Essays
Long-form writing on attention, wisdom, difficulty, reading, time, and what it means to live a grown-up life in a distracted century. Written slowly. Meant to be read the same way.
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Essay · Attention
Your life follows your attention
Not focus hacks. Not productivity tricks. Attention as one of the deepest forces shaping a human life, and the front door of destiny.
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Essay · Attention
Attention, the brain, and three thousand years of wisdom
What neuroscience and older traditions both say about where your life ends up when the mind is pulled in a thousand directions at once.
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Essay · Attention
The noise problem
Information was never the problem. The volume of arriving noise keeps going up. The amount that turns out to matter stays roughly flat.
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Essay · Craft
The discipline of finishing
Projects rarely die in dramatic failure. They die in the middle. On the identity work of finishing what you started.
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Essay · Craft
The case for difficulty
Ease trained us to expect ease. It also flattened the muscles that used to grow when the work was hard.
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Essay · Reading
In defence of reading slowly
Speed reading trained the eyes to skim and the mind to summarise. Slow reading is where the sentence works on you.
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Essay · Reading
Read like an editor
The reader who reads like an editor is the one who ends up with something worth carrying.
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Essay · Reading
How the letter shaped the mind of the West
The alphabet was a technology. The technology changed cognition. Cognition changed the civilisation. The civilisation is still changing.
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Essay · Time
What Seneca knew about time
On the shortness of life. Two thousand years old. Still the plainest thing ever written about how we throw the days away.
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Essay · Living
Grown-up living
Science, wisdom, and the wrong wall. On what it means to build the second half of a life that the first half did not know it was going to need.
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Essay · Living
The return to grown-up living
The culture went adolescent. The work of coming back to grown-up standards is quieter and less popular. It is also the only work that lasts.
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Essay · Living
Living above the line
Below the line is reaction, blame, avoidance. Above the line is ownership, action, response. Most days you get to choose which side you are on.
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Essay · Living
A person becomes what they worship
Worship is the older word for attention. What you give your attention to, over time, is what you turn into.
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Essay · Body
Stress, healing, and the body listens
The body was listening the whole time. What we told it, in a decade of running from ourselves, is what it stored.
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Essay · Body
Epigenetics, belief, and daily patterns
The gene did not decide. The daily pattern decided which gene got expressed. Which means the daily pattern is where the leverage was, all along.
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Long-form · Book chapter
One truth before the noise
The lead essay from the first published book in the 12X series. Free to read in full.