#82: Connecting dots, cultivating intention, and building a more human internet

A Q&A with writer, storyteller, and Sublime founder Sari Azout

Hello!

Thank you so much for all the support in response to my last post. It was a relief to share the mixed emotions of hitting the 1k subscriber milestone, and I’m glad so many of you appreciated the candour.

Today’s issue is a Q&A, and it’s a particularly special one for me. The person we’re learning from is one of my intellectual heroes, someone whose thinking I revere and whose writing I’ve quoted perhaps more than anyone else in this newsletter.

I am, of course, talking about

Sari Azout

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Sari is a writer, storyteller, and founder. She's on a multi-decade mission to bring more humanity, creativity, and soul to Tech, and she’s currently doing that by building Sublime—an app for cultivating your digital second brain. In Sublime, you can save anything you want to remember in pretty much any format, keep stuff private but also make it public, and discover interesting things that others have chosen to remember. Someone described Sublime as a “tasteful take on Pinterest for knowledge”, and I’d agree. There’s something uniquely nourishing about it. It’s rare to come away from a digital app these days and feel brighter. In fact, it’s often the opposite: we might feel anger at what we see and guilt at how much time we’ve spent scrolling. Sari believes the internet can be a better place, and she’s acting on that belief with uncompromising intention, dedication, and care.

May more of us move through this world like Sari.

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Why Sublime? What’s led you here?

It's taken me a lifetime to get here, but Sublime is where my deeply held beliefs coalesce into one piece of software.

There are two sides to Sublime. The first is the more practical one: anyone looking to do great work or think great thoughts must cultivate a repository of interesting ideas, a quiet space to think. And in that sense, Sublime is the result of a decade of looking for the perfect tool to collect and connect ideas. I wanted something easy to use, without a steep learning curve or excessive customization. Something that would let me capture anything from anywhere and show it to me in a way that makes sense. Something purpose-built to curate my knowledge library without doubling as a to-do list, project management tool, that kind of thing. Something that felt equal parts personal and communal. This last part's key—we are combining the focus and intentionality of a personal knowledge management tool (PKM) with the serendipity and aliveness of a social space. When you add a thought, link, or idea to Sublime, we immediately show you related ideas from your library and others. It's kind of beautiful.

The second is the cultural frame. The software itself is marbled with our company’s values:

Less is more

Attention is sacred

Resonance over scale

Creativity is more important than productivity

Both are true

Each of these values has depth. For example, both are true. Sublime is less about categorizing things into a polarizing good or bad but rather about looking for answers in the grey and asking: “Does this spark a new part of my mental map that I should pay more attention to?”

Or take creativity over productivity. I believe the productivity mindset that we've optimized for over the last few decades won't serve us in the future. As more human jobs become automated or replaced by artificial intelligence, we have to shift our focus to areas where we have a competitive advantage over machines: creativity, taste, expressing old things in new ways, infusing ideas with meaning. Sublime is designed to help you cultivate a state of flow conducive to this way of being. Humans aren’t good at making things from scratch. For us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to connect countless dots, cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of places, and combine and recombine these to build new things.

This is Sari

I want to pause on something you said in an interview with Rebecca Robins last year:

“In a world that is increasingly urgent, it’s important to cultivate intention. And this is a root of so many of the mental challenges that we’re seeing. People don’t have clarity on who they are and what they want – and, effectively, they’re delegating it to technology.”

How do we make that shift? What does cultivating intention look like?

It's hard. I very much feel this persona of the addict when I am online. And the problem is that every time you go on Twitter/Instagram/etc., you lose hours. Not because you're browsing for hours but because those spaces agitate the mind, and it becomes nearly impossible to get back into contemplative mode. The spirit of Sublime is very much about rescuing that lost intentionality—and making space for thinking—without losing the sense of communion with others.

What does cultivated intention look like? I think it requires inverting the Internet's consumption model. Today, you open your phone and see a feed of all sorts of different things designed to engage you. On Sublime, the best way to consume ideas is to set an intention: you put in a thought or idea, and we construct a feed of related ideas around that. The Internet molds around your intentions. It's conducive to creation, not passive consumption.

The uber-talented designer Shuya Gong has a beautiful collection of notes on musings mapping this shift from the attention economy to the intention economy. 

It takes a lot of repetition for an idea to settle into the zeitgeist with enough weight that it provokes change. But more and more, I’m realizing pulling myself and others out of passive consumption mode and into creation mode is something I really care about and am willing to spend a lot of time working on.

You recently published a post about the seven questions that guide your life and work. It stopped me in my tracks, and I’ve been thinking about what my questions would be ever since. Could you share your current answers to two of them here?

Guiding question 6: How can I maintain my creativity, optimism, intellectual vitality, and sense of agency in the face of the stress that comes from building a company and the endless forces luring towards conformity?

The only reliable ways I've found to maintain this vitality are collecting inspiration and writing. I notice that a certain pressure builds up inside me when I am not writing enough. Writing helps me unearth and resolve the self-sabotaging stories living inside me and helps me regain my creative confidence. Collecting inspiration charges my creative battery.

Don't get me wrong, writing is very hard. But it's a good kind of hard. So many good things in my life have come from taking the time to interrogate what is inside me, put it into words, and share those words.

Guiding question 7: How do we reconcile ambition and the desire to do great work with motherhood? 

It's a problem of time more than anything else. I've always believed that "most people attribute to genius what is really just time," and both raising children and the creative work I feel called to do demand a lot of time. That balance is always fragile, so I don't have a lot of advice to give here.

What I do know is that it's all hard—it's hard to be a mom and not work. It's hard to put your career above everything and not get to build a family. It's hard to be a working mom and feel like you aren’t giving enough to your family. But we get to choose our hard.

I also know that the way we think of ambition in the US is very limiting. Those who take building a family seriously are pursuing one of the most ambitious and noble acts. They are building something that outlasts them, whereas most startups and companies disappear within a few years. So it's a question of mindset, you know?

Now for the questions I ask every guest. What, if at all, do you wish the tech sector understood better about the non-profit sector and vice versa?

I think the biggest mistake the tech sector has made is assuming that technology is the solution to all of our problems—that we can engineer our way out of all of the world's problems.

Non-profits don't think in terms of zero marginal cost, and there isn't a tendency to think we're a SaaS solution away from solving things like the loneliness epidemic.

In my view, we need to break away from this oversimplified Silicon Valley ideology towards something a little bit more multidisciplinary, more multicultural, less myopic. We all need someone to help us see the problem through the lens of a totally different field, then return to the original problem and apply those insights.

Which three books or other media have impacted you most and why?

I read so much it's genuinely hard to pick, but the few that feel prescient in the context of my life at the moment are:

George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By is an essential book to understand how language subconsciously shapes our perception and social agenda.

Pete Davis’ "A Counterculture of Commitment" commencement speech brilliantly argues for the importance of committing to something in the age of infinite browsing.

I love Rory Sutherland's work. Start with his book Alchemy, or just sit with his 11 rules of alchemy.

What’s an unusual opinion or uncommon belief you hold?

One belief I guess is uncommon these days is trusting intuition over the data/logic or even the user feedback. I don't think the obsession with A/B testing everything and being data-driven or relying on research leads to the best results in domains of product and innovation.

Henry Ford didn’t need focus groups to tell him that people would prefer inexpensive, dependable automobiles over horses. Alexander Graham Bell never stopped to worry about whether people would prefer speaking to each other on the phone.

This quote sums it up well:

A tradeoff occurs every time you get feedback. You become slightly more mainstream, slightly more aligned with the zeitgeist. You become marginally more of an exploiter than an explorer, standing on the shoulders of the giants who conceived the paradigm you’re striving to build upon. This is very effective when you want to align your work with others. But you also stray from the path you were exploring.

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More questions for Sari? Get in touch with her at sari@sublime.app or find her on Substack, Twitter/X, and Sublime.

Thanks so much for reading,

Lauren