1. The world is a wonderful place, full of wonderful things in unimaginable quantity and complexity.
2. What you don’t know, threatens you, so you block it out. Learn to live with confusion.
3. When you feel stupid, you are getting smarter. When you feel smart, you’re closed off and not learning.
4. Training attention is among the highest of priorities. Hard!
5. Conflict is the gas in the tank of fiction. A great story would make an awful experience. A delightful life makes a bad story.
6. To write with clarity and precision is a moral virtue concerning honesty and vividness: living more and more truly.
7. The goal is always to live more.
8. Questions turn on the brain. Learning to ask good questions ranks just below learning to pay attention. See the QFT.
9. Learning how to find out stuff: the Research Cycle.
10. Competition shuts down learning, which depends upon openness and challenge, not winning. Not conquest: fulfillment.
11. Forgoing competition doesn’t make anything easier: there are still massive mountains of things to know before you can fly.
12. When you think it’s either/or, it’s probably neither/both.
13. Literature’s job is to define what it means to be human. All human concerns are the legitimate fodder for fiction. Reading fiction well exercises our empathy and compassion.
14. Your one truest job is to reach your highest potential. What do you love? What are your skills? What does the world need? It’s a Venn diagram: find the sweet spot.
15. There are merits to both the A job and the B job. Whatever. Just embrace your highest potential.
16. It’s all up to you. I can help, coach, cheer, present, cajole, maybe even inspire: but you have to do it all yourself.
17. It is never too late to learn something. You are never behind, ahead, or on schedule. There is no schedule. Just take the plunge.
Write with strength.
Read with passion.
Live more: engage.