelings of discomfort and uncertainty—watch yourself as you think and feel. The thing I like about writing is that it’s quite literally thinking—a way for me access my own interiority and construct something from it. What I write is all mine, it’s a living thing, it’s an extension of me that wanders out into the world. It is desire turned inwards instead of outwards, focused instead of displaced. It’s a way to access self-knowledge and self-respect.
how to avoid half-heartedness - by Ava - bookbear express
I’m a high self-monitor, and I started noticing that many couples consist of a high self-monitor and a low self-monitor. Two high self-monitors can find themselves constantly adjusting to each other, and it’s exhausting. Two low self-monitors are slightly hard to seat next to each other at a dinner party; they need a guide for the social world, and often implicitly require the other person to come to them a bit.
What's going on here, with this human? - Graham Duncan Blog
high self-monitors—people who adjust to their audience, and are thus high flexibility, lower integrity—and low self-monitors—people who in good and bad ways don’t adjust to their audience and are thus high integrity, lower flexibility.
What's going on here, with this human? - Graham Duncan Blog
Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.
May 20, 1990: Advice on Life and Creative Integrity from Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson – The Marginalian
some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them. To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
May 20, 1990: Advice on Life and Creative Integrity from Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson – The Marginalian
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his poten…
May 20, 1990: Advice on Life and Creative Integrity from Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson – The Marginalian
If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.
May 20, 1990: Advice on Life and Creative Integrity from Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson – The Marginalian
A city speaks to you mostly by accident—in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It's not something you have to seek out, but something you can't turn off.
🌻 object permanence - by Jasmine Sun - half-baked futures
My advice to the person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each day as many as possible of the small joys, and thriftily save up the larger, more demanding pleasures for holidays and appropriate hours. It is the small joys first of all that are granted us for recreation, for daily relief and disburdenment, not the great ones.
Hermann Hesse on Little Joys, Breaking the Trance of Busyness, and the Most Important Habit for Living with Presence – The Marginalian
[There are] many other small joys, perhaps the especially delightful one of smelling a flower or a piece of fruit, of listening to one’s own or others’ voices, of hearkening to the prattle of children. And a tune being hummed or whistled in the distance, and a thousand other tiny things from which one can weave a bright necklace of little pleasures for one’s life.
Hermann Hesse on Little Joys, Breaking the Trance of Busyness, and the Most Important Habit for Living with Presence – The Marginalian
A stretch of sky, a garden wall overhung by green branches, a strong horse, a handsome dog, a group of children, a beautiful face — why should we be willing to be robbed of all this? Whoever has acquired the knack can in the space of a block see precious things without losing a minute’s time… All things have their vivid aspects, even the uninteresting or ugly; one must only want to see.
Hermann Hesse on Little Joys, Breaking the Trance of Busyness, and the Most Important Habit for Living with Presence – The Marginalian
And with seeing come cheerfulness and love and poesy. The man who for the first time picks a small flower so that he can have it near him while he works has taken a step toward joy in life.
Hermann Hesse on Little Joys, Breaking the Trance of Busyness, and the Most Important Habit for Living with Presence – The Marginalian
Just try it once — a tree, or at least a considerable section of sky, is to be seen anywhere. It does not even have to be blue sky; in some way or another the light of the sun always makes itself felt. Accustom yourself every morning to look for a moment at the sky and suddenly you will be aware of the air around you, the scent of morning freshness that is bestowed on you between sleep and labor. You will find every day that the gable of every house has its own particular look, its own special lighting. Pay it some heed if you will have for the rest of the day a remnant of satisfaction and a t…
Hermann Hesse on Little Joys, Breaking the Trance of Busyness, and the Most Important Habit for Living with Presence – The Marginalian
Our eyes, above all those misused, overstrained eyes of modern man, can be, if only we are willing, an inexhaustible source of pleasure.
Hermann Hesse on Little Joys, Breaking the Trance of Busyness, and the Most Important Habit for Living with Presence – The Marginalian
As an experiment, for one continuous month, make the focus of one in every three things you share on social media — wherever you normally share, however regularly or irregularly you do, however many people you reach — something other than yourself or your own work: a friend’s art project, a stranger’s poem, a record by a musician you love, the tree shimmering with majesty and mystery in the low morning light, someone in your community you admire, a bygone pioneer of something you value, a book that spun you on your axis, the lost cat sign crayoned by a neighbor’s child, the new community garde…
Unselfing Social – The Marginalian
There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives. So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections — between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and a particular place, between the interior world of each pioneer and the mark they leave on the cave walls of culture, between faint figures who pass each other in the nocturne before the torchlight of a revolution lights the new day, with little more than a half-nod of kinship and a match to change hand
Figuring – The Marginalian
How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism?
Figuring – The Marginalian
Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams.
Figuring – The Marginalian
Facts crosshatch with other facts to shade in the nuances of a larger truth — not relativism, no, but the mightiest realism we have. We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once: our first names and our last names, our loneliness and our society, our bold ambition and our blind hope, our unrequited and part-requited loves.
Figuring – The Marginalian
We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.
Figuring – The Marginalian
“inescapable network of mutuality,” what Walt Whitman punctured when he wrote that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
Figuring – The Marginalian
All of it — the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had, the shepherdess singing in the Rila mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance’s velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore’s red braid and the whiskers of Montaigne’s cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda’s newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets before wad…
Figuring – The Marginalian
Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”: So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion. Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet. Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass. Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lu…
16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one…
16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.
16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture
16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
Earth carves canyons into rock with nothing more than a steadfast stream. Somehow we keep forgetting that human nature is but a fractal of nature itself
16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
my ledger of curiosity — a brief digest of interesting, inspiring, or plainly wondrous things I had encountered on the internet, at the library, or in the city, from exquisite sixteenth-century Japanese woodblocks to a fascinating new neuroscience study to arresting graffiti on the side of a warehouse.
16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody… Plurality is the law of the earth.
Hannah Arendt on Being vs. Appearing and Our Impulse for Self-Display – The Marginalian
When you can and do entrain, you are synchronising with the people you’re talking with, physically getting in time and tune with them. No wonder speech is so strong a bond, so powerful in forming community.
Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation – The Marginalian
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, d…
Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past – The Marginalian
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past – The Marginalian
This is why utterance is magic. Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.
Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past – The Marginalian
The earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past – The Marginalian
Those who experience, not the arts, but nature, may have a similar response, and also those who experience another human being. Do we not know the feeling that overtakes us when we are in the presence of a particular person and, roughly translates as, The fact that this person exists in the world at all, this alone makes this world, and a life in it, meaningful.
Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past – The Marginalian
. Should I perhaps try to explain for you with some hackneyed phrase how and why experiencing beauty can make life meaningful? I prefer to confine myself to the following thought experiment: imagine that you are sitting in a concert hall and listening to your favorite symphony, and your favorite bars of the symphony resound in your ears, and you are so moved by the music that it sends shivers down your spine; and now imagine that it would be possible (something that is psychologically so impossible) for someone to ask you in this moment whether your life has meaning. I believe you would agree …
Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past – The Marginalian
because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad. Hymns don’t do this, churches really cannot do it.
James Baldwin on the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity and How It Illuminates the Universal Experience of What It Means to Be Human – The Marginalian
Then you discover, and I discovered this through Dostoevsky, that it is common. Everybody did it. Not only did everybody do it, everybody’s doing it. And all the time. It’s a fantastic and terrifying liberation. The reason it is terrifying is because it makes you once and for all responsible to no one but yourself.
James Baldwin on the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity and How It Illuminates the Universal Experience of What It Means to Be Human – The Marginalian
some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.
James Baldwin on the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity and How It Illuminates the Universal Experience of What It Means to Be Human – The Marginalian
What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.
James Baldwin on the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity and How It Illuminates the Universal Experience of What It Means to Be Human – The Marginalian