i can only get smarter by being dumb and other advice to myself (mini-📝 20/100)
partly inspired by this message that Ameesh sent me today.
There’s a lot of trite advice I give myself, but today was especially rich in the amount of things I was telling myself not to forget. A bunch of them were things that I marked down as candidates for full-featured mini-essays, so here’s a bullet list of them for your perusal. Would love to hear in the comments if any in specific particularly make you curious or want to hear more about in a dedicated mini-essay.
all of the stuff in the screenshot above that i typed
play infinite games
weirdness is a proxy for being true to yourself. The more weird you can be in front of people, the more comfortable you are with being authentic (have a stub of an essay on this)
don’t take anything personally. take tough, honest advice as the view of “the critic” and use it to inform how you would convince them
dont compromise on what you want if you know what you want
to do ^, know deeply what you want, develop your personal taste
angst is necessary to be willing to advocate for dramatic change
angst without community or optimism leads you to nihilism
optimism + angst leads you to optimistic nihilism, which gets you to actually engage with society and take practical steps towards making things better
is the key to optimism your community? giving you a reason to be optimistic about things
jolt yourself out of being stuck
when people dont vibe with an idea, it could have nothing to do with the idea and everything to do with the presentation of the idea
typical indicators of “quality” are inaccurate (YoE could mean great or many years of being bad)
follow the awesome, the energy, the creative flame, the path of least resistance, of most acceleration
the “you know it when you see it” feeling is very powerful agent for knowing what has chemistry with you and what doesn’t
be grateful and give back
be greedier (along the lines of gambling)
imagine a future where i’ve surpassed my limits
Okay so this spiraled into both advice to myself and some open-ended questions on my mind. As always ever-optimistic about what lies ahead and grateful that I have such a list to work through and remind myself to stay true to my values.
This is the 20th installment in my experiment of publishing raw, lightly edited mini-essays every day towards achieving 100 public pieces. Check out the rationale and the full list here or view my evergreen, longer pieces on my website.
If you liked this post, I would be grateful if you shared it with a few friends. And if you’re not already subscribed and would like to get updates, you can do so below.