My neck is sore from reading Yamauchi №10 Family Office’s statement, but while you’re distracted by the amazing soundtrack and the floating clouds and the space shuttle and the trees and the flowers and the everything, don’t sleep on the copy:

Seeking stability only clouds your soul. Fear of failing only kills seeds of innovation. We must create a more exciting future where people feel free to dream and leap into a world of possibilities. We must create a freer future where people are eager to truly live.

Justin Murphy, The Time to Withdraw:

One hour of truly focused attention is significantly more valuable than 25 hours of scatter-brained Twitter posting. One hour of focused attention is sometimes sufficient to conceive one original idea, write it down clearly, and do something purposeful with it, such as post it to your blog. The quality of the idea, the quality of the decision about what to do with the idea, and the basic follow-through — all of these are more valuable, and harder than we appreciate.

And…

When you’re in the rhythm of bouncing around between podcasts, Youtube videos, Twitter, and all the rest, the decision to stop in favor of reading and writing is more devilishly difficult than any educated person wants to admit. It is perhaps the most underestimated social harm afflicting the literate classes today, in part because it’s embarrassing to admit it.

Can relate.

Susan Orlean, Overdrawn at the Psychic Bank Account:

This year has been a constant state of withdrawal. We have withdrawn from all the things that we usually do. We have withdrawn from friends. … That’s because there’s been no inflow. Life always requires effort, always takes a chunk out of you, but in ordinary times, it also returns on the investment. You venture forth. You see things, talk to people, have experiences, hear stories, discover someone, eat something delicious, wander into a new place. Each one of these things gives you something — new information to process and sort through…

It’s Time to Rethink “Professionalism” from Jillian Ashley Blair Ivey.

Professionalism in 2021 isn’t about what time you show up for work or whether your interpretation of “business casual” is consistent with your company’s policy. None of that matters. None of it ever actually mattered; we just collectively convinced ourselves over the years that it did.

And…

Professionalism implies a certain degree of respect, and what could be more respectful than recognizing our employees and colleagues as whole adult human beings who have lives outside of the office — lives that may sometimes affect the their work?

Perfectly timed as folks start thinking about what a return to the office could / should look like. (And file under compartmentalization.)

Via Kottke, the poet David Whyte on Friendship:

All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die. In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.

Hey hey, what’s up. How are you? I’m good. Not much happening here, pretty quiet all around. Someone may have mentioned that you like links? Here are some for you.

NFTs and crypto-art, from a practicing artist, who thinks, on balance that (ultimately) it’s a good idea, by Rev Dan Catt.

Suppose we strip away all the tech-bro bubble, Twitter frothing, headline-grabbing, gold rush, planet-destroying, market flipping, copyright-infringing, bandwagon-jumping, volatility and hot takes. …

New Otessa Moshfegh coming. On Vox, via LitHub, a bit of very welcome news that the author of the not-about-the-pandemic-even-though-it-sounds-like-it novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, wrote a new novel during the pandemic. Moshfegh writes:

I’ve found that for my closest friends, the people that I’ve been in consistent touch with, it seems like this has been a year of self-confrontation and soul-searching in a way that couldn’t have happened otherwise. Everyone I know has gone through an internal transformation.

Highly recommended reading: Tim O'Reilly’s piece from last week, The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It, where he outlines the four trends that will likely end up shaping the future of tech. So much of it is worth highlighting; including this bit about our “fractured information landscape.”

I suspect that we will come to terms with machine learning-enabled science, just as we’ve come to terms with instruments that let us see far beyond the capabilities of the naked eye. …