Month: March 2022

Find it. Walk it. Return when you stray from it.

It’s in the title. Get to fucking work.

the thing I will be a broken record about is that no truly ambitious person will be distracted from their ambitions by simplistic attitude towards self-care or whatever

the omnipresence of terrible advice and trivial distractions is only an issue because people are susceptible to it. and people are susceptible to it because they’re gullible, impressionable, have no taste, no sense of self. that’s the real problem IMHO

but if you really know who you are, what you care about, what you want to do, and how you’re going to do it, (A)

then the rest of the world could spew an infinite amount of bullshit your way (B) and it wouldn’t bother you

but people focus on B because A is hard and scary

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1504504463662661633?s=21

the stuff you joke about (even ironically or whatever) has a way of shaping your reality so be careful and deliberate with that stuff. a lot of people out here fumbling their own bags by joking about outcomes they don’t want. you might as well joke about the outcomes you do want

@visakanv

It’s a variant of “As a man thinketh . . . .”

P: One cannot change what one was born with. But one can, under one own’s power, go about changing what use one makes of that equipment. So, in that case, one simply has to focus on what one can change, rather than on what one cannot. This is what I call self-acceptance.

Y: What one can change, and what one cannot.

P: That’s right. Accept what is irreplaceable. Accept “this me” just as it is. And have the courage to change what one can change. That is self-acceptance.

The Courage to be Disliked, pp. 210-211.

Followed by a short reference to the Serenity Prayer.

Preceded by a discussion of why self-acceptance is preferable to self-affirmation.

And ending with this:

We do not lack ability. We just lack courage. It all comes down to courage.

Italics on courage are in the original text.

Self-acceptance implies—no, it demands—recognition of my inherent limitations. Brain-fart focusing ability. Physical attributes. Etc. But those limitations do not mean limited ability.

I’d say that the big thing that almost everyone gets wrong is re: scale. most people’s sense of possibility is calibrated to assume a fairly small number of attempts. fewer than a dozen attempts. the idea of trying and failing 1,000 times is alien to most people

@visakanv again

the answer to almost every “if you’re so smart why aren’t you X” question is “because you’re a coward”

@visakanv

Thread from @visakanv:

with each passing year I increasingly realize that, not only should I focus on what I want to see more of, I should also let go of trying to help other people stop focusing on what they say they don’t want to see more of. brings us to Nietzsche’s “I wish only to be a yes-sayer”

https://mobile.twitter.com/visakanv/status/1500482262672232449?cxt=HHwWgsDSpeCq5NIpAAAA

the core “engine” of this is even more radical than I thought, even after I thought I already understood it. and it radicalizes me more and more with experience

https://mobile.twitter.com/visakanv/status/1500482453567578113

“i want to stop X” must be reframed into “I want to do Y”, this seems to dramatically improve the odds of success, it feels like an order of magnitude or more

https://mobile.twitter.com/visakanv/status/1500482755947560960

How do I get there? How do I get to the point where all I do is say “Yes” or “I want to do Y”?

Assertion: with filters. Lots of “No” answers to X.

Which is not as hard as it sounds. The Y crowds out the X. Saying “Yes” to Y (this is the hard part) makes saying “No” to X easier.

Synthesized:

• Only say yes to Y. It helps if I say no to X, too. But that’s just a question of how long the transformation takes, from X to Y.
• This means I know that I want Y and I don’t want X. I have a goal. This is the necessary pre-condition. The goal can be a tentative hypothesis (“Let’s see what happens if I have more Y and less X”) but an Aim is necessary.
• More Y means less time for X.
• More Y brings me even more Y. Birds of a feather, etc. (It will probably bring me unexpected K, and P, and W. These are the second order effects of aiming at Y).
• X becomes a trivial part of my life. Eliminate it in favor of all Y, all the time. Or one of the second order effects that became visible while focusing on Y.