I just finished The Intel Trinity. It’s the story of Intel and founders Andy Grove, Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore. There’s an incredible amount to unpack but I can’t stop thinking of this one vignette of Grove, then a new immigrant and struggling at university:

It seems like it’s never been easier to be an autodidact. Endless wikis, videos and articles are a search away. And they’re (mostly) free. All you need is the will. Supposedly.

There’s some sampling bias in how often biographies I read centre curiosity. But I wonder if it’s more my choice of reading material, than it is the kind of people who get biographies.

Fulfilment at work comes from mastery, and the perks that go with it, rather than pre-existing passion. That’s my main takeaway from So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport.

I recently got the results for my latest masters courses and I’m doing pretty well. But I don’t really care. I’ve never been particularly motivated by grades. As long as they are high enough that I can keep studying whatever I want.

We’re surrounded by colour. On TV, advertising and clothes. I can whip open an app and conjure countless hues. We have wonderful algorithms that can interpolate from grainy, black and white footage.

I recently stumbled across the sketch column of Gabriel Campanario in the Seattle Times. The archive goes back a decade and is full of lovely art. But he's also using the medium to tell stories, and capture emotion and feeling, in ways others can't.

This is from Sketching People. But it could easily have been in any of the drawing books I’ve read recently.

I was hurrying across the shopping centre this morning when a painting stopped me. It was a print. A generic composition of an urban scene. You’ve seen it. A street disappears into the horizon, lined with lovingly water-coloured buildings.

The easy, obvious heuristics are, often, just so bad. How many simple signals of what’s good or proper are actually just status quo bias rather than reliable indicators we should use to make decisions?