Quotes from the book in normal text. My thoughts in bold. (JR)

“FRIENDLINESS is about being a nourishing presence. It’s about becoming somebody who people (including yourself!) love and enjoy.”

I like this framing and hadn’t thought about it that way before. How could I become someone I more enjoy being around? Be more empathetic. Be more willing to take things to fun places. Be more goofy.

“The most important person you have to be friends with is yourself.

Much of self-improvement, personal development, introspection and so on can quite simply be reframed as the art of socialising with yourself.

Listen to yourself, pay close attention to yourself, don’t interrupt yourself, be kind and supportive to yourself, be constructive in criticism”

Absolutely love the “How to feel your feelings” graphic; very helpful.

On emptying your cup: “At the heart of this, I think, is a question: do we allow life to surprise us? Bc everything we think we know is a *tiny* fragment of the world. The world *will* surprise us, in both good & bad ways. Emptying your cup is about refusing to be in denial.”

I like this framing. Really try not to write off surprise. Take it seriously. I’ve been surprised a lot lately, and want to learn from that.

“All of that said, if you need a starting question to surface and unearth responses to ask further about, “what is your relationship with X” is my favorite. What is your relationship with fitness? With food? With the internet? Then observe closely.

What is the history of your relationship with music? With travel? With leadership? With taking responsibility? Strength? Vulnerability? Fashion? Self-expression? Optimism? Being a public figure? Privacy? Intimacy? Ugh, I am so curious about everything and everyone!! ❤”

“Sometimes people ask things like, “aren’t you afraid you’re going to get bored of each other after a decade?” There are some buried assumptions in there. I met my wife in 2000 and honestly she gets more interesting every year. I’d like to think the same is true for me. For the beginner, interestingness is about novelty. For the expert, interestingness is about nuance.”

• This is especially helpful; looking back, I’ve thought about it a lot since reading it.

“I have an essay draft making fun of the idea ‘how to spice up your relationship’ – people think it’s about toys and lingerie but it’s really about exposing vulnerable bits of your psychology to one another. You can love someone for decades and marry them and still have huge blind spots.

Relationships become boring because they get reduced into shell-scripts, patterns and routines – because people avoid the difficult work of communicating hard, painful things to one another. At this point some people, desperate for stimulation, do crazy shit like cheat.

It’s actually entirely possible to have an affair with your own spouse – just literally decide to break from your routine and ask each other questions about things you don’t normally talk about, and be honest with each other. Do hard and scary things together.

I think a big reason lots of people fail to do this is because they’re shy! You can see your spouse naked, and witness each other throwing up, etc – and yet be too shy to ask each other things that are outside of the stable/familiar configuration you’ve established together. You’re scared that they will judge you for wanting something different, for wanting to be someone different than they’ve gotten used to.”

Really enjoyed the great discussion on “managing disagreements” and “context-sensitivity”

My basic takeaway: group dynamics are extremely powerful. It becomes addictive to make arguments that are perceived as valuable by your in-group. Eventually you start seeing other groups’ arguments as dumb and stop engaging with them and actually trying to learn about them. So, it’s really important to keep your identity as small as possible, from an intellectual perspective. Try to make sense of each issue individually. This makes me more interested to try to write content that would be seen as valuable by communities other than EA/rationalists. 

Good point on safe spaces below. Basically, safe spaces are a way for people to get to really explore and develop their ideas. Makes sense to exclude people with certain perspectives/values for pragmatic reasons.

“I created a “safe space for brown friends” group on Facebook, and I worried that it would end up being an echo chamber. But the folks in there question + doubt + challenge each other a LOT. In fact, they get to do it more effectively when they don’t get distracted by noise. Makes me think.

It is my experience that, if you create a “safe space” for a minority group, sparing them the stress of having to explain themselves to clueless outsiders, the level of criticism, argument, discourse, etc inside the group INCREASES. People challenge and spar with each other.

For example, feminists arguing internally about how to best achieve their goals have much more rich, interesting, thought-provoking conversations when they don’t have to be interrupted to explain “women are people too” to newbies every 20 minutes.”

I like the way he thinks about ambition. It’s more about wanting to manifest your taste at a large scale and impact rather than to gain prestige.

“A fun way of thinking about it might be – what would Prince, Bowie or Hendrix do? Pick your own heroes. There have been people throughout history who marched to the beat of their own drums. They have very distinctive signatures. Richard Feynman was one. David Ogilvy was another. Anais Nin, definitely.”

Heroes for me to think about as ‘marching to beat of their own drum’: Kelsey Piper, Peter Chinman, Holden Karnofsky, Alex G, Mitski, Devon Welsh, Jenny Slate, Ben Falk, Ted Chiang.

“A common mistake people make on twitter is reading the dumpster fire junk on the timeline and assuming that that’s what they ought to post too. This is a failure of imagination. You should be tweeting what *you* want to see more of. If in doubt, I recommend nerdposting.”

I like the push to be prolific and not worry about quality

I also like the idea of trying to become friends with people you’re excited about. Might be worthwhile for me to try to get to know Andy Matuschak and stuff.

I like this quote on note-taking: “If you’re like me, keep meticulous notes of whatever you do when you’re procrastinating. I think of it as “deep-self-directed work”. If you’re going to watch trashy movies then write down your thoughts after watching each movie. It’ll come in handy in ways you least expect.”

Possible thing to do: Take my notes and produce lots of short posts based on them that are really rough. Take the best of them and develop them.

Also: Start by writing about things where I have relatively precise views, but don’t worry about being too precise.

Really enjoyed the “Pass it on” message

“I’ve also found it really heartening to use this frame when people gush at me with admiration. Sometimes I get people on Twitter saying things to me like, “I can’t thank you enough, you’ve changed my life.” It’s tempting for me to think, “Hah, I’m so great.” And it’s tempting to simply say, “You’re very welcome,” and leave it at that. Which is a valid response, of course. But the coolest thing to say is, you guessed it: “Pass it on! 

It’s how I choose to interact with my own heroes, too. Rather than gush at them excessively (which then becomes something that they have to manage), I thank them as calmly as I can, and let them know that their work has passed through me and is now helping other people in turn. The responses are always wonderful as well. Some of my heroes are now my friends because of this.

People love to feel appreciated. People love to feel like they made a difference. People love to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves.

Pass it on.”