Guided by Beauty

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The shortest path is the one you don't abandon.

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Practice until you get it right, and you'll need perfect conditions.

Practice until you can't get it wrong, and conditions no longer matter.

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Don't let your worst moments become your story.

“People respond well to those that are sure of what they want. What people hate most is indecision.”

Mathematician Jim Simons on being guided by beauty:

“You might think 'building a company that's trading bonds, what's so aesthetic about that?' What's aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, approaching the problem, and doing it right it's a beautiful thing to do something right.”

“A clear majority of human beings tend to connect their sentences, paragraphs, and scenes together with the word and.

This is a mistake. The ideal connective tissue in any story are the words but and therefore, along with all their glorious synonyms. These buts and therefores can be either explicit or implied.

“And” stories have no movement or momentum. They are equivalent to running on a treadmill. Sentences and scenes appear, one after another, but the movement is straightforward and unsurprising. The momentum is unchanged.

But and therefore are words that signal change. The story was heading in one direction, but now it’s heading in another. We started out zigging, but now we are zagging. We did this, and therefore this new thing happened.

I think of it as continually cutting against the grain of the story. Rather than stretching a flat line from beginning to end, the storyteller should seek to create a serrated line cutting back and forth, up and down, along the path of the story. We are still headed in the same direction, but the best storytellers don’t take a straight line to get there.”