First Principles

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them.
We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how.
If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin

This is the first of a series of articles about First Principles, the components required to create a life, a company,

Practice Creates the Master

“Practice Creates the Master.”
— Don Miguel Ruis

At first, you can’t do it at all. 

Then you summon up your courage. Take a run at it. Make a mess of it.

Later, with a new subject, in a new moment, you sally forth! And,

Constructing One’s Self

“Without much formal schooling, Washington was subject to condescension from some contemporaries, especially the snobbish John Adams, who disparaged him as “too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation.” Washington has suffered from comparisons with other founders, several of whom were renowned autodidacts, but by any ordinary standard, he was an exceedingly smart man with a quick ability to grasp ideas.

We’re Back, After Hiatus.

Time for some changes.

1.

Many of our clients employ strict e-security measures — which eliminate our illustrations, formatting and list feedback. (For us, a little like preparing a great dinner and not knowing if it arrived on the table of the intended

Creator/Consumer

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
— Muriel Rukeyser

Stories… We absorb them like oxygen. They fuel our curiosity, feed our upsets and our favored outrage. They form the substrate, the superstructure, even the skin of our lives. Often, they tell us who we are.

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