Threshold Crossing (vol. 1, no. 8)

Here are five things I’m sharing this month:


1.  Paul Graham on the value of projects over grades:

  • “If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I’d pick the projects. And not because I’m an indulgent parent, but because I’ve been on the other end and I know which has more predictive value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn’t care about applicants’ grades. But if they’d worked on projects of their own, I wanted to hear all about those.”

2. Joseph Campbell on how to read:

  • “When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.”

3. Naomi Shihab Nye on what is happiness:

  • “Once my father and I were flying home from the Middle East and we stopped in Paris for 24 hours. Our taxi driver told us what happiness was. “It’s when you don’t want anything. You don’t hate it, You just don’t want it. You like it, in fact. You just don’t want it.”

4. Laurie Penny on self-care (this is counterintuitively interesting):

  • “Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.”

5. Encore blog post from me on the benefits of harder not smarter:

  • “[S]ometimes we need a reminder of what is possible even when the “smarter” way is not available. We don’t have access to specialized tools. We cannot afford time-saving techniques. And, we have exhausted our wits, our creativity and our genius. It is just us, our goals, and the pure unadulterated work that keeps us apart.”

It’s a great day to be alive! – dr H

PS If you’re reading this newsletter for the first time, you can read previous issues hereview lists of questions, quotes and resources I’ve shared before here, and subscribe here.

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