Feeling intimidated is a good sign. Writing from a place of safety produces stuff that is at best dull and at worst dishonest.

Write backwards. Start from the feeling you want the audience to have at the end and then ask "How might that happen?" continually, until you have a beginning.

That's our mirror. Every dip, every crash, every bubble that's burst, a testament to our brilliant stupidity. This one gave us the railroads. This one the Internet. This one the slave trade. And if we hope to do anything about saving the environment, or getting to other worlds, we'll need a bubble for that too. Everything I've ever done in my life worth anything has been done in a bubble: in a state of extreme hope and trust and stupidity.

Feeling intimidated is a good sign. Writing from a place of safety produces stuff that is at best dull and at worst dishonest.

There's a strange thing goes on inside a bubble. It's hard to describe. People who are in it can't see outside of it, don't believe there is an outside.

Maybe the biggest misconception humanity has about itself is that by gaining more power over the world, over the environment, we will be able to make ourselves happier and more satisfied with life. Looking again from a perspective of thousands of years, we have gained enormous power over the world and it doesn't seem to make people significantly more satisfied than in the stone age.