Month: March 2022

Twitter thread from @visakanv:

1. Reality is whatever you want it to be

2. Reality is also whatever everyone else wants it to be

3. The ensuing infowar of all against all leads to consolidation…

4. reality now seems quite a bit more constrained than (1)

but the underlying power of 1 is still real…

you can repeat this whole thing with

1. you can do whatever you want

2. everyone else can also do whatever they want

3. ensuing conflict leads to consolidation – laws, enforcement, jobs, bills…

4. it appears that you can no longer simply do what you want

however…

the tension between 1 and 4 is uncomfortable to hold within oneself – (man is born free…) – and so a lot of people conclude that 1 is simply false, ie no longer true, that the era of action and initiative etc is past.

It’s less stressful to live like that in the short run…

… but in the long run it can be a kind of self-abdication, self-abandonment, like giving up one’s freedom, sovereignty, self-respect, etc etc. one becomes Institutionalised by Society, come to depend on the very walls that one resents

the opposite of being Institutionalized is to see how reality is just a sort of temporary consensus, full of chaotic noise and nonsense, and that you can hit Inspect Element to study it, examine it, and figure out opportunities that everyone else is missing bc they’re not looking

There is no spoon.

I took a look at what I have written here. Just skimming, not reading.

Wordy.

And directionless.

It’s time to get simple.

Develop taste along with talent. That’s how to gain visibility.

… I have gotten a steady stream of paid job offers ever since I was ~17.

This is because employers know what I’ve done + they know what I’m worth. They know that bc of the work I’ve published in the public domain… that nobody paid me to do.

(I never did college/Uni btw)

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1015472994301308928?s=21

If you want cool and interesting jobs that pay decently, you have to be a cool and interesting person that can demonstrably create value. How fucked up is it that our education systems don’t actually optimise for this – and in fact disincentivize this? The game is rigged.

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1015475474074488832?s=21

This, I believe. I come at it from a different angle: someone with college and two graduate degrees. It’s true for me, too.

Demonstrate value, be cool.

In a weird way I am not cool yet compared to my peers in this industry I am sufficiently barely cool enough to be interesting. Compared to the world, I am not cool at all.

My consistent vision has always been on the value side of that second tweet. It’s time to develop the cool and interesting side now. Or, unleash it. I have it in me. Everyone does. Even you.

“Work” being used in the sense of energy spent on doing important (to myself) tasks:

Stage 1: Do unpaid work for yourself

Stage 2: Use that as leverage to negotiate a position where you get paid to do work for others

Stage 3: Save up enough so you can be free to do more, higher-quality unpaid work for yourself <— I am currently here

Stage 4: We’ll see

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1015469196300337153?s=21

And Visa follows up the next day with:

Btw, just to circle back: for a lot of people, Step 1 is “go to school”, and not only is it unpaid, YOU actually pay to do it, and the work that you get out of it often isn’t actually all that useful or interesting 🤔

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1015509304571383809?s=21

I am looking at these thoughts through the eyes of someone who has followed a different (i.e., traditional) path and is currently doing Stage 1 as a method to getting to Stage 3 as a method to break free of the constraints of that path.

I am spending an unreasonable amount of effort on one thing tangentially related to my business, because it is fun and awesome to me.

It is a writing project—an Explanation. The reason it takes so long to write it? Draft 1 is “this is so utterly simple.” First revision efforts make me realize “oh wait a minute, actually things are more complex than I thought.” Draft 2 metastasizes into incoherency. In my despair, while trying to beat clarity into the mess, the answer suddenly becomes simple and clear in Draft 3.

My draft manuscript travels the dimwit / midwit / topwit normal distribution. 😀 So does my brain. Who knew there were three of us in here?

I am going to stick with the writing. The task in life is to transcend one’s inner midwit.

The project is doing something for me. It will never make money on its own to replace the opportunity cost time spent. But it may open a portal for me.

and yet I feel like I kinda knew. part of why I took so long with the book was that a part of me knew that I couldn’t be the same person after finishing it, that I would have to say goodbye to an old version of me

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1506940326849646592?s=21

What is incomplete in my life? Is it incomplete because completion would open a portal through which I would fall into an entirely new life?

And excellence is in doing unreasonably more than necessary.

Example. I just wrote a thing for work, supposedly. Probably put 20 hours into a one hour job. That work made me happy. And already I am thinking of ways to make it better.

I will hit publish (metaphorically speaking) on it now. The improvements are embellishments, additions.

My point is that I am deeply satisfied with having put an unreasonably excessive effort into something trivial. But not trivial! It is a clean explanation that will enlighten others and will make their lives easier. The time and effort gave me a deeper understanding of the subject.

And it gave me a behavior model to follow.

picking a purpose and committing. It bends reality. For example money: what should you do? How invest? How much earn? With a purpose it becomes coherent as a means to the purpose end, not some abstract thing you should want more of

https://twitter.com/forthrighter/status/1505874997948174339?s=21

That helps explain how and why “as a man thinketh . . .” works. It’s not necessarily some mystical universal force (though who knows—it may be). Rather, it becomes a self-installed sorting and filtering function. “This appears to be consistent with the focus, so keep it.” “That is obviously orthogonal to the aim, so drop it.”

And magically you trend toward the focus.

It’s a coherence tool: a method to create a coherent narrative, to create meaning.

Which is all well and good until you see the external manifestations (things around you made of atoms) have rearranged themselves according to your focus. Then it dawns on you that focus isn’t a magic trick. It’s a force of nature.

I’ve been marinating in this thought ever since I saw it on The Bird App.

“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.”

https://twitter.com/bullmoosesoci/status/1502388390469189633?s=21

I don’t know where this takes me. Gravity exists, no matter what you say about it or how you choose to behave. Gravity exists and it doesn’t matter what you tell yourself when you jump.

All I know is that I want to live debt free. I don’t even want a working line of credit to draw on for brief needs to go into debt for psychic working capital.

In fact, those temporary lies told for expedient reasons may be the worst: all of a sudden you hit the credit limit. Now what?

“When considering a new project or opportunity, one of the first questions to ask is, “How do I want to spend my days?”

Make as few choices as possible that violate your answer.

Many opportunities seem exciting but actually give you less of the life you want.”

https://twitter.com/advenit/status/1480939980734279688?s=21

That’s a quote from James Clear, FWIW.

It’s yet another way of saying “focus on the things you want more of.”

Elon Musk tweet from 2021.

I wonder how that applies in life.

I focus on “vacation in x place” as something I’m metaphorically building toward in my life.

That’s the car that Tesla is building.

Go up a layer. He is building factories to build cars.

What am I doing in my life to build mental/life factories to output “vacation in x place”?

It’s something that I’m doing already: work on the inside man is building the factory. And it’s more fun than the output it generates. Output is temporary. Mindset is forever.