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My Musings

Not your ordinary tales

Why Creativity Advice Fails: You Have the Wrong Diagnosis

The protocol works. Just not for you. My friend Rajan has been making the same lamb curry for thirty years. Same ingredients, same rough method, different result every time — sometimes forgettable, occasionally the kind of thing where mid-conversation you just stop because your mouth needs a moment with what's happening in it. He finds this genuinely funny. People ask for the recipe constantly and he hands it over without ceremony, watches them follow it step by step, and what comes out is technically his curry and tastes like it was …

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What Men Actually Want Has Nothing to Do With What You’ve Been Giving Them

Most women I know are exhausted by men. They've read the books, done the therapy, had the conversations — and still find themselves in the same argument, with the same distance, drawing the same conclusions. The man is emotionally unavailable. The man doesn't listen. The man doesn't care. Alison Armstrong spent three decades testing that hypothesis. What she found is that the diagnosis is wrong — and the wrong diagnosis, far more than the original problem, is what breaks relationships. Her core finding is this: women expect men to be a …

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You’re Not Lazy. You’re Running Old Code

Software engineers have this practice when something breaks—and something always breaks—where they refuse to fix the visible problem until they've found the invisible one. The smoke alarm went off, sure, but where's the fire? It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. In real life, most of us just yank the battery out and go back to sleep. We are spectacular at treating symptoms.Someone who can't stop overspending gets a budgeting app.Someone who blows up every relationship reads a book on communication.Someone who hasn't finished a project …

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The Art of Actually Being Here

I’ve been thinking about how often I’m technically present and still not really there. The other night I was sitting with someone I care about, listening to them talk, and halfway through I realized I couldn’t repeat what they’d just said. I had drifted into my own head, replaying something small from earlier in the day and stretching it into a future that hadn’t happened. From the outside it probably looked like I was engaged. Inside, I was somewhere else entirely. I keep telling myself I’m just distracted because life is busy, but that …

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The Story You Won’t Put Down

There's a version of the past that lives in you like a book you've already finished but keep rereading, and the honest reason you keep returning has very little to do with the ending — which you already know — and everything to do with the fact that being inside the story feels safer than standing outside it with nothing to hold. Grief moves through you and releases. What most people are doing instead is maintenance — the daily, largely unconscious act of keeping a version of events alive, tending to it, making sure the details stay sharp …

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