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• Stay firm and unwavering, like you are being deposed and cannot change a single word of your answer every time it’s asked.

When we’re actually engaged in the flow of fascinating work, we don’t think in these terms. The task at hand fills our mind. The task itself is what keeps us up all night, not some extracted story of purpose.

David Lee Roth, the band’s lead singer in those early years, published an autobiography in 1997, titled *Crazy from the Heat,* in which he claimed that, *actually*, the bowl of curated candy had an entirely functional purpose: it was a quick way to see if the venue had actually read the whole contract, line by line.

“Edge City”, a term a friend and I use to talk about living on the edge of what’s normal, surrounded by others who are into weird, edgy stuff.

Aim a laser pointer at the moon, then move your hand the tiniest bit, and it’ll move a thousand miles at the other end. The tiniest misunderstanding long ago, amplified through time, leads to piles of misunderstandings in the present.

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

To build a creative environment, incentivize long-term thinking and experimentation. Making room for failure opens the door to much greater success.

The trusted advisor, with our permission, can simply watch and analyze the “digital exhaust” from our activities to develop deep insight into who we are and what is important to us.

Alda said in his interview: “If I have a difficult thing to understand, if there’s something I think is not going to be that easy to get, I try to say it in three different ways. I think if you come in from different angles you have a better chance of getting a three-dimensional view of this difficult idea.”

In the future, anything that’s used as a reference should become a chat bot. Wirecutter, Eater, and more should all be accessible this way so that when I have a product I want to buy, or I’m in need of a restaurant to visit I don’t have to scroll through a list of articles with lots of options. Instead, I can just ask, “What’s a good place to eat in Fort Greene tonight?” and get a response that’s based on the latest Eater reviews in my neighborhood.