Final Fantasy I was released in 1987. It was one of the first larger-scale role-playing video games and ended up spawning a franchise that has since inspired over 200 million people.

The original game was for the NES, the Nintendo Entertainment System. The device is now on the rarer side, and so is the cartridge to play the game. The game itself has no autosave function. If you don’t save manually, your progress will be lost. It also requires a lot of “grinding,” aka entering and repeating battles over and over again to make your characters strong enough to move on in the game.

All in all, it’s a bit of a hassle to play the original game today. If you’re a hardcore gamer, that won’t stop you, of course. But if you’re a casual player, you might just as well pick up one of the five (!) remakes the game has received in the nearly 40 years since its release. There was a version for PlayStation, one for the Game Boy Advance, one for PC, and so on.

As a long-time fan of the series who only joined around Final Fantasy VII, I picked up the Pixel Remaster version for Nintendo Switch. The graphics had been updated, and so was the music. Instead of 80s synth sounds, you could now also enjoy an orchestra in the background. The developers had also added options for faster walking speed, a mechanism to turn random battle encounters on and off, and made the experience system easier for faster leveling up. You could even let battles play out automatically on 2x speed, presumably to address the grinding issues.

At first, I was a bit shocked at these changes. “Wow, that makes the game so much easier!” With the exception of the final boss, getting through the story was a walk in the park. It was much less of a challenge than I had expected, but in hindsight, I have to admit: That’s exactly what I wanted. I wanted to see the characters, explore the world, and immerse myself in the story. I’m no longer nine years old. I don’t have dozens of hours to sink into collecting virtual experience points. So, for a busy creative like me, the updates were just what I needed. Otherwise, I might have given up on the game altogether.

There’s no shame in updating a 38-year-old game. After all, your original audience has also aged that much, and, chances are, new people will also appreciate modern mechanisms. Some art should remain unchanged to forever preserve its spirit. But some will need the occasional coat of fresh paint to stay accessible. As long as the original stays around, an upgrade only creates more versions of the same masterpiece different people can fall in love with.

Update your art. Keep it accessible. And don’t feel bad for enjoying a modern take on a timeless classic.

When you first start writing, mastering the hot take is a valuable exercise. How can you make a strong and convincing argument? How do you grab someone’s emotions and pull them over to your side? Once you’ve done so successfully a few times, however, it quickly becomes a distraction.

Hot takes have increased chances of going viral. When I open my Medium homepage, I can see several ones instantly: “Gen Z Are Getting Fired Left and Right.” “I’m Now Terrified of AI, And You Should Be Too.” “Zuckerberg’s New Meta: It’s Finally Time to Leave Social Media.”

Based on their numbers, these pieces have made a lot of money, too. And even if three quarters of your hot takes fall flat because people either love them or hate them, chasing those highs can be addicting. Some writers get hooked and never stop until the numbers do.

I’ve written my fair share of hot takes over the years. Now, every time I get the urge to write one, I resist. “Is this really necessary? Is it relevant? Timely? Do I need to be the one to say this, and does it need to be said now? Has anyone else said it recently already?” Usually, these questions help me calm down, and then I go write something real instead.

But the temptation never goes away. When you write a hot take, you feel strong. It’s a powerful channel for venting your frustration. Done right, at times, they can even inspire people to change. But nonetheless, hot takes are not reality. We can’t thrive on riding emotional rollercoasters 24/7.

Meanwhile, I have dozens of “real takes” sitting in my drafts folder. Stories about my grandpa, about death, and about what it takes to find our highest self. Time is finite. I’ll only get to publish so many stories in my life. Every minute I spend on one a million other people could have written is a minute spent on the wrong cause.

Write down your hot takes in private. Let them sit. Chances are, you won’t want to publish them when you look at them again a week later. Give us your real takes. Say what only you can say. Hand out lights, not stink bombs. Even if they fascinate us, we’d all rather avoid than step into piles of poop.

There’s a famous quote from Bruce Lee: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” It’s about focus, determination, and the fact that persistence yields results.

You’ve heard this before. “The boring stuff works,” we say. But who decided that repetition and routine are boring?

In a 1967 letter to Taky Kimura, a friend and student, Bruce pointed out a different path. Lee had just opened a new martial arts school in LA, and he’d certified Kimura as his replacement instructor for his existing school in Seattle. In the letter, Bruce guides Taky so he can keep the students engaged.

“Follow this rule and you will NEVER feel like you have to ADD more and more so-called ‘sizzling’ techniques to keep our students interested,” Bruce writes. That rule is the “economy of form.”

The idea is that “each student must attack [in unison] FROM THE BAIJONG without any wasted motion.” Should the student exert too much or undirected effort in this particular technique, called “pak sao” or “slapping hand,” “back to the touching hand position he goes to MINIMIZE his unnecessary motions.” Even after a student has mastered the initial steps, Bruce suggests they should return to the practice position on occasion to maintain economic form.

In his system, Bruce also suggested to master the same technique under various conditions: “1. synchronization of self, 2. synchronization with opponent, 3. under fighting condition.” Therefore, between learning the movement itself, doing it efficiently with consistency, practicing it with an opponent in training, and chaining it together with other movements to have a realistic chance at hitting a real enemy, students will have their work cut out for them—and that’s just one technique!

“Following the above suggestion will give you endless hours of instruction,” Lee writes. It “takes up one heck of a lot of time for perfection,” but it also makes for “a most efficient lesson plan that will bring results to ALL students.” Perhaps most of all, however, Bruce noted that “disregard how LITTLE we show each time [here in LA], the students’ interest is kept up because they have to eliminate the extra motions involved, and they feel great doing it.”

If someone claims to be able to teach you a great variety of things, most of the time, they simply don’t know what they are talking about. True expertise is narrow yet nonetheless fascinating. Stick to the path you know will take you to your goal, and look out for teachers who can make even the mundane engaging and fun. When you walk towards it with the right map, mastery is interesting—just like practicing the same kick 10,000 times.

As with most new technologies, what humans expected turned out to be very different from what they got. “All the creative jobs will be safe. After all, you have to pull from so many sources to do those!” But now tens of thousands of entirely AI-generated articles, images, and videos hit the web every day.

“You can never replace coders! Coders are the future!” Yet besides superficial creativity, AI is also good at very narrowly defined tasks…like coding. Want a pricing table for your sales page? A script to analyze a database? No problem! And now many software engineers are breaking into a sweat.

Meanwhile, the people everyone thought might be the first to go are thriving. Project managers, program managers, business administrators and executive assistants, for example. As it happens, for all the menial tasks they complete, like following up with people on project deadlines, booking flights, and dealing with processes, all those tasks involve humans—and humans react differently to humans than to robots.

If you think about it, we’ve had “AI” for project management for years. Asana sends reminders about due tasks every day when you get close to or go past the deadline. That’s automated project management. It just doesn’t work—because you know what I and everyone else at my and many other companies is doing: ignoring the reminders. Nobody cares if a robot pokes them about a report that’s overdue. But if a human asks the question? Yikes! That’s different.

I’m not sure chatbots or otherwise slightly smoother robots will change that. Put the AI into a humanoid robot, and…maybe? Then again, Sonny won’t care either if you tell him to scram, and you already know it before he exists. Humans want to interact with humans. The nature of those interactions changes all the time, but the fact that those interactions are a baseline of collaboration doesn’t.

Perhaps just like most other big revolutions, AI will play out the way new technology generally does: It’ll change everything a little more than you’re comfortable with—but also a little less than you think it will.

“What if we’re spending our time improving horses when, actually, we should be building a car?” my fiancée asked. She and her team were analyzing user challenges with their software to inform what the next version should look like. Her concern was that by focusing too much on people’s existing struggles, they might end up only fixing bugs instead of making better tools altogether.

There’s a quote often misattributed to Henry Ford floating around in product management: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” In my fiancée’s case, what good is making an annoying workflow slightly less annoying when, actually, you can remove the workflow altogether? What if the user could talk to an AI instead of digging through five tabs of code? Making the digging faster addresses only the symptoms, not the problem.

As we were sitting there, contemplating the famous analogy, I realized: “You know, maybe the people building the first cars weren’t thinking much about horses at all. Engine and automobile construction was an entirely new industry. They were probably just trying to innovate in their lane, making the best product they can. And, eventually, that product happened to make horse-drawn carriages obsolete.”

This one Henry Ford did address: “In a few years the horse will become obsolete except for saddle horses, though why anyone wants to ride horse back is more than I can understand,” he said in a 1923 newspaper interview. But out of the over 200 US car manufacturers from the early 20th century, how many thought the same? Who looked at horses in terms of features and benefits? “How could we increase galloping speed by 10%? Is there a way to get the same mileage with less food input?”

How we think about cars and what they can do evolved along with cars themselves. Whatever problems people did see with horses were not the exclusive source of everything the automobile would eventually come to offer.

There are many small problems we can think our way out of with A-to-B logic. But when it comes to real innovation, perhaps it’s best to pretend we’re back in our sandbox: Blissfully unaware, using whatever we can grab to build the coolest castle we can. Don’t think about the horses. Think about just how magical you want your car to be.

The Tuatha’an are a nomadic tribe in the Wheel of Time series. They live by what they call “The Way of the Leaf.” It’s a philosophy of extreme pacifism. The Tuatha’an won’t ever pick up weapons, nor so much as raise a hand against someone else—even in self-defense.

Naturally, this makes them the perfect victims, and attacked they are, again, and again, and again. Whenever tragedy strikes, the current leader will try to soothe the tribe with their motto: “We bury our dead, and we go on. What else is there?”

If your gut reaction to this question is similar to mine, you may feel tempted to blurt out one of a thousand answers: “A lot, actually! You could run. You could fight. You could build traps to protect yourself without fighting. You could do a million things other than resign.”

In revisiting the tribe repeatedly throughout the show, it seems I’m not the only one who found the Tuatha’an philosophy unconvincing. Time and again, we see both main and side characters breaking with the Way of the Leaf in order to survive and protect the ones they love. Are they wrong? Is there something we’re missing? Or is this worldview simply not thought through enough to be compelling?

I don’t know the answer yet. My mind is still open. I will wait and see.

Sometimes, there’s a point of view we, for whatever reason, can’t access. Maybe its vantage point is too high, too low, or too far removed from the places our mind has comfortably ventured before. But then again, even after we finally leap, our conclusion might still be the same: This does not make sense to me, let alone for me.

If you’ve done all the mental gymnastics you can muster, this is a perfectly valid outcome. In fact, most ideas will have to die so you can choose the ones your real self truly longs to embrace. And when it comes to ideas rather than people, The Way of the Leaf offers a surprisingly calming outlook: “We bury our dead, and we go on. What else is there?”

It was nice to have a week off from work. I thought I’d do a ton of book writing. I did a good amount, but on day three, I felt exhausted. So I rested. And rested. And rested. On day four and five, I spring-cleaned the house and garden. Then, we went on a two-day trip, and the holiday was almost over.

I felt bad for a minute, but I had to admit: I did need the rest, and the house needed the cleaning. Perhaps it’s better to arrive at work fully charged than completely spent. The more I thought about it, the more I looked forward to my workday routine again. Half an hour to an hour each morning isn’t as much creative time as a big block on a day off, but it’s predictable. Reliable. And it happens every day.

It’s tempting to blow air into small routines until they’re big balloons meant to carry us to our goals. When you can find the space, the occasional attempt is worthwhile. But remember that big balloons burst easily, and when you spend your time picking up scraps off the floor instead of flying, you might as well stay on the ground.

Big time means big potential, but its potential for chaos as much as for success. Cherish your small routines. In time, they’ll take you anywhere.

It’s a tough bet, placing the world’s fate on a single young man’s shoulders—especially if none of the prophecies marking him as extraordinary specify whether he’ll save the universe or destroy it. Such is the world of Wheel of Time, however, and so the people of Cairhien, Seanchan, Saldaea, and the Westlands will have to trust that the “Dragon Reborn” will live up to his name.

But that’s not really his name, is it? While it may be clear that the fate-elected magician will acquire tremendous power, no one knows when, how, and why he’ll choose to use it. Yet, when it comes to heroes, their decisions are all that matters. Thankfully, in this case, some of his friends come with common sense, and so, like Nynaeve al’Meara, occasionally jog his memory—starting with calling him by his actual name: “Remember who you are, Rand al’Thor,” she tells him before they part ways once again. “No matter what you may become.”

Might and character can only go hand in hand if the character is already formed by the time the might appears. Lean into your powers—just don’t forget why you set out to attain them.

It’s uncomfortable to drive a car in which your hair is constantly grazing the ceiling. With every bump in the road, you wonder whether you’ll bump your noggin, too. There’s not enough headspace! Even though we technically don’t use it for anything, we still need some open air above our brains.

This isn’t just a literal requirement. It’s a figurative one, too. If all you do is try to check off one to-do after the next, tight deadline followed by tight deadline, there’s no room for mistakes, let alone breathing or reflection.

It’s as if you’re operating a 24-hour takeout restaurant, with more orders piling in every minute. When are you supposed to come up with new recipes if you’re constantly busy making the same burger over and over again?

Sometimes time compresses. We’re in a tight spot and on the clock. It happens. Push through, but remember to get your headspace back. Whether it’s against a wall or the ceiling, our best ideas rarely come from banging our head.

Right now, the cheapest way to rent a car in Munich is an app called “Miles.” They charge by the kilometer instead of the minute, gas is included, and they offer affordable multi-day packages, too. There is only one problem: You can’t reserve the cars in advance. “On demand” means on demand.

This puts you into a bit of a pickle whenever you’ve planned a weekend trip: Do you book a car elsewhere, which you have to collect, refuel, etc, but which you know you’ll actually get, or do you try your luck with Miles, which’ll be much cheaper and efficient, but where access to a car near you is not guaranteed? Usually, the latter works out fine. So far, I don’t think I’ve had to walk more than 10 minutes to find one—yet I’ve spent many minutes fretting over it. Why? Because I opened the app too early.

When you know you’ll need a car in two days, one day, a few hours, one hour, it’s tempting to keep checking. “What’s available now? Will it reassure me that a car will be available later?” I used to check many times before I’d actually leave the house, but that’s not how it works. On demand means on demand. All I got was worry, anxiousness, and FOMO.

If the available stock was plentiful when I checked, I would get nervous about it dwindling before I was ready. If there were few cars on the map, I’d worry about them running out altogether. No matter the status quo, it can’t help you when your problem lies in the future. So why bother? Leave the app alone. Only open it once you need it.

This extends to many other apps which I’ve spent hours staring at for no reason at all. Social media. News. Portfolio trackers. Five minutes here, five minutes there. It adds up. Yet if I don’t want entertainment, news on a particular subject, or to invest or cash out some money, all I’ll get is anxious thoughts and some regret about opening the app in the first place.

Everyone gets caught in the distraction mouse trap at times. But whenever you can resist, don’t open the app too early. Engage life’s challenges neither sooner nor later than they show up on your doorstep, and trust you’ll be ready when you meet them.