flâneur

Michelle Nguyen

4 followers · 17 following · 1810 views

on the atlas — 100

highlights — 115

  • One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future. A priest should not presume to judge unless he can judge as Sa does; with absolute justice and absolute mercy.
    nothing will change your life more than saying what you actually want to say
  • I know that environmental influence is the most effective form of behavioral control. Accordingly, if you want radical change, radically change your environment. Being in the wrong city will cancel out years of self-improvement.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that sometimes, persistence is not a virtue. I would trade my other abilities to be an exceptional songwriter. I gave it a serious enough try to know that I don’t have the knack, for years, and I’m not interested in being publicly mediocre at the performing arts. My life is incalculably better for having let the dream go. The world will be happiest with a certain range of behaviors from you—life will be easier if you find a place in that range where you’re content. David Whyte calls this the conversational nature of reality, and he is correct about the importance of this concept.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • “Every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.”
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • Being able to live in the “world as it is,” rather than getting permanently fixated on the “world as it should be,” is a superpower. My heart is usually with the progressive team, politically, but I am sad to note that the classic aphorism is often true: “A liberal is someone who doesn’t understand the difference between is and ought.”
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • People are their own punishment, which means revenge is rarely worth it.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • There are huge quality of life improvements downstream of “let me take this off future me’s plate.” You don’t just shift work earlier, you also save yourself all the mental friction between now and when you do it. Psychic cost is the integral of cognitive load over time — so do the things you most want to avoid first.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • What this means is that you can internalize good intellectual habits that, in effect, “increase your intelligence”. ‘Intelligence’ is not fixed.
    How To Understand Things
  • There’s kind of a dividing line between people who continue to open their hearts and those who shut down. And one is the path to happiness, and one is the path to unhappiness and regret.
    love, conflict, and opening up your heart in relationships
  • To my mind, the world of defense tech in Silicon Valley learned a valuable lesson: hype earns revenue.
    Defense Tech Shouldn’t Be Sexy
  • the ultimate way to feel vulnerable was not to be hurt but to be loved.
    no exit - by Ava - bookbear express
  • Before him, I had treated my life as one long performance for the benefit of others.
    no exit - by Ava - bookbear express
  • They’ll want to review the XYZ problem, think about how X will solve it and maybe do some thinking or prioritization about how this fits in with other work. Or maybe they’ll want you to share what you know. It may fall off their plate. You will probably have to remind them a few times to get around to saying “yes”. It might be a more pressing issue for you
    Ask for no, don’t ask for yes – Dan Moore!
  • Now, let’s take the alternative approach.”Hey, boss, I am going to install action X, which should solve the XYZ problems we’ve been having. Will take care of this on Monday unless I hear differently from you.”
    Ask for no, don’t ask for yes – Dan Moore!
  • When you have something you want to do and that you feel is in scope for your position, but you want a bit of reassurance or to let the boss know what you are up to, it’s common to reach out and ask them for permission. Don’t. Don’t ask for a yes. Instead, offer a chance to say no, but with a deadline.
    Ask for no, don’t ask for yes – Dan Moore!
  • We can travel, if there are openings into other worlds, but we can only live in our own…we have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us, there is no elsewhere.
    Although of course you end up becoming yourself | MIT Admissions
  • Use other people’s thoughts to inform your own, don’t copy
    Conviction is the Scarcest Resource: Essays About Gaining Real Conviction
  • If you are too constrained by what you think is going on to notice what is actually going on—you will miss important data that would allow you to make better choices.
    Becoming perceptive - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Building trust isn’t just about believing in your teams — it’s about creating conditions where they feel empowered to act. I’ve noticed how unclear accountability often leads to what psychologists call the “bystander effect” — where everyone sees a problem but assumes someone else will take the lead in solving it. In technical organizations, this can manifest as teams waiting for explicit approval or assuming someone else needs to make the call.
    The Staff Engineer Transition. Finding Your Path to Scaling Technical… | by Gabe Perez | Jan, 2025 | Medium
  • Any given “bet” you take is likely to fail. Success is making lots of “bets” and trying as hard as possible at each of them. P(success) is higher the more bets you take & the better your execution per bet. (This is also why fast cycle time is so important). Ravin first articulated this to me.
    Principles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • Be honest about whether something is learning or entertainment. Real learning is extremely hard and effortful. (Podcasts, Atlantic articles, pop science books, anything that’s a bit too digestible is more “entertainment” than real learning).
    Principles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • When writing, separate the “creator” and the “editor”. The “creator” just writes, and doesn’t worry about quality; the goal is words on the page. Later, you can be the “editor” and shape it into something good.
    Principles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • Figure out what gives you new ideas, and make sure you incorporate that into your routine.
    Principles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • Be careful about rationalizing something that does not feel right. (Utilitarians, this means you!)
    Principles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • You don’t do anyone any favors by lurking, put yourself out there!
    Principles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • Think about what makes you ‘imbalanced’ as a personality, & do things where this gives you an edge.
    Principles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can't think of this time as a cost, or it will seem too high. You have to find the work sufficiently engaging as it's happening.
    How to Do Great Work
  • But fields aren't people; you don't owe them any loyalty. If in the course of working on one thing you discover another that's more exciting, don't be afraid to switch.
    How to Do Great Work
  • I commonly compartmentalize my tree or basically get rid of seemingly large unwieldily ideas. By modularizing your tree in your free time, this actually does a lot of precomputing for handling a new argument. By having more granular (again, not necessarily more data) building blocks, you can get a better hang of new concepts that are deep out of your comfort zone.
    how to think fast
  • 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
  • Have the confidence to cut. Don't keep something that doesn't fit just because you're proud of it, or because it cost you a lot of effort.
    How to Do Great Work
  • if you want to do great work it's an advantage to be optimistic, even though that means you'll risk looking like a fool sometimes.
    How to Do Great Work
  • One way to avoid intellectual dishonesty is to maintain a slight positive pressure in the opposite direction. Be aggressively willing to admit that you're mistaken. Once you've admitted you were mistaken about something, you're free. Till then you have to carry it. [13]
    How to Do Great Work
  • The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We're taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kind of sacrifice. But in fact it's a source of power too. To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest?
    How to Do Great Work
  • If you succeed at an ambitious project, you're not a nobody; you're the person who did it. So just do the work and your identity will take care of itself.
    How to Do Great Work
  • 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
  • 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.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Ideally those hours will be contiguous. To the extent you can, try to arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in. You'll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted.
    How to Do Great Work
  • The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal, but you can't discover natural selection that way.
    How to Do Great Work
  • When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. Fields change as you learn more about them. What mathematicians do, for example, is very different from what you do in high school math classes. So you need to give different types of work a chance to show you what they're like. But a field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn't, it's probably not for you.
    How to Do Great Work
  • What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lo…
    How to Do Great Work
  • But always preserve excitingness.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Don’t divide your attention: focusing on one thing yields increasing returns for each unit of effort.
    Lessons from Peter Thiel - Joe Lonsdale
  • When you say your punchline upfront, you will instantly seem more competent, strategic, and organized
    How to be concise - Wes Kao's Newsletter
  • I have only started to realize that, when Loom was in its early innings, I felt very secure with my position in life, and lots of this stemmed from an extreme gratitude for the journey I was on. I was happy with everything as it was. The growth trajectory of the company was more than I could ever dream for. I was happy. I felt secure. It could all turn to shit the next day, and that would be ok.
    I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life
  • Asking questions allows you to unblock yourself as quickly as possible. You might learn something by spending hours trying to figure it out yourself, but if you could’ve learned from someone else in a matter of minutes, then you wasted both your own and your team’s time. Be humble and teachable.
    how to get a return offer (and so much more)
  • Your skills are your safety net.
    how to get a return offer (and so much more)
  • Accepting loss and grief as the price of love, and above all accepting that happiness is not about perfection or certainty or even success
    50 ways to be happy in Toronto, according to Torontonians
  • Nothing makes me happier than walking to Dundas and Spadina in Chinatown, taking the stairs up to the second floor of my favourite spot in the city, Hong Kong Bistro Cafe, and being warmly greeted by their staff. By now, they already know I’m there to order either the curry beef brisket or baked pork chops in tomato sauce (with rice), iced lemon tea, and their Chinese soup. Hong Kong Bistro Cafe is a “cha chaan teng,” a kind of Chinese diner that was commonplace for me growing up in Hong Kong. A solo lunch here helps recharge my social battery, allowing me to turn everything off and just enjoy…
    50 ways to be happy in Toronto, according to Torontonians
  • I had to think about what truly makes me happy. I could have written about spending time with my loved ones or a warm summer evening on a patio downtown — those things do make me happy. But, for me, the practice of happiness or joyfulness is a conscious choice. I choose to be joyful during the hard times and I choose to be grateful amid the sweet times. An unknown person said, “When it rains, look for rainbows. When it's dark, look for stars.” That’s what I’m going with for 2025.
    50 ways to be happy in Toronto, according to Torontonians