Colin Wright's Blog, page 20

Epistemic Humility

The word “epistemic” means, essentially, anything dealing with knowledge. Epistemic humility, then, is being humble with your assumptions about understanding. It’s recognizing that you may not know something—may not know a great many things—and that this is natural and okay. This doesn’t mean deciding that you’re ignorant and therefore know nothing about anything. And it […]

Where You’ll Be

Our present perspective is limiting. It can also be deceptively harmful, at times. Yes, we’re using the best information currently available, operating under assumptions derived from the most up-to-date sensory input and internal processing. But that may mean nothing a year from now. It may mean nothing tomorrow. A few minutes from now, something dramatic […]

Press-Worthy

To gain press for something that you’re doing, to increase attention and have newspapers and blogs writing stories about it, that thing, that effort of yours, needs to be framed in a press-worthy way. What this typically means is demonstrating why it’s worth paying attention to compared to all other possible things that could be […]

Transcendence

Everyone’s looking for some kind of transcendence. For some people religion fulfills that purpose. For others, it’s a less-defined sense of spirituality, or other non-organized, faith-based practice. For still others, the exploration of the physical universe scratches this itch—science, math, learning about human neurology and physiology and sociology. Transcendence is about being uplifted, pulled out […]

Creative Triggers

It feels wonderful to publish something. It’s an experience I first had way back in high school, when the web was still young and when, despite having access to basic computer production software, my journalism class still taught the not-yet-phased-out craft of physically laying out a page—every line of text on every page of the […]

Liminality

A liminal moment is one in which you are in flux, in limbo. You’re in the process of moving from one state of being to another, and although you’ve already left your previous state behind, you haven’t yet arrived in the new one. The word “liminal” was originally reserved for rites of passage. The time […]

First Principles Lifestyle

In philosophy, “first principles” refer to something like foundational truths. They are assumptions we can safely make about the way of things, with all of the secondary suppositions and postulations stripped away. The term is similar when applied to the world of formal logic. There are a lot of arguments you could make that rely […]

Tiny Luxuries

With rare exceptions, I prepare every meal I eat. I’ve done this for almost two years, now. Being able to take the time, not just to learn to cook, but to prepare myself something nice, to acquire the right ingredients, to spend a half-hour or more on preparation, to sit with my food and enjoy […]

Envisioned

With as much detail and precision as possible, describe your ideal lifestyle. This is what I asked myself to do back in 2009, when I first allowed myself to think about a world beyond my business, beyond LA, beyond the goals I’d been chasing my entire adult life. And this was a necessary ask, because […]

Eudaemonia

Most decisions we make can be traced back to our desire to be happy. But happiness is a fuzzy term, and is often—incorrectly, I would argue—conflated with a collection of other terms: fulfillment, pleasure, contentment, and satisfaction, among them. Homing in on this difference is important, though, as it allows us to better refine our […]