Compacting.
PROMPT: Improve Your City
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Category Archives: Thoughts
PROMPT: Financial Success
How does your mindset affect your financial success?
Nonlinearly. First, positively with increasing marginality. Then, with decreasing marginality. And, finally, negatively.
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PROMPT: Could Talk
If your pet could talk, what would be the first thing it says?
“You think you’re better than me? Who carries whose poop in this relationship?”
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PROMPT: Regretted Reading
Have you ever regretted reading a book — which one and why?
“Hostage” by Robert Crais. The ending was terrible. The protagonist had zero agency in his own survival. They made a movie with Bruce Willis which improved the defect. While the movie may not have been good, per se, it’s my go-to refutation whenever someone squawks that pretentious cliche, “The book is always better than the movie.”
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Unsolicited Advice [Free Verse]
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PROMPT: Villain
Heath Ledger’s Joker [The Dark Knight (2008)] has a monologue that goes: “Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan’… even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I told the press that, like, a gang-banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all part of the plan…I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.”
It is definitely true that our psychology allows us to accept tens of thousands of deaths from drug interactions or auto accidents, but then we will go to outlandish extents — billions upon billions of dollars — to avoid the possibility of a couple of terrorism fatalities. We would use resources much better if we were not so panicky about uncertainty.
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FIVE WISE LINES [July 2026]
Trust in Allah, but tether your camel.
Sufi Saying
[S]ome day you will be old enough to
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe
start reading fairy tales again.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel proust
Live as if you were to die tomorrow.
Mahatma gandhi
Learn as if you were to live forever.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael,
Pablo Picasso
but a lifetime to paint like a child.
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PROMPT: Lesson
Daily writing prompt
What’s a lesson you’ve learned recently that shifted your perspective?
Just because a message has merit does not mean there is benefit in its delivery. For example, telling a person who is on fire and mad with itching not to scratch or telling a person to not be a jackass when their core nature is jackass. Saying such things will not nudge the state of the world and can only release the puff of hot air that creates chaos — like Edward Lorenz’s proverbial butterfly in Brazil that causes a tornado in Texas.
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PROMPT: Negative Thoughts
Feel the feelings but cut short the rumination with the realization that negative thoughts are waking dreams and have no more inherent reality than sleeping dreams.
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PROMPT: Ridiculous
Daily writing prompt
What’s something you used to believe as a kid that seems ridiculous now?
That adults knew stuff and were free to do as they pleased.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 