If an idea is good, the work flows easily

• Woodrow Wilson said government “is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” It’s a useful idea. Everything is accountable to one of the two, and you have to know whether something adapts and changes over time or perpetually stays the same.

• Some of my best work was easy to write, and the worst stuff I’ve ever written was agonizing to write. I think it’s similar in most fields. If an idea is good, the work flows easily. Writers’ block – or its equivalent in other jobs – usually means the idea is wrong.

• Any amount of intelligence can be overridden by: ego, insecurity, immorality, bad incentives, or impatience, usually in that order.

“Greatness is overrated. It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in.”
—Kevin Kelly

“Long term companies are not obsessed with quantifying performance. They are in it for a brand.”
—Rory Sutherland

“The only guarantor of independence is profit.”
—James Murdoch

There’s enormous pressure right now not just to use AI, but to use it maximally. In the frenzy to hack your way to success before the “social singularity,” you might be destroying the skills that will actually matter in a post-AGI world: judgment, strategy, the ability to recognize when something is off.

Being successful in this world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Rather we should aim to be significant, which means accomplishing things together. We want to make an impact on the people around us and bring people along with us. Success is meaningless unless we are being significant.

In 1965, a University of Florida physician watched his football players wilt in the heat and asked a simple question: what are they losing, and how do we replace it? Nomio is this generation’s answer to a similar founding question — what does science actually say about performance and recovery? — asked again, with better tools.

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