flâneur

Anna Shi

1 followers · 3 following · 840 views

on the atlas — 28

highlights — 78

  • Gratitude is what allows you to feel that same sense of wonderment about your day-to-day life as you would if you were walking the streets of a faraway city.
    Travel Is No Cure for the Mind
  • When you view life as a continuous cycle in this box, it can be easy to take its components for granted and view everything as a mundane blur of familiar events. However, when you take the time to actually inspect the box with mindful awareness of its contents, you will discover the true amazement that lives within them. And the best tool one can use to magnify these great discoveries is the practice of gratitude.
    Travel Is No Cure for the Mind
  • The Box of Daily Experience. Instead of viewing this box as a problem to escape, we have to realize that it is indeed the only thing that we can truly hold onto.
    Travel Is No Cure for the Mind
  • Who we are inside a venue matters far more than the venue itself. Instead of having the wanderlust of travel guide our search for meaning, we have to look within and embrace the only thing that is present now. The only thing that actually exists today.
    Travel Is No Cure for the Mind
  • We tend to grossly overestimate the pleasure brought forth by new experiences and underestimate the power of finding meaning in current ones. While travel is a fantastic way to gain insight into unfamiliar cultures and illuminating ways of life, it is not a cure for discontentment of the mind.
    Travel Is No Cure for the Mind
  • That feeling of restlessness underlying all the unresolved issues you have at home will follow you wherever you go. A strained relationship with your family, a sense of purposelessness in work, a low self-worth, a strong tension with your partner, a lurking depression — the answer to any of these things does not lie in a one-way ticket to a faraway place.
    Travel Is No Cure for the Mind
  • A vacation is designed to be an exciting respite we take to keep us incentivized to return back to The Box of Daily Experience upon its conclusion. In a way, it’s absurdly paradoxical — churning the gears of the box is what provides us with the fiscal resources to break out of it, but the wonderful memories of our vacations are what brings us squarely back to the box once again.
    Travel Is No Cure for the Mind
  • The interesting thing is that you can replace the object of desire (car) with any other noun (a new house, a new job, a new relationship, etc.), and the same pattern will emerge. Shifting and swapping the contents of your box may briefly alter the shape of it in the form of excitement, but in the end, these things will become just another part of normal life. So if moving around the contents of the box doesn’t work, you look to the supposed root of the problem: The box itself.
    Travel Is No Cure for the Mind
  • Designers are trained to ask the next question, and the question after that. When you ask the next question, and the next question, and the next question, you begin to see a pattern. A bigger picture begins to emerge from behind the pixels.
    Seeking the hidden dragon | COLLINS
  • Design is not what we make. Design is what we make possible.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • You’re only in competition with the future itself. So don’t look over your shoulder. Look two, three, five years down the road and invent backward from there.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • It is never about winning. It is never about losing. It is only about contributing. It is only about learning.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • Perhaps. Maybe. Possibly. Someday. These are among the most damaging words a creative person can use. Lose them.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • Clients want you to succeed like crazy. That’s why they hired you. Show them how. That’s your damn job. Do it.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • All ideas are bad ideas. They only become good through craft and love
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • We don’t create fantasy worlds to escape reality. We create them so we can better see, understand, and reshape reality.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • But aim to seek what they were seeking instead of doing what they were doing
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • If you want to teach design, first read “Teaching to Transgress” by bell hooks. Your whole mindset will change. If it doesn’t, please do not teach.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • But when the talented get frightened, they hit the pedal, accelerate, and drive headlong into the unknown.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • A designer’s first job is to articulate the tangible value we bring to every situation. It’s not the clients’ job to try to guess it.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • When designers get overwhelmed we can retreat into passivity. We pull back. This gives us an illusion of control. The less we try, the less our chances to fail. We make it look like we’re not responsible for what happens to us. But never give up. Move in closer, instead. Try. Make a mistake. Apologize quickly. And keep trying.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • Ubiquity = Invisibility. What we’re overly familiar with, what becomes common, we stop seeing. One function of design is to restore our perception, renew our understanding, and invite us to be more alert.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • seek out those much better than you; they’ll make you feel that you can achieve your dreams, as theirs are probably even larger. They’ll wave you on to the finish line.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • Stuck on a problem you can’t solve? Go bigger. Expand it. Make it giant. Do not try to contain it, or simplify it, or reduce it. Make it so large that you can begin to see a new pattern. Solve the larger problem and the smaller one will get solved along the way.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • If you lose the desire to be silly, the power to laugh, and the ability to poke fun at yourself, you will lose the power to think
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • A good designer will help a company get to where they want to go. A great designer will push a company to where they should go.
    101 design rules | COLLINS
  • With more drafts in the works, more of the world will pop alive.
    Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog
  • That doesn’t mean be sloppy. But it does mean, push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy. That’s because the task will come to cost less in your mind; it’ll have a lower activation energy. So you’ll do it more. And as you do it more (as long as you’re doing it deliberately), you’ll get better. Eventually you’ll be both fast and good.
    Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog
  • There is no delay between thought and action, no opportunity to lose the impulse to find something out.
    Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog
  • Saying goodbye in forty years is not gonna be any easier than saying it in three months.
    The problem of long-term close friendships - by Kasra
  • Each time you go to these annual/monthly/yearly gatherings it’ll be a slightly different group, but there will be a small group of faces that is there every time. That seems to be the way to create family: out of the people you see again and again. Showing up no matter what else is happening in your life, and believing that by the act of being there, something a little more sturdy will form, at least for the time being.
    The problem of long-term close friendships - by Kasra
  • It seems like the only person you can rely on to be there indefinitely, and with whom you can build something long-term, is your partner, and this is nice, but I do find the concept of a nuclear family—two parents on their own raising a few kids in a suburban house—a little depressing, when contrasted with a bustling extended family, many of them living together in the same building, hosting boisterous family dinners and monthly trips to a cottage.
    The problem of long-term close friendships - by Kasra
  • People talk about how in the strongest friendships, even if you go on separate paths and only see each other once a year, it always feels the same and you can just pick up from where you left off. I appreciate these friendships, but I much prefer consistent presence over the long haul (studying together, cooking dinners, sharing memes) rather than annual hourlong catch-up calls and barely ever talking in between
    The problem of long-term close friendships - by Kasra
  • “MY INSPIRATION COMES MOSTLY FROM THE ORDINARY WORLD... MUSIC DONE BY NON-MUSICIANS, ART DONE BY NON-ARTISTS, DESIGN DONE BY NON-DESIGNERS AND SO ON,”
    How to design with heart: Sometimes Always’ unpredictable practice – Pangram Pangram Foundry
  • Call them. Send them a book. Give them a small gift.
    How to make friends and keep them
  • Congratulate. Compliment. Console.
    How to make friends and keep them
  • Friends come in different shapes and sizes. Be open to that. Different friends, bring different viewpoints. Be a melting pot of friendships.
    How to make friends and keep them
  • Serendipity is your friend.
    How to make friends and keep them
  • My own emotional experience of the world is noticeably less extreme than it was, say, five years ago. I assume this will be a consistent trend throughout my life. In some ways it’s great: I feel better most of the time, and my highs and lows are muted. But when I first noticed it I was terrified because my feelings, especially my lows, had always been huge driver of productivity for me. Lately, however, I’ve realized that being terrified of being less emotional meant investing in a model of the world where all my creativity and desire to produce was based on the up and downs of what I felt. Th…
    How to write and what to write about
  • Good art requires acute sensitivity to both yourself and a world that continually shifts beneath your feet. The secret to creative success is disequilibrium, which is to say noticing things in the world that confound you. When we pay attention, we see things that disturb our expectations of how life should be.
    How to write and what to write about
  • “Art does not imitate life. Art anticipates life.”
    How to write and what to write about
  • “Some people have a lot farther to go from where they begin to get where they want to be—a long way up the mountain, and that is how it has been for me. I don’t feel I am getting older; I feel I am getting closer.”
    How to write and what to write about
  • "if comparison is the thief of joy, gratitude is how you win it back"
    23 thoughts for turning 23 - by Cindy Zhang - cindo thinks!
  • revisit your inner child often: so valuable to revisit who you were, what you wanted, and what you valued before the world threw their opinions at you. to me, this is binging harry potter once every year - reminding myself to fight for good, nothing can be accomplished alone, and to always, always believe in magic
    23 thoughts for turning 23 - by Cindy Zhang - cindo thinks!
  • it's okay to like things that other people like too (things are popular for a reason). it just means you have a big community waiting for you to join : )
    23 thoughts for turning 23 - by Cindy Zhang - cindo thinks!
  • "i don't know what i think until i write it down"
    23 thoughts for turning 23 - by Cindy Zhang - cindo thinks!
  • sometimes, i really want to be good at something, knowing i'm not really trying my hardest to get there.
    23 thoughts for turning 23 - by Cindy Zhang - cindo thinks!
  • felt like i was constantly, and unstoppably on "go" mode. didn't have much time to reflect and find meaning in my experiences. too much doing, not enough creating
    23 thoughts for turning 23 - by Cindy Zhang - cindo thinks!
  • a couple weeks ago, i turned 23. i mulled over this specific number for days in my head. 23. tweeenty-three. 二十三.
    23 thoughts for turning 23 - by Cindy Zhang - cindo thinks!
  • in rebuttal, my mind keeps returning to: will our goals even be aligned then? there are no cities nor townships that cater to all of our desires. however, there exists a way around the geographical distance that grows ever-so slowly amongst my best friends. to be a beacon! a lighthouse! a place of warmth and familiarity no matter where you reside! the beauty of my friendships is that they transcend borders and although physical presence is a gift, it’s not necessary for the continued sharing of our lives. we may not talk for months but then we will see each other and it is as though we have ne…
    friendships, play, and love | arielle lok