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Nobody is destined for greatness.
Demosthenes lost his first appearance before the Athenian assembly. His voice came out thin and failed him mid-sentence, and the crowd laughed him off the platform. Plutarch tells us he walked home with his cloak pulled over his face, certain his public life had ended before it started. What he
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How to be inspired without copying
In 1713, Johann Sebastian Bach sat down at his desk in Weimar and began copying out concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. He transcribed them note for note, in his own hand,
Position or Perish: The Narrative Blueprint
Avis was losing $3.2 million a year; and they'd been unprofitable for thirteen straight. In 1962, they sat at number two in American car rental, well behind
Fear is information.
The motivational industry has built any number of small empires on the notion that fear is a problem to be either managed, suppressed or out-manoeuvred. Fight the fear, etc. The
The war between fast and legitimate is here
The European Union took four years to draft the AI Act - with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its
Emotional regulation is a dying art.
There was a time when adults could feel something without screaming at you about it. We could disagree - hard - in a meeting and walk out with our faces
Outrage is letting someone else set the frame
William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895 - and immediately started running stories designed to make his readers furious before they’d finished their breakfast. The
On wintering.
The winterer is out of the loop; they're not maintaining a position because they don't have a position to maintain. They can do work that takes longer than a quarter, longer than a year, longer than 5 years, because nobody is auditing the line item.
The Loop: everything has happened before, and everything will happen again
We keep replaying the same human mistakes -bubbles, strongmen, scapegoats, and panics -because the operating system in our skulls hasn’t updated in ten thousand years.
Why prediction markets are a sure sign that our civilisation is in decay
Prediction markets are the clearest single sign our civilisation has entered a late and decadent stage. The reason isn't that they're new or sinister. It's that the case for them is defensible, the technology works, the outputs are useful, but the long-term effect is corrosive anyway.
How we lost the living Now
Before 1840, noon in Bristol happened about ten minutes after noon in London, and nobody much cared. The railway needed a common minute or it couldn't run - and that common minute is now a common nanosecond, shipped in real time.
I truly hate mostpeopleslop
In 2006, Joe Sugarman published a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - and an axiom stuck... "The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to