A Winter Salad Bowl
by Olivier Cleynen
This winter I transited from working alone on a big project to searching for new employment. In the process I found myself taking a lot of words in, and here is a salad bowl of pieces I discovered or rediscovered:
Kevin Kelly (2026): How Will the Miracle Happen Today?
But the strangeness of “kindees” is harder to explain. A kindee is what you turn into when you are kinded. Curiously, being a kindee is an unpracticed virtue. Hardly anyone hitchhikes any more, which is a shame because it encourages the habit of generosity from drivers, and it nurtures the grace of gratitude and patience of being kinded from hikers. But the stance of receiving a gift – of being kinded — is important for everyone, not just travelers.
Joscha Bach (2024): Self Models of Loving Grace. “Artificial Intelligence is not just an engineering discipline, but also the most fascinating and important philosophical project ever attempted: the explanation of the mind, by recreating it.” A soft, thought-provoking conference talk.
YouTube Quitters (2023) — Caleb Pike, Jordy Vandeput, Matt D’Avella, Matti Haapoja each announcing they are abandoning or breaking down their YouTube channel, reflecting on different ways in which happiness and success can sometimes no longer overlap.
Emma Alvarez Gibson (2016): Seven Lessons From About a Million Jobs
Because almost everything is interesting, because learning is the most interesting thing of all, and because I need health insurance in order to live, I’ve worked a lot of different jobs, in a lot of different sectors. Some people have seen this as a liability — “Oh,” they’ve said, for instance, their eyebrows rising to their hairlines, “You’ve had a lot of jobs,” in the manner that one might say, “You’ve had a lot of husbands.” Other people have said, “Wow! Tell me about your experience.” Listen, if there’s one thing that having had about a million jobs provides, it’s experience.
Hamilton Nolan (2025): Nations Are People. Simple words that fit like a puzzle piece in my mind.
Henrik Karlsson (2024): Lessons I learned Working at an Art Gallery
So instead of selling coffee, I looked into how we could streamline the café and the cash register so that the volunteers who help out at the gallery felt comfortable doing my job, then I made myself a small office where I sat down to analyze the business and figure out how to improve it. You can imagine how popular this was. I had to backtrack for a few months after the board told me to get back to the café. And this was a good lesson for someone who is used to being self-employed: at an institution, you can’t just do what is best, you also have to build trust and coordinate with others so you are on the same page.
Kurt Armstrong (2023): Just Your Handyman. “So most of what I know about building I’ve learned from careful demolition, close attention, and common sense, shot through with medium-to-high anxiety as I mess with people’s homes.” Reflections on what it means to work.
Ryan Kuhn (2024): Building a Rocket Engine from Scratch. “I recall a coworker talking about an engine performance-related question they had asked an interviewee, where they scoffed at the inadequate answer they received, and which I myself would not have been able to do better than.” Fascinating recounting of an ambitious technical project.
Cate Hall (2025): How to Instantly Be Better at Anything.
Once, when I was staying with friends an hour outside of London, another American came to visit. When she showed up in a rental car, she announced that she’d learned to drive stick on the way over. As in: she landed at the airport, realized all the rentals were manual, and just decided that it couldn’t be that hard. She looked up instructions, grabbed the shifter, and set out driving on the wrong side of the road, on the highway.
Now, it might sound reckless when I say it that way, but you are missing the context that this woman was incredibly cool. She was so self-assured that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for her to have done. She narrated the story without apparent amazement about her learning. And, I thought: oh, that is what a generally competent person looks like.
For some time after that, whenever I stepped up to a wholly foreign task, like learning archery, rather than asking myself what an archer would do, I would ask myself what that woman would do — how she would approach this totally alien endeavor. And hand to God, much of the time, it made me better at it immediately.