There’s a phrase I came across on Substack a few days back that I’ve been thinking about. “Live a disciplined life, spontaneously.” Four words that aren’t supposed to fit in the same sentence. I keep turning it over, and the more I do, the more I think
Earlier this week I wrote one line and couldn’t put it down. “High quality is an act of aggression against a world that is completely comfortable with mediocrity.” I posted it, watched it sit there, and then spent the next three days arguing with it. Not because I think
I leave my gym bag on the back seat of my car. It’s still damp from the morning’s workout. I walk into the Rust office and sit down at my desk, moving the mouse to wake up the screen. A harsh blue light hits the wall. A line
You are sitting on the couch on a Sunday evening, and you are trying to remember what you did on Wednesday. Not the meetings, those are on a calendar, but the actual day, what it felt like, whether anything happened in it that belonged to it and nothing else. The
I killed most of my interests last year. Not in the dramatic way that sounds, not some bonfire of old identities, but in the quiet administrative way that things actually die when you decide to get serious. I stopped designing for fun. Stopped building systems that had no audience. Stopped
I have made a self-admitted critical error in this series. I have been citing the same six writers across multiple papers, leaning on their ideas, building arguments on top of their arguments, and I have never properly introduced any of them. I have treated them like old friends at
Meaning used to be simple. For most of history, someone handed it to you. A priest, a king, a book, a tradition. You were born into a structure that told you what mattered, what to do with your time, and what your labor was for. The structure could be oppressive,
I spent years telling myself that having a lot of interests was a strength. And it was, in the sense that it gave me range I wouldn't trade. I could design a site and write the copy and think through the funnel and run the ads. I could
I started Muay Thai classes a few days ago. I have no idea what I'm doing. The combinations are foreign, my guard drops every time I throw a kick, and by the second round of pad work my lungs were burning so hard I could taste metal in
What happens when we optimize away the conditions that make tools usable You have just finished something. A report, a proposal, a piece of writing that was due by end of day, and you produced it with the help of a tool that knows how to sound like you, or
Studio KILN started the way a lot of real projects start, with a clear taste for what the thing should feel like, and almost no certainty about how to make it real. There was no software or web development background at the beginning, and there definitely was not a clean
For her birthday