Snapshots
- Introspection is not for rumination, but for action. It is the practice of noticing what pulls on you and then trying things in the real world to get feedback.
- The goal of writing is not just to articulate your thoughts, but to make them rigid and testable. It converts a vague idea into a "bad" idea, which you can then critique and improve.
- To learn faster, you must cultivate a joy in being wrong. Reframe the shame of error into a signal for learning. This requires a peculiar state of mind that can only be developed through practice and community.
- The world is full of people who are good at saying "not that" (critiquing). Far rarer and more valuable is the ability to offer a "maybe this" (a new, positive formulation), which creates a starting point for feedback and progress.
- The opposite of a vision is unfolding. A rigid vision is fragile because it ignores the rich information held within your context. A better approach is to iterate with reality, letting the form of your life, career, or project emerge from a series of experiments. The context is smarter than you are.
- Write with intense, niche specificity to find your people. A blog post is a search query for your tribe. The details you might be tempted to cut are often the very things that will make the right person jump out of their chair and connect with you.
- To find a partner, show the inside of your head in public so people can see if they would like to live there. The goal is to find someone with whom you can have a wildly generative conversation for 20,000 hours.
The core insight
The path to a life that fits is not through executing a grand, predefined vision, but through a process of "unfolding." This means continuously experimenting and iterating with your present context. By treating your assumptions as testable hypotheses and paying close attention to the feedback you receive, you bake information from reality into the form of your life. This process produces a design that is smarter than you, as it holds all the nuance and wisdom gained from your experiments, allowing your life to become a true expression of your potential.
The practice of introspection
Introspection is often misunderstood as passive rumination. A more effective form is "introspection for doing." This involves briefly noticing what ideas or feelings are pulling on you, and then immediately going out to test them in the world to gather feedback. It is a process of protecting the playful, curious nature many people have as children. While someone like the art dealer Larry Gagosian might "lose their edge" through self-reflection, that is only one path. It is possible to combine deep introspection with agency, creating a rare but beautiful combination of creativity and effectiveness.
I try to avoid sitting down too much and just reflecting on my feelings and ruminating, but just taking a few minutes here and there to sort of notice what pulls on me and then just go out trying things and then you get feedback.
Writing is a crucial tool for this kind of introspection because it forces thoughts into a structured, testable form. Vague intuitions become concrete statements on the page. This rigidity makes it easier to spot contradictions and flaws in your own thinking, a process that is difficult when ideas remain fluid in your mind or in conversation.
Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. It often requires breaking old ideas. This is easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, 'well, I didn't mean it like that'.
This process is not about choosing between logic and intuition, which is a false dichotomy. Inspired by John Stuart Mill, who integrated rationalism with romanticism, the goal is to use both. Logic and reasoning can unpack, critique, and refine your intuitions. It is a back-and-forth process where you articulate an intuition, test it with reason, and use the result to hone a better intuition.
Learning through conjecture and error correction
Progress comes from having strong opinions that you hold loosely. The act of forcing diffuse ideas into a sharp, definite statement—a "take"—is an art form. It feels vulnerable, but it increases the surface area of your beliefs, allowing them to be pressure-tested by reality and other people. While the media rewards shouting opinions without ever correcting them, the goal for learning is the opposite. You must be willing to have a strong opinion, be proven wrong, and then update your model.
It's a very peculiar state of mind to inhabit because it's so easy to either fall into protective and only critiquing ideas... or if you're putting something out in a way to protect yourself, you start to have confirmation bias. So it's a very delicate thing.
This requires moving from a mindset of critique ("not that") to one of creation ("maybe this"). Simply identifying what is wrong is not enough; you must propose an alternative. A positive formulation is a probe reaching toward the world, generating data and feedback. The creative leap to suggest "maybe this" takes a particular kind of bravery, as it is the necessary first step for any collaborative or iterative process to begin.
The original idea remains the seed, no less valuable for having been wrong. It takes creativity and boldness to leap out and form a conclusion. And the part that criticizes must understand how dependent it is on the part that throws ideas at the wall.
To cultivate this mindset, you must learn to feel love for the "seed" of your past, incorrect ideas. A younger, stupider version of yourself made the best guess possible with the available information. That bad guess was a necessary step to becoming the person you are today, one who can see its flaws. This reframing requires practice, but it's possible to rewire your brain to feel less shame and more joy in being wrong, accelerating the rate of learning.
The unfolding path to a life that fits
Many of the best things in life—relationships, careers, essays—are not the result of a grand vision, but of a design process called "unfolding." This idea, from architect Christopher Alexander, is about the interplay between a form and its context. The core principle is that the context is smarter than you; it holds more information than you can ever fit in your head. The goal is to collaborate with it.
You will have lost track of all the experiments and insights that led you to a fit. But the good news is that you don't have to remember it. The form does.
This process is rooted in experimentation. A good experiment is not random; it involves stating your assumptions and finding ways to test if they are false. This is a "collision with reality." By increasing the velocity of these experiments—writing faster, prototyping faster, asking for feedback faster—you lower the cost of trying new things, take more risks, and extract more information from your context.
This applies at all scales. To rebrand an art gallery, Henrik spoke to hundreds of visitors, testing different framings of its value until one resonated. To decide where to move his family, he and his wife spent years traveling to potential locations, gathering information and testing the fit until the right place emerged. It begins with listing constraints to narrow the field, then rapidly testing the most promising options to gather more data.
You have to have some criteria. You start listing constraints. We want to have, it should be fairly easy to travel home. We should afford it. We should, you know, all these things. And then you start listing constraints and mapping out potential solutions. And then you take the first best idea and try that.
This approach requires ruthless prioritization. You cannot do everything well. Focus on a few things that truly matter and go deep. By cutting away distractions—like not having a smartphone—you create the space to spend "ridiculous amounts of time" on the problems that are most important, whether that's finding a place to raise your kids or getting the branding right for your business.
Finding your people in a high-dimension world
The name of Henrik's blog, Escaping Flatland, refers to the dream of making contact with people and ideas—"spheres"—that can expand your understanding of reality. These encounters provide existence proofs that a higher level of thinking, being, or creativity is possible. They give you a high-resolution image of the kind of character you can cultivate.
When you meet someone who's like pushed to the very edge of like thinking and writing, for example, you know, oh, that's something else. Like I didn't even know that league existed. And that can be like an existence proof. You realize that could be done.
The internet is a powerful tool for this. It acts as a niche-matching machine that can connect you with your tribe. By writing with specificity and vulnerability, you send out a "search query" for the people who resonate with your unique perspective. This can lead to a feeling of homecoming, where strangers arrive in your inbox who are excited by the exact same obscure things as you.
The first handful of times it happened, Johanna asked me what was wrong. I was crying in the kitchen. Those were tears of homecoming.
To tap into this, you must embrace the niche and resist the urge to write for an imaginary large audience. Following common wisdom will lead you to cut the very eccentricities that will attract your people. There is a tension between niche specificity and audience growth, but the goal is to trade away growth for the freedom to do "weird shit." You don't need a huge audience; the life-changing connections can happen with just a handful of true readers.
The art of generative relationships
You can shape yourself by reshaping your relationships. This doesn't necessarily mean finding new people; it can mean changing how you interact with the people already in your life. You can only know another person if you meet them in open dialogue and treat them as unfinished and capable of surprise. Some people are natural "spheres," but you can also become more skilled at inducing "spherness" in others by being grounded, unneedy, and honest.
If someone seems boring to you or a bad fit, it might be that you don't know how to prompt them, that you haven't seen them react to the context that brings out their full being.
The most profound friendships are "friendships of virtue." Some virtues, like responsiveness or humor, are visible early on. Others, like loyalty or resilience, can only be seen in adversity or over long periods. This is why in creative online communities, there is an understanding to "wait two or three years" to see who is serious and will stick around. True seriousness is measured only by time.
To build deep connections, you must get past "cached conversations"—versions of things someone has said before. The key is to ask questions that prompt them to pull from a rich experience in a new way. The director Werner Herzog does this in the film Into the Abyss, pushing a priest past his rehearsed sermon until he speaks authentically about a squirrel, moving him to tears. The goal is to get people to a place where they are not protecting themselves; they are just there.
If you want to prompt someone to be authentic and playful and generative, you usually need to ask them something where they have a rich experience to pull from, but have never pulled an answer from that experience before.
Finding a life partner is a similar process. For Henrik, meeting his wife, Johanna, involved a mutual recognition of deep values combined with complementary cognitive styles. He is more generative, while she is more analytical. This creates a productive dynamic where he produces ideas and she rigorously evaluates them. This level of trust allows for "brutal conversations with love" that fuel growth.
Connections and tensions
A central connection is that introspection and agency are not in opposition but are the internal and external views of the same process: attunement. Introspection attunes you to your own inner signals, while agency is the capacity to act on those signals in the world. A life that "fits" requires both.
A productive tension exists between having goals and embracing the "unfolding" process. A rigid vision is fragile, but a complete lack of direction can be paralyzing. The synthesis is to hold goals lightly, using them to rank-order opportunities and provide a general direction without letting them become a dogmatic plan that ignores real-world feedback.
Both self-cultivation and building deep relationships rely on the same fundamental skill: moving past low-resolution, cached versions of reality. Whether it is an unexamined assumption in your own mind or a superficial impression of another person, the work is to get to the messy, high-resolution details underneath, where true learning and connection happen.
Resources
- Boom (Book)
- On Liberty (Book)
- Awareness (Book)
- The Idiot (Book)
- Spring (Book)
- Into the Abyss (Film)