Category: ideas

“The company’s Instagram and Twitter handles are both still @Madewell1937, and its LinkedIn page says, ‘Madewell was started in 1937 as a workwear company, and we’re always looking to the brand’s roots for inspiration.’ This is, to put it mildly, baloney. Madewell as it stands today has almost nothing at all to do with the company founded by my great-grandfather almost 80 years ago.”

“For more than 2,000 years, from the time of Thucydides to the middle of the 20th century, one of the primary purposes of learning about the past was to orient oneself towards the future.”

“I want to take a moment to talk briefly about unexpected opportunities. Just as it is important to formally state your desires and goals, it is equally important to remain open to the unexpected.”

Zadie Smith: “To find your beach you have to be ruthless. Manhattan is for the hard-bodied, the hard-minded, the multitasker, the alpha mamas and papas. A perfect place for self-empowerment — as long as you’re pretty empowered to begin with. As long as you’re one of these people who simply do not allow anything — not even reality — to impinge upon that clear field of blue.”

“Collisions (i.e. chance encounters) between creative people serve as the active reagent for great feats of entrepreneurial activity. Pack a bunch of smart people into urban space and genius is bound to happen. That’s Holacrazy.”

“If procrastination is so clearly a society-wide, public condition, why is it always framed as an individual, personal deficiency? Why do we assume our own temperaments and habits are at fault — and feel bad about them — rather than question our culture’s canonization of productivity?”

“Every moment, our brains are bombarded with information, from without and within. The eyes alone convey more than a hundred billion signals to the brain every second. … How do our brains select the relevant data? How do we decide to pay attention to the turn of a doorknob and ignore the drip of a leaky faucet? How do we become conscious of a certain stimulus, or indeed ‘conscious’ at all?”

“Perfectionism is a trait many of us cop to coyly, maybe even a little proudly. … But real perfectionism can be devastatingly destructive, leading to crippling anxiety or depression, and it may even be an overlooked risk factor for suicide, argues a new paper.”

“What if the omnipresence of cameras and the act of recording helps some people to be more firmly in the moment than if they weren’t documenting it? Maybe it isn’t so much about the result of that documentation – the arguably inflationary numbers of selfies, time-lapses and photos – but about the mere act of consciously documenting?”

Researchers describe it as a progression from aggressive humor to affiliative humor – but it’s clearer and more understandable than those two terms may sound.