Garrett Kincaid
I’m WRITING to embrace uncertainty and live with clarity. Every month, I update my LOGS with my latest batch of half-epiphanies. And if an idea is good enough, I’ll add it to my library of APHORISMS. For some context, you can read a bit ABOUT me.
I’m also COACHING to help online writers become better self-editors.
With everything I write, my goal is to help you practice introspection. If you want my essays delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Intronaut. Every issue includes a Springboard, which is a carefully crafted question to help you dive inwards.
Featured Essays
My Best APHORISMS
- There is no best way to go, but there is a worst way: to follow.
- Be an intellectual nomad; don’t dwell in dogma.
- Change is the only certainty. To be certain of anything else is to be in denial of change.
- We humans have these infinite concepts of what could be, yet we are stuck in the finite concrete of reality.
- The only path to greener grass is to tend to your lawn.
- Success comes from repeated failure. If you want fertile soil, mix in manure.
- Say what you know is unsaid.
My Latest LOGS
February 14 Let the first draft be for you, and revise as a service to your reader.
Keep editing until everything hangs on a single thread. Shift your thesis if you have to, and if you do, cut what's not longer relevant. That's the responsibility writers have to their readers -- to ruthlessly revise.
February 13 We understand that life moves in phases, fits and starts. But we treat that as a design flaw instead of a feature. We strive for perfect balance between our professional and personal lives, friends and family time, mental and physical fitness. But never at any point will both sides be at equilibrium. Balance is the wrong goal, and it's not even optimal if you could achieve it. Life is a series of seasons. Let one side of the scale dip down, let one part of you take the lead for a while. Instead of trying to achieve perfect balance, just make sure that what you're doing with your time is healthy and promotes personal growth. Go for harmony, not balance.
February 12 Computers are counter-evolutionary. Our minds and bodies are evolved to move around in 3-D space and do things in the world. At a desk, behind a computer, we sit still and move a phantom appendage in digital space. The self-reliant human-animal is now less of an animal and more of a machine, and more reliant on machines.
We have this unquestioned value of ease, comfort, and convenience. And it leads to default thoughts and decisions -- like "Why would I write emails when an AI assistant can do it for me?" or "Thanks to social media, I'll never have to be bored again!". We have these values that contradict a fundamental truth: it is the things that are difficult and boring and aimless and tedious and slow that uniquely add depth and breadth to life. There's value in doing hard things, moving slowly, and being bored. These states are nothing to escape but are parts of life to embrace.
The world is not flawed but rather how we think of the world. Nature is always right.
February 11 Find harmony, not balance. Balance suggests everything in equal portions. Harmony requires, at any one time, for one aspect of you to be in the lead. And that's what's realistic. That's how you best function, by letting different aspects of you take the lead at different parts in the song.
February 10 So much just comes down to how you package and frame what you offer. You can be a polymath and do 10,000 things, but if you want to be known by anyone or be understood or stand out to anyone, you need to be okay with them only knowing you for one thing. Make that thing very clear, and deliver on it, and that will give you the freedom to pursue the 10,000 things.
You don't have to be the Drunk or the Dork. You can be the Social Soberman. This is true for everything. Don't identify with one side of the dichotomy. Live the duality.
Mechanics magic — an en dash plus a hyphen to create a phrasal noun made up of a range of numbers:
"Are you free tomorrow for a 30–45-minute meeting?"
Life is your line in the snow, and how you live is how you turn.
February 9 I don't want a slow life. I want a dynamic, spontaneous, ambitious life that rests on a practice of stillness.