For writers and thinkers, artists and creators
The Mikolay Letter is about writing, the creative process, digital entrepreneurship, and living a meaningful life.
I regularly publish articles to help your creative work and to inspire you to put new things in the world.
The Letter is about getting above the noise and living in a magical way — changing yourself from a consumer into a better and more prolific creator 🧙♀️🧙♂️
Work has changed from information to knowledgeTools have changed from attention to creationFocus has changed from time spent to quality timeOn the other hand, maybe those things aren’t changing at all.
We sometimes have 👇 relationship with our tools:
Other times we have 👇 relationship with our tools:
The nature of these relationships hasn’t changed for centuries (though the character of these relationships changes every day).
BONUS ROAR!
Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds, men and women – old and young – detach themselves from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease … just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering? … The world has always been a sorry and confused sort of place – yet poets and artists and scientists have ignored the factors that would, if attended to, paralyze them. From a practical point of view, intellectual and spiritual life is, on the surface, a useless form of activity, in which men indulge because they procure for themselves greater satisfactions than are otherwise obtainable. In this paper I shall concern myself with the question of the extent to which the pursuit of these useless satisfactions proves unexpectedly the source from which undreamed-of utility is derived.
-Abraham Flexner, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” Harpers, 1939
