Keshav Chauhan
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on the atlas — 4
- Curius / Bookmarks for the extremely curious182 savers
- How to Predict the Future - by Santi Ruiz - Statecraft6 savers
- Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born65 savers
- cdixon | Climbing the wrong hill24 savers
highlights — 18
Every time he acclimated to the pace of his writing, he increased the quota so he would always be overwhelmed—at one point he forced himself to write 25,000 words in 24 hours
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornTarkovsky realized it didn’t matter that Bach was a popular choice that people would praise him for. It was just the right thing.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornLevel two is noticing that your longing to be accepted can fool you to get excited about an idea that you are not actually excited about.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornYou also need to have a rich mental representation of how it is supposed to feel to embody the state so that you can orient toward that. This feeling is what you use to measure the relative success of whatever techniques you employ.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornThey keep coming up with techniques, rituals, and narratives to block off and protect the mental space they need.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornPeople show much more originality in solving problems than in deciding which problems to solve. Even the smartest can be surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who’d never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornThis patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions. It is this capacity to surface questions that set Grothendieck apart, more so than his capacity to answer them.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornThere is also a lot of confusion and pursuit of dead ends. Newton looking for numerical patterns in the Bible, for instance. This might look wasteful if you think what they are doing is research. But it is not if you realize that they are building up their ability to perceive the evolution of their own thought, their capacity for attention.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornAs the philosopher Bertrand Russell remarked, the development of gifted and creative individuals, such as Newton or Whitehead, seems to require a period in which there is little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which they can develop and pursue their interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornBut I don't recall feeling any sense of disappointment
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornBeing isolated from mentors he instead painstakingly reinvent parts of what is known as measurement theory and the Lebesgue integral.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornBut the point is: being exceptionally talented and trained was, in the long run, not enough to do groundbreaking work because they lacked the capacity to go beyond the context they had been raised in.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornAn important part of the notes has Grothendieck meditating on how he first established contact with the cognitive space needed to do groundbreaking work.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornThese notes, written not for publication but as an aid in the process of discovery, are, in a way, partial windows into minds who inhabit the solitary creative space which the quotes above point to.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born“Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.”
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornIt’s true that coworking spaces do kill off the very worst ideas, but a band-pass filter for startups is a terrible thing because they kill off the best ideas, too.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are bornmeander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear.
cdixon | Climbing the wrong hillpeople tend to systematically overvalue near term over long term rewards. This effect seems to be even stronger in more ambitious people. Their ambition seems to make it hard for them to forgo the nearby upward step.
cdixon | Climbing the wrong hill