Taylor’s Delights

Design your life around delights.

What fosters fond memories? What spreads smiles?

Here’s my little list of fun:

1. laughing with loved ones
2. overcoming challenges
3. exercising creativity
4. inciting coincidence
5. helping people
6. experiencing novelty
7. meeting cool people
8. dancing

1. laughing with loved ones

Share wit! Manufacture surprise! Play positive pranks! Make others feel clever!

To make laughter likely, create controlled chaos. Engage in games. Embrace the uncomfortable. Poke bears.

Maintain comedic momentum; always say “yes, and…”.

2. overcoming challenges

Find your limits! Expend effort! Prove yourself! Share adversity!

Effort flows. Focus is freeing. Pour your full attention into a challenge.

Victory demands risk. Predictable wins are hollow. Pursue the improbably. Become an underdog. Face goliaths. Create stakes. Take pride.

To supercharge relationships, do something difficult together. Develop depth via shared experience. Make mutual trust with teamwork.

To understand yourself, perform experiments. Stretch your spirit to its limits. Find the edges of your soul. Tackle fear. Experience cold, dissonance, hunger, foreign cultures, exhaustion, etc.

3. exercising creativity

Sieze the adjacent possible! Generate novelty! Move minds! Push progress!

To capitalize on your creativity, make things only you can make.

If you lack skills to create, develop discipline. Practice, practice, practice. Study masterpieces. Relentlessly purge distractions.

To foster inspiration, commune with muses. Consume classics.. Record ideas. Publish insights.

4. inciting coincidence

Flirt with fate! Synthesize serendipity!

Mingle in epicenters. Curate a network. Contribute to communities. Make happenings happen.

Become a billboard. Signal your interests with t-shirts and tattoos. Carry calling cards. Be approachable.

Thrive on asymmetric bets. There is little downside to writing publicly, sending cold emails, and offering office hours.

5. helping people

Do good!

Give freely. Free lunches exist. Smiles, compliments, jokes, etc. demand no sacrifices.

Share your time and energy and money. Reduce suffering. Manufacture meaning.

Maintain anonymity. Secrets sweeten generosity.

6. experiencing novelty

Learn! Stretch your mind! Seek the strange! Find the fringes!

Explorers delight in sparks of understanding. New knowledge can only be found in the unknown.

Treasures sometimes punctuate boring voyages.

7. meeting cool people

Study humans! Meld hearts! Draw out depth! Cue tears!

Learn to listen. Be slow to suggest. Reflect, riff, and enhance others’ experiences.

Questions weigh more than opinions. Curate curiosity!

8. dancing

Wiggle! Twirl! Frolic!

Dancing is easy: copy others and edit. Follow the flow; create cooperatively.

The dancefloor celebrates all who conquer conceit. Catch the spotlight and pass it around!