These aren’t polished essays or tidy aphorisms. They’re scraps I’ve carried around this month—half-heard thoughts, borrowed lines, sudden recognitions—that refused to be forgotten. Zuihitsu literally means “following the brush,” and while my version is shorter and scrappier than the classical form, the impulse feels the same: to catch what drifts across the mind before it dissolves.
They’re not meant to be a system or a manifesto, just a trail of mental breadcrumbs. If any resonate, keep them. If none do, that’s fine too—next month’s batch will be different. For the full, ever-growing collection, grab the the fortune file.
- Rather than choose community based on their principles, most people choose their principles based on their community.
- Every time you level up, you lose something. A habit, a friendship, a version of yourself, it’s not loss, it’s you evolving.
- No contempt prior to investigation.
- When something is dead, it probably deserved to die.
- Empathy is like mud. You lose your boots in that stuff.
- Competence creates authority.
- Don’t worry boys, we’ll ride out this wave of approval and come out as hated as ever.—Saul Alinsky
- Roast until cooked, then broil until charred.
- The highest form of existence is to have no desire to be understood, admired, pitied, or known.
- When everyone turns their attention at once that’s news; when people turn their attention cohort by cohort that curriculum.
conomic power accrues not to what is most elegant, but to what is most constrained. - The aggregate of unexpressed interior life is enormous. For men, stereotypically, the inner life stays unspoken and increasingly, so does the outer one. For women, the error is inverted: feeling circulates as social currency while the interior life stays just as protected.
- …allowed to be, who hasn’t been groomed, cleaned, or edited into obedience.
- Examining patterns doesn’t mean you live by them.
- Will you let others judge your worth or will you establish your own scale?
- You can make wild ducks tame, but you can never make tame ducks wild again.
- Fidelity or fun. Pick one.
- Use the difficulty.
- Communicability is prima facie evidence of partiality.
- You can’t steal the light from someone who carries a galaxy of stars in their heart.—Rumi
- The best peer review is reality.
- Overkill often carries no penalties.
- The difference between a good commander and a great one is about 15 seconds.
- Money can be issued only in the act of buying, and can be backed only in the act of selling.—EC Riegel
- You didn’t like it? You don’t like it? Are you here to bitch?
- Buy less, buy better quality.
- Sometimes suffering is just suffering. It doesn’t make you stronger. It doesn’t build character.
- Lack of action due to the expectation of long timelines is one of the sins of the lawyerly society.
- Bioprosperity for the individual and measles for the many.
- It is the weak who are cruel, and gentleness to be expected only from the strong.
- If you are right, rejection does not mean you are wrong. It means you are early.
- Love is not permanently gifted. It’s loaned.
- He who writes for fools always finds a large public.—Arthur Schopenhauer
- Knowledge is of no use unless it is accessible at the moment of need
When everyone owns a tiny slice of the problem, nobody owns the result. - Bureaucracies prioritize predictability over excellence.
- No hothouse-flowering.
People care about tone the moment they need a scapegoat. - Don’t become lost in the world of signs and forget the things they signify.
- Do it messy, do it scared, do it unprepared.
- Your focus determines your reality.
- A right without a remedy
- That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.—Karl Pearson
- …a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.
- …what we need is “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”.
- Reciprocity reveals character.
- I’ve always expected the worst, and it’s always worse than I expected.—Henry James
- I came here to laugh not to undergo painful self reflection.
- Only the disciplined ones are free in life.
- Advertising has two goals: comparison to others and questioning your own value.
- Proximity is power.
Love is 3/4 selflessness. - Ninety percent of influence is weaponizing cognitive dissonance, of presenting a frame that shapes future behavior.
- Exposure does not threaten power.
- Pressure is a privilege.
- I know a profound pattern which humans deny with their words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak, they create the seeds of turmoil and violence.—Dune
- Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.—Dune