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In the early stages of a new project, when you’re not quite sure what you want yet, instead of allowing indecision to paralyze forward motion, just start failing until your true desire announces itself. Begin making the wrong choices quickly, quietly and cheaply. Flush all of the bad ideas out of your system first, and that way, you can back into what you really want through a process of elimination. …

Contrary to popular conditioning, dreaming is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality. And dreams shouldn’t be reduced to a mere parenthesis.  Just because we’re unconscious doesn’t mean we can’t take that experience seriously. After all, we spend a third of our lives asleep. We we may as well discern what questions the dream is trying to answer. What our subconscious might be trying to tell…

Asking makes us vulnerable. It means people can hurt us by denying us the things we want. And nobody likes giving others that much power over them.  That’s why we back down from the task. We’re afraid to ask clearly, creatively and repeatedly for what we want. Is it any wonder why we’re unhappy?  The reality is, and this is going to sound so obvious it’s stupid, asking improves…

Husserl was the grandfather of phenomenology, which is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness.  He believed that experience was the source of all knowledge, famously saying that learning was not the accumulation of scraps of knowledge, but a growth where every act of knowledge develops the learner, this making him capable of constituting ever more and more complex objectives.  Learning, then, was the activity of the…

I’ll never forget reading the story about the middle eastern farmer who became rich and famous by selling sheep using the photo sharing app on his smartphone. Impossible.  Ali never could have dreamed of that level of economic prosperity twenty years ago. In fact, he probably comes from a long family lineage of sheep herders, most of whom wouldn’t even believe his story if he told them.  The question…

Here’s a question every entrepreneur must ask themselves.  When will I have done enough to be happy with who I am?  This thought haunted me for years. Because in a boundaryless system with no governor on my workload, no boss to answer to, and no separation between my personal and professional selves, I never put a proper limit on my work. I had zero sense of pace and proportion….

Alder first hypothesized that the personality was the same in dreaming life as in waking life. And that the only difference was, in dreams, the pressure of social demands was less acute and the personality was revealed with fewer safeguards and concealments.  Out in the world, though, we’re forced to put logical chains on our whimsical appetites. We face a level of accountability and rationality and practicality that’s sufficiently intense to…

All creativity begins with the moment of conception. That little piece of kindling that gets the fire going. That initial source of inspiration that takes on a life of its own. That single note from which the entire symphony grows. That single spark of life that signals an idea’s movement value, almost screaming to us, something wants to be built here. Based on my books in The Prolific Series, I’m going…

The industrial education complex isn’t interested in students whose talents don’t fit into what the examination systems require. Because it’s a giant factory. And if a student’s gifts don’t conform to the dictates of whatever core curriculum is in place, they’re kicked to the curb.  Thiel’s book on startups summarizes it perfectly: If we overachieve and end up learning something that’s not on the test, we won’t receive credit for it….

When you become chronically concerned with remaining the way you are, convinced that it’s impossible for you to exist in any other way, it will never occur to you to take any actions beyond that state of being.  And why would it? As long as you think you’re playing the game effectively, you don’t question the need to play it.  But the pathway to new power is putting at…