How To Get Serious About Something - Visakan Veerasamy

why is being serious so important why is being serious so important well you know we have a limited life right we have limited resources and we get to live it however we want I just think it is really tragic if we don't make the most of it basically right and you know it's it's funny it depends on who you talk to because there are people who kind of get very like who get very hung up on the kind of thing I just said and you can kind of go too far with it and then you get really stiff and and grimaced about oh I got to make as much money as possible oh I got to acquire as much status as possible and in my mind that actually isn't so when I describe seriousness my essay uh that is slightly unserious it's it's kind of a fixation on a a particular model of trying to make some number go up so if you if you read my essay the conclusion is that seriousness is love and curiosity expressed earnestly over a long period of time and that I just think really it's like life is a feast and you really want to sample everything you can and find the thing that's yours and really you know really enjoy it uh yeah and actually you know the way I would answer that question other than that is having lived through the opposite which is you know being around unserious people going to school or other institutions where there's like an unserious energy where people are kind of you know just not taking things seriously and they might have their reasons maybe the job's not that important to them and they want to focus on something else it's fine but what I found is that when I reflect on my life and think about when are the moments when I've really had a great time it's invariably when I'm serious about what I'm doing which involves you know playfulness and so on and I'm surrounded by other people who are also serious and that just produces something you know that's that jesa right that Excellence that is once you've tasted it it's such a such a nothing else Compares and so I kind of I I talk about things like that in part to you know like uh my friend Kevin quar has this quote that's like it's like tapping a tuning for to see what else resonates right so if like in a sea of people you have a distribution of different kinds of seriousness you want to find the kind of people who Vibe with you and I'll you know dude so I was at a uh I was at a bachelor party at stago in the UK about two years ago and we were playing shuffleboard and there was sort of we'd been going for maybe six hours or so so people kind of gravitated into whatever their normal social groups were some of us had priors some of us had known people from before but a lot of the people in each of the groups were new and I looked over at the other table of people and they were the the guys were sort of like flicking the little pucks and they were sort of being play playful and messing about and no one was really keeping score meanwhile on the table that I was on we were Whispering tactics to each other we were talking about oh he's really weak when he he has to come short so blah blah blah I was like dude we're at a bachelor party but we had separated ourselves out we had literally triaged the group by seriousness and I realized in that moment that I like to be around people that take things seriously and it doesn't mean I I really appreciate you saying this isn't sort of uh solemn tedious rigid stodgy uh you use this term Dynamic persistance uh sort of a sense of humor being critical to that because it's difficult to persist for a long period of time if you're too if you take yourself too seriously so you become rigid and you become stiff and the opposite of being Dynamic and yeah I just uh I saw that thing I saw that situation occur in front of us and I saw a group of people that were they they had resonated with people that weren't taking things seriously and I realized I was on the serious people table no better no worse but just i' I'd found my tribe so to speak very nice it's so fascinating to me how easily people tend to triarch themselves that way like there's no you know like top down it's just naturally people gravitate towards people who are similar and away from people who are not and yeah you know I used to play in a band when I was a teenager and it's so funny that like 10 15 years later we find out that oh this person has ADHD this person is bipolar this person like it's all these people who were Misfits and maladjusted in some way that we all just drawn to each other and it's not like we signed up for who has you know this this issue we didn't even know we just knew that we were all very passionate about what we did and we just all found each other it's so magical actually when you think about it I love the idea of this I also think I I became quite frustrated and one of the reasons I really wanted to speak to you was reading your blog post was kind of like a it's an allowance for people who are serious to not feel embarrassed in their seriousness you know because there is the person who doesn't seem to be taking things too seriously who doesn't seem to be paying that much care or attention they're kind of laxidasical they're chill man you know just [ __ ] relax a little bit dude that person often comes across as sort of more fun more cool they're more viby right The Vibes are vibing uh and I've always found myself as somebody who prefers to be on the serious table as opposed to the non-serious table and um seeing that as a virtue not in a virtue as in like some superiority complex of some guy in a stuffy [ __ ] Library somewhere but genuinely just this is a predisposition you have it's some weird personality trait probably orderly some form of orderliness conscientiousness a couple of other industriousness maybe um but beyond that it's an amalgamation of you pay care and attention to the things that you do and you think that there is utility in effort and there is utility in in trying yeah what what you're describing reminds me of an anecdote from one of uh Michael B Jordan's classmates and she was saying he was such a weird kid you know he would come to school with his um head shots and stuff like that and it's just so striking to me that being serious when you're starting out is really difficult socially because again it's like I think the the the general sentiment in most of the world is like who do you think you are you know to take this thing so seriously like why are you so and you know like another joke I lik was uh imagine being Shakespeare's English teacher right like this annoying kid coming up with his own phrases and words and and stuff like that and and I also have sympathy for people who you know like so for the teacher for example who is just trying to teach a class but there's a student who's like nah I'm I'm going to do my own thing and God damn it William not again EX exactly and at the same time I think about all the kids everywhere who had that spark of something but it was snuffed out because their social environment just didn't allow it it's tempting to think that oh you know I have it and I've made it so far therefore I'm special which yeah in some sense yes but we always I think underestimate the degree to which a kind word here supportive context there just really you know you watch the right movie at the right time of your life and it just hit something for you and someone else just random walking didn't get that and it's like it's like virtuous cycles of do things get better or not and yeah just there's a lot to get into about how Society is structured in a way that kind of you know it's like I I can always see both sides of this like it's both good and bad it's it's a kind of sorting algorithm in a way like in the long run the people who are most serious and kind of this is quote from this old friend poet writer B something like the great man in order to exist has to overcome the resistance of like millions of people know his family his friends his school his Society so by the time he gets there he's got this immense strength or however he on the frame it you know immense persistence immense capability of like managing his psyche to get there and in a way because we live in a world where there's so much information so many people doing so many things and you know um used to work in in startups and like you would hear from someone that their their startup is going to be the next big thing and two years later they're gone and so since there's there's competing uh demands on your attention it's very normal and reasonable in fact to kind of dismiss most things so most people assume that most people are not serious you know in this Frame even the ones who say that they are being serious exactly because everyone says they're serious so the only way to demonstrate it is over time and you just you keep shipping another pot episode you keep writing you keep showing up year after year after year and I found that um there's something magical about like the seven-year Mark sometimes it's less like three to five but like once you've been around for like seven years is people's memories are not that long and so once you've been around that long it seems like you were there all along like forever and so it's it's it's just interesting I guess the line explain to me the line between this uh people that Lop seriously and people that are serious and the fact that what everyone is trying to do in some form or another is get all of the benefits of seriousness i. being taken legitimately whilst not necessarily having to pay the price of seriousness which is consistency and hard work and all the rest of it and also being able to seem chill and cool and like The Vibes of vibing uh what's the line between this sort of public world of seriousness and how it can cause cynicism and and and criticism uh among the the general population oh that's a good question I think and you know the messy thing is that nobody has it all figured out at the start right I love to look up you know any anybody who's like very successful now I love to look up their earliest like if you see like Obama's earlier speeches or like Jason mz's first concert they look nervous they don't look like they like they know what they're doing you know so in the earlier stages I think if anybody has any like intellectual honesty they are going to be like well I think I got a shot but I'm not completely sure but I'm going to try right and and you know so there will be self-doubt and if someone tells them you're not serious they might be like am I I'm not I'm not I think I am but I'm not sure right that like there there's that cluster of people and then okay there's also the cluster of I I imagine Kanye is probably an extreme end of just radically certain of themselves and you know that group probably splits into those that don't crash and burn and those that make it and then that's like out of Survivor bias you get uh you hear from a lot of those who do make it um I'm drifting from your question you were asking about how that causes cynicism so basically the way that the way that I see it is that the fact that so many people want to be seen as serious and so few are right and that you don't really have a way to expedite working out whether or not somebody is legitimate in their claims of seriousness Beyond just waiting which is the exact opposite of Expediting that causes cynicism to occur as a a defense mechanism sort of Fraud and [ __ ] and and the trouble you say with cynicism as a defense mechanism is you can get so good at it that you inadvertently also defend yourself against anything good ever happening for you too tasks failed successfully yeah um I think it's especially difficult when you're starting out which is why I I tend to think about and focus on teenagers and like people in the early 20s a lot because that's such a I do think as you get older if you've been somewhat rigorous you have like some hygiene principles in how you examine things and who you talk to um over time you cultivate a social graph a social network that's the people in your life if if you have other serious people around you um who are serious about figuring out who's for real and who's not it gets easier a little bit you might still make some errors here and there but like you know after a while you know I think Steve Jobs has this quote about how and he's talking about a company and running a team like when you hire a people and you put them in a context with other a people they become self- policing in only welcoming other a people and like pushing and like kind of um not necessarily pushing away but like they keep out the b people I guess um but yeah so if you are not rigorous about your information environment and who you allow to take up your time and energy and attention cynicism becomes the natural response because you keep seeing failures and you keep seeing you know evidence of people bullshitting you and you know if you look out into the world there's always people bullshitting right I I have an essay I want to write I haven't written yet it's called [ __ ] watch and it's like it's already funny it's like there's like the incentive the social media algorithms incentivize High arousal emotions and so there are people who whether coordinated or not end up look so the analogy I give is imagine there's a group of people in your city who go around looking for like the worst public toilets they can find and then they look for the [ __ ] and then they they scoop up the [ __ ] and they present it to you and he say hey hey here look at this [ __ ] smell it you know taste it I don't know and you'll be like that's disgusting what's wrong with you right but we do the equivalent with like information and content and be like oh here's this people fighting here's this you and it's like you know in a city of millions of people there's going to be someone fighting somewhere and if you can scroll through some Feats where it's like fight compilations and it's just oh my God it in five minutes of scrolling you would think that the whole world is at like full of people fighting but if you go out into a restaurant everyone's just sitting around having lunch or dinner you know and it's so there that um with regards to cynicism I think it's very much a function of how well you curate your your information and I think yeah there's this there's this unfortunate tendency for people especially like intellectual types who want things to be objective and they are like and I I remember thinking this way as well like I need to know all the bad things I need to know the truth I need to know the the so like you know that somewhere out there there is [ __ ] true you don't need to Deni be in denial of that but you also don't need to like go around sniffing it you know I mean you don't need to like immerse yourself in that so my my recommendation is always to like do an audit of what you have been consuming what you have been reading who you're talking to how does it make you feel do does it inspire you towards action does it inspire you to you know make things better if it doesn't if it's making you feel more helpless more Angry more all of those things then like what's what's the point you know and even just knowing that you can experience different realities by modifying what you allow in I think that's like a huge like as a way of overcoming cynicism and you know like our to be to be fair like as a species we are new to having smartphones it's only it's been like 15 years 16 17 years and it takes time for like the collective to develop like antibodies and proper protocols it's funny you can read up about like when the telephone was invented people didn't know how to use it and they would just call randomly at any hour of the day they wouldn't say hello they just just start talking and they like they they would have to write into magazines to complain about like you know people crank callers and all that and it took a while for like healthy Norms to develop and I think we're still in the prog in the process of figuring out how to have healthy chaotic information environment diets but the the the scary thing is that you know like Ai and all these things are coming out and so by the time we adapt to whatever is happening now like new stuff is going to happen faster so it's it's it's a challenge given that longevity and doing things for a long period of time is so important to being serious that seriousness is smeared across time what would be your advice to people who don't want to get seriousness burnout the people listening who go wow I feel seen by this I have care and detention I am bothered by details I want to do things well I want to leave the world better than I found it but I find it a little bit exhausting sometimes being around people who AR so serious who don't support me in my seriousness and uh I I don't want to I don't want to feel too rigid and and sort of stodgy I need to be dynamically persistent in that way what how can people be more sort of psychologically uh flexible or robust um in managing their own motivation you know what's coming up for me strangely enough I know you've podcasts with uh the Renaissance periodization guy um israil Israel yes great yes and so I used to have a problem with my lifting patterns where I would try to go as hard as I could and it would it would go pretty well for like three months four months and then I wouldn't realize it but I'm getting kind of burnt out in some way and then I would either experience a minor injury or thankfully nothing serious but like a minor injury or I'd start losing my appetite and then or you know I and then eventually I'd take like a week or two weeks entirely off and then my habit would fall off the rails and then everything just went bad and like I had like years and years of cycles of this until I watched uh is Miss Dr Mike and he was talking about D loading right and I think that's just such a I can't believe I never encountered that concept until I mean I guess I may have encountered it in passing somewhere but I didn't take it very seriously but when I saw Mike speak about it I was like oh this guy knows his stuff and I I gave it a shot and it totally works it's like so the idea is is basically keep doing the Reps or maybe maybe fewer reps maybe fewer weight but like you know still show up but like at at a lesser intensity and that kind of keeps you in the game but not balls through the wall kind of uh pushing yourself too hard and I feel like there's a parallel here with like seriousness in general or just you know any kind of project management like athletes need their downtime right like rest is a part of the recovery process and so if you're serious about doing anything for period of time you should consider how that break from the main thing keeps you like be allows you to return to the game from a with a healthy perspective and I'm thinking also now of uh David Ogilvie who was an excellent copywriter excellent manager he was just a great guy he should read his book it's fantastic and he would he would work really really hard for I think months on end and then he would switch off completely and go like into I don't know where he would go like uh just go on vacation I guess and he would um just let his mind lay fellow and I think the the quote he gave was like he would receive telegrams from his subconscious and the telegrams from his subconscious would Inspire him and give him a new perspective and and that kind of thing another person I'm thinking of now is um Paula sha who is the designer of the City Bank logo she R's great design consultancy and she's like you know I can't design anything if I'm not in a state of play so what she does is she sketches while she's in taxi cabs and yeah I think there are very few things that are interesting that don't involve some amount of playfulness some amount of you need to step away from the things so you can see the big picture and not get lost in the weeds of the thing so yeah like you know I'm kind of going in circles a little bit because I don't want to be too prescriptive like if you say oh take seven days on and two days off or like no that is not necessary maybe maybe it's that's correct your thing but like you have to be sensitive to your own rhythms and now I'm thinking of Christopher Alexander who's like a he's a he used he was a famous like architecture thought leader I guess you could say and one of his quotes that I keep coming back to is like this idea of improving patterns by tinkering with things and then seeing how you feel about it and it's really the feeling that dictates the action and there's no you can't Outsource this you know you can't Outsource your judgment and you can't Outsource your feeling like these are things that it's it's just like all the way to the top right even like if you're like Beyonce or Taylor Swift and you have a whole team of people managing your operation you still at the top have to judge do I want to have this pyot techic do I want to have this part of the show or whatever like people offer you ideas but you have to decide by your feeling what's right or wrong there's no escaping that and it's the same for rest and it's the same for if you've been doing things for some time and it's not working out like you have to sit back and feel it and it's it's so funny to talk about it because I think people who hear it would be like oh yeah yeah yeah of course but you know it's you really it's it's it's non-trivial it's kind of tricky because I guess because you can get lost in the Wheats so easily so you kind of want to practice having time away from the thing and like um I think Netflix has like in their their software department or something they had they had this thing like called chaos monkeys where they would basically program things to break randomly so that they would be like oh no if this breaks we got to do that thing and it it challenged them to make things more robust and yeah I mean and life is like that right in like whatever you're doing things are going to surprise you and Blindside you and so on so okay if you're a person trying to be serious and overwhelmed mhm yeah yeah yeah yeah trying to avoid that and then also I suppose you can add into it how do how do these people deal with the inevitable sort of friction that they feel with people around them because if you're somebody that is serious about things you're going to become very disliked because you throw everybody else into quite harsh contrast yeah that's very difficult so this is why my first book is titled friendly ambitious nerd because there three variables and Al so aot successful people tend to be ambitious nerds and if they're not friendly and when I say friendly you know it's like sensitive to other people and this this is this is tough because the people who are really at the absolute cutting ede most exceptional they tend to be uncompromising they tend to be you know just very intense characters who they see it as their point of view is correct because they they have put in so much work into it and so it's like they don't suffer fools right and yeah so it's like how much do you suffer fools is basically the question like how do you do it in a way that is well each person has to decide for themselves based on their value use how kind they want to be to people who can do nothing for them or you know are even in like interrupting their process and I'm I'm kind of you know I remember when I was a kid and I felt like an idiot and I felt like uh you know no one was looking out for me and I had no mentors or no whatever and I really just needed someone to kind of show me around and help me out so I'm kind of biased towards when I see someone struggling or I see someone lashing out or being what ever I try to you know like can I at least if I can I at least say something that they might consider later on and be like oh yeah you know actually the guy was unreasonably nice to me but you know I I don't know if I I I've gone back and forth with regards to like how much should I like lecture people on that they should be nice to other people you know I I think this is one of those things where you may have some predisposition and it can vary a little bit bit slightly and like you know I'm reminded of uh when the Google co-founders were looking for funding right and like I think one of the investors said something like oh these guys are so arrogant and they're so um just not socially nice right they're not they're not kissing the ring and they're not they're just kind of saying oh yeah we want to organize the world's information and it's going to be great and I'm paraphrasing what they said I I don't think they said it's going to be great it's like they just they just spoke in very clinical ter about precisely what they were going to do which is like I would say it's a tell for like you know the rocket scientists and the the the people that are really serious about technical things and they want to make progress on things like they they are thing oriented people rather than people oriented people so they don't you know like they often they're like neurod diversion autistic something like that and so you know and I think okay here's what I think you don't nobody needs to do everything by themselves you know and it's a it's a it's a Fool's errand to insist that your Cutting Edge scientist should also be a very smooth um like political operator right it's not realistic to expect someone to be both although like really exceptional people are but like realistically most people are going to like specialize at the thing that they're good at but like so the the cool thing is life is a multiplayer game right like we people are are kind of indoctrinated by school to think that oh you got to do standardized test tests you got to be get good grades at everything and you know like that kind of like super generalist perspective whereas you know there's a lot of things where actually you just need a friend you just need like one friend who can cover you for that you know you just need like a Handler or a manager and you know so like like my wife she's I would say my wife is smarter than me in terms of like reading people and in terms of a bunch there's a bunch of ways in which my wife is smarter than me but she doesn't like talking to people that much but like so she married me and so she gets to benefit from like my social butterfly um instincts or or inclinations and I get to benefit from her being you know kind of like analytical about you budgets and schedules and so like there's a quote from Rocky which is like you know we each have gaps but together we have no gaps so yeah I think the good news is we can trade like so we can make friends so you need so you have to make at least one friend right and ideally every like antisocial you know like not they're not trying to be antisocial but the kind of person who isn't very good with people should have one person in their Corner who's like their their representative or their Advocate or someone someone who can look out for them and kind of translate their perspective to other people and again it's like the zero to one part of this is the hardest like when you don't have anyone that's when it's really tough but I think even just knowing that it's possible that if you can find someone who's like a nerd Whisperer right and I I consider myself basically that like I'm I'm kind of a nerd Whisperer I'm nerdy in general but I'm not like all the way intense to the point where I'm like tinkering with stuff so you're able you're able to translate for the ones who are too far down the autist ladder to be able to communicate you're you're like the gateway drug to normal civilization basically yeah that's true actually so yeah I've described it as like being like um the bridge between worlds right so I I am a fan of like heal from like the no mythology and yeah we we need Bridge people to bridge people well so you you said before about um you had this sort of sense that you as a a kid was uh yearning for role models for somebody to give you an encouraging word in your ear and uh I I think I was very similar I came up with this idea of the reverse role model because you've heard of food deserts in America I think I was in the equivalent of a role model desert the UK to not many people like IED to be and um I realized that I think most success from life doesn't necessarily come from Expediting success but from avoiding tragedy and failure like if you multiply by zero you're completely out of the game so at least there is much more downside to be had than potential upside um so what I found was people who were very much like the sort of person I didn't want to be so I don't want want his relationship with gambling and I don't want the way that he cheats on his wife all the time and I don't want the fact that this person never really seems to be able to speak their mind and so on and so forth and um they're way markers in the ground you sort of place these different way markers of stuff that you don't want to be like and correct I think that's reassuring to anybody that feels like they haven't yet found a role model or an encouraging word in your ear because if you haven't had a single one of those the likelihood is that you haven't just been s of moving through some really boring gray middle Zone what you've been exposed to is the opposite end of the bell curve lots of people like the person you don't want to be like and um it was just a I thought that was an interesting and nice uh way for me to uh rationalize uh alchemize um the uh situation that I'd been in and it's uh for the people who don't have that many Role Models around them I'm I'm sort of pay for it yeah I respect that so much you know to to decide to do that kind of alchemy is is a Prof found actually I'm I'm curious like did you did you read anything did you would you point at anything that kind of set you off on that or do you feel like it was really just within it was intuition I think mostly um that I just I didn't fit in right I didn't I didn't resonate with the people around me in the way that they resonated with the people around them and uh you know you find little glimpses every so often of someone that you can sort of get on with and much of this is your problem right much of this is a you thing that you don't really fully know how to present yourself in the most legible way like how is it that's best for me to be understood by people it's not compromising it's not changing yourself it's not being a shape-shifting like sort of social Climer but it's putting your best easy to understand foot forward you know you don't need to talk to people about your rampant flatulence or erectile dysfunction on the first date you know save that for further down the line and um yeah the sort of social mores and Graces and and how you sort of slowly acclimatize people to you um it's a skill it's a real skill and it's a skill specifically for people who are serious and who care about things and um who want to have deep and interesting relationships but they're terrified that if they bring that up too early on people are going to think that they're some sort of a nerd or or they're not fun they're not playful they're going to be a buzz kill uh God don't bring VIs like he's just going to talk about feelings again you know what I mean like that you don't want to be that guy especially when you're young and I I really think that the point you made before about how when you're first starting out you have no legitimacy why why on Earth do you person at the same level as everybody else IE zero novice beginner starter think that you have the right to be able to be this serious about anything why on it's so [ __ ] patronizing in a way that you it's solipsistic it's egotistical it's narcissistic to think that you deserve this level of like rigor um but then when you look back like you you need to have some of that that spark needs to be there or else you're never going to take it sufficiently seriously to actually be able to become good at it yeah I actually so yeah I've thought about this a lot and I I've encountered it myself back then and even now sometimes and I find that what what I find myself often saying is that you know so there are assumptions buried in culture that people just internalize from their upbringing from wider Society or whatever and the idea of deserving is very is very tricky stuff you know it's very it's uh like you know I think there's this implicit sense that so it's like status hierarchies and concepts of like royalty even like you and it goes back all the way to like our founding like our earliest myths mythology and you know like if you if you go back and you know you can actually look at like Disney movies and even superhero movies or whatever and it's like oh you have to be a prince or a princess to be able to have agency right and like and that's like B out from it's implied it's like you're the chosen one you're the Divine whatever so everyone else is just you're meant to be a peasant basically and like this these intuitions still remain in modernity right and the the way I I put it is like uh I'm not special that I get to be serious anyone can do it like it's it's there for the taking right and it's just I guess um maybe there might have been some validity to those old heris stics in ancient times but you know and like one one analogy I would use is like it used to be that if you wanted to have your own TV show or a podcast or whatever you basically had to go through The Gatekeepers of traditional media and back then producing video is very expensive thing to do and so it was highly resource intensive and like whoever had the cameras back there or like you know that whole operation like they you would need to justify things to them you would need to oh I'm going to do a show it's going to make this much money it's going to grow this much audience or whatever and now with like YouTube and iPhones or whatever like even like the cheapest phones you anyone can record anything and upload it for basically free anytime but that has been true for like a decade at least and yet people still think we we always use our old intuitions to to and so like the present reality that we live in culturally is always like 30 to 50 years behind or maybe even more think you as you say you know this medieval surom environment where well you've got to work for the baron and The Baron's not going to let you do this thing yeah this odd you need to have agency bestowed on you but you're right freed this up there was a time where your as a parent if your son is trying to let's say wear fancy clothes you would be protecting him by telling him don't do that the baron has a temper he doesn't like to see anyone other than Royals dress up he's going to kill you and so they're protecting you by saying those things but like that's no longer true but you know it just it's like that that story of like the five monkeys like beating each other because they used to get electrocuted so yeah like culture evolves very slow relative to like I had a I had a great conversation with this guy that researched the the history of humans discovering their own ability to destroy themselves so a history of existential risk um and he's got this great term uh that is apparently in the literature called conceptual inertia and it let's say that we we have a cernic revolution we go uh to learn that the universe is perhaps constructed in a different way to the one that we believe and first off people will deny that it's true and you will continue to need to push with evidence and data and so on and so forth observation and then after a while maybe some of the elites will begin to accept that it's true that maybe some of the normal people will begin to accept that it's true but they still don't behave as if it is and that's conceptual inertia it's the the archetypes it's the stories that we tell ourselves it's the way that we see the world and this just lags behind this lumbering Behemoth that we need to [ __ ] drag along and the other thing just just to kind of round out that the social element because I do I I do get the sense that that's a really important seriousness derating uh uh element that um the social incentives will align for you to go back to the mean with anything whatever it is that you do even if it's aggression you will be socialized to be less aggressive if it's funniness like if you're too much of a comedian Al it's like dude come on we're trying to be it's a it's a [ __ ] funeral let's be serious here but and I always wanted especially because I was very sort of lonely as a kid I always wanted to work out how to make people like me I wanted to be accepted I wanted to have friends I wanted to have a support system and it took probably until about a year ago for me to realize that I always thought that people wanted to be around charismatic individuals other people around them to be charismatic to have some sort of you know gravitational sense some sort of pull and then I reflected on the friends that I like to spend my time around and it wasn't the people who were the most interesting it was the people who made me feel like I was the most interesting so I came up with this idea of uh inverse Charisma which is what you want to be trying to cultivate is not necessarily a sense of everybody going God I'm so glad V is coming he's going to tell us all these Amazing Stories he's going to be like regil us with a dance you know he's going to do the limbo thing again we don't want that what we want is Vis is going to come [ __ ] like I I love he always brings the best out of me I always feel good when I'm around him and none of the feel good when you're around this person has got anything really to do with them other than their love their kindness their curiosity smeared across time and uh yeah I think it's just for the fellow uh Charisma uninfused uh out there the people who maybe don't think I'm I'm not you know full of confidence and charm and wit and Whimsy uh it kind of doesn't matter you can actually be one of the best liked people in the room to whatever regard you care about simply by being interested in other people uh not necessarily by just being interesting yeah I think I think there's there's a kind of a selection bias effect or a gar n effect I I call a version of this the Time Square problem where like people like imagine thinking that the only thing in New York is Time Square which is like all the ads and all the garish lights and everything which is you know it's it's interesting to check out but like similarly like you know some people think oh the only people on YouTube are like Mr Beast and and whoever it's like it's when there's like so much interestingness just like two streets down three streets down like you can I I follow this like publish um some just some guy running a really old printing press kind of thing it's fascinating and it's yeah it's it's it's like that kind of uh it's not exactly the same thing but like his love for his craft really shines and everyone in his domain loves to be around that it's just so nice to see someone lovingly tending to the thing that they care about and it doesn't need to be showy or flashy or loud that's just you know it's if if you filter that out suddenly you look at the rest of the landscape and it's like oh there's so much everywhere talk to me about the relationship between seriousness and earnestness H well I feel like earnestness is at the heart of like you can't really be serious and not be Earnest right I guess I guess you can you can choose how much of it you want to show I'm not I'm not entirely sure why I've used two different phrases in two different essays but it's just um it just felt natural to me I guess uh so I I think my my earnestness essay says there's nothing edgier than Being Earnest so I got around to talking about earnestness by talking about edginess and I guess I like the alliteration that's probably how I ended up doing that because you could also say there's nothing edgier than seriousness but you know it's nice to have alliteration but yeah so basically the interesting thing about um you know so some people want to be you know they don't want to go with the social hurt right they don't want to just say what everyone else is saying they don't want to think what everyone else is thinking and so they begin with that and then they think well I should contradict what is being said which can be you know a little bit of a public service and I think it was more of a public service in the past when we didn't have like Twitter and comments like you know like in your in your social friend group if five if you're in a group of six guys and five guys always saying the same thing the sixth guy who says the other thing is providing the group with like a useful service right in a sense but if it's something like you know so you upload something online and some like inevitably you know some guy is going to present the critical like contrary perspective so each additional contrary perspective doesn't add very much and again this is one of those things where like people are not yet good at acting in large groups they still no snowflake feels responsible for the Avalanche right um but the cool thing is no sorry I didn't finish that thought um if you going to try to be edgy by reacting to what the consensus is you're always going to be lagging behind the consensus so the consensus is there then you analyze it you compute your response and you're always going to follow the consensus and in fact so like if you're like a rigid heterodoxy like you're being the opposite of what's the Orthodoxy you mathemat like you can you can like map it out almost mathematically people you're you're still following the H you're just the sheep is still a sheep right yeah and on the other hand the interesting thing is if you follow if you go inwards right you follow your own heart you follow your own interestingness you do what you deeply care about because each individual is socialized like kind of on the outside your theay layers of socialization begin a little like the way to talk about this is like uh young children when they first start writing poetry they write excellent poetry because they haven't learned how ordinary people speak and so they have all these very fresh uses of phrasing that seems surprising and almost like eal like they just they'll just say very cool things until they get to like I don't know like 13 14 and they start caring about their peers and so yeah kids like toddlers like three to seven they are excellent freaks you know and I think um some several artists have quotes that's like the challenge is to remain childlike and not let the world whatever which is difficult but yeah so if you if you go inwards and express what's really true for you and what you feel you know like what you like daydream about what what you dream about literally so like that stuff and you express that you end up being more quote unquote contrarian you end up being away from the hurt right like so like and I think this is other thing where people who make predictions within a group they tend to it's it's like they're playing the pric is Right sort of you know they all kind of calibrate their guesses in relation to everybody else's guesses and so there's like a bell curve of what all the people guess and sometimes the answer is way out in the field far away from the B right it's like a thousand times more 10,000 times more than or what in whatever Direction and the person who figures that out is the person who wasn't listening to everybody else and the way yeah so the person who isn't listening will from time to time be more radically edgy than the person who's trying to be edgy which is which is it's kind of a trip you think about it for a while and it's like whoa you know yeah just following your own Rhythm gets you somewhere else you have this great line in that essay where you say as a general principle if your position on things can be picked out very easily predictably it's probably worth being suspicious of it because you're basically running a simple script and if nothing else maybe consider that you might soon be easily replaced by a chat GPT bot coming to your Twitter timeline near you I talked earlier about how earnestness gets suppressed sometimes a person who has lost ability to focus on what they actually want can become superficially motivated by the social activity of attacking other people for the imperfection in their utterances it's a fairly Hollow form of nourishment but hungry people without any good food will eat anything they get yeah man I sound better in writing than when I speak it's the British jaon it's a British ja yeah it's very you should I should get you the right to speak my audio books uh yeah it's that's true you know it's it's uh what what is that to say about that that it's really well I when I hear that you know I I find myself feeling some empathy for you know people who don't know how to be better than a hater you know it's like nobody you know like some people say they want to be haters but you know I kind of believe that if you could know how if you could figure out how to be adored for your idiosyncratic personal flavor and style and Essence like you wouldn't want to go around disturbing like annoying people for engagement right like you just like again we live one short life and like you want to look back and be like oh yeah I really you know critiqued well yeah there there's there's some contexts in which that's true but like if you're doing it like compulsively you wake up in the morning you scroll your feet and you look for someone to be mean to like uh you can do better you can do better than that that's my thing yeah yeah what's your um you start that Essay with this really lovely quote from Ted Hughes saying that's how we measure out our real respect for people by the degree of feeling that they can register what's that make you think of this actually ties back to what we're talking about earlier about uh when I was bringing up Christopher Alexander and stuff like you have to feel like feeling is feeling is the highest bandwidth thing that a person is capable of I think like there there is you know I love this there's this book called the user Illusion by Tor nor trenders he's a Danish physicist it's not a very popular book because it was written in Danish originally but he has all these brilliant bits about Consciousness and um one of the things he says is that the bandwidth of feeling is more than the bandwidth of knowledge I'm I'm paraphrasing I don't know what exactly he said now and the bandwidth of knowledge is more than the B bandwidth of communication so we feel more than we know and we know more than we can say right and we like and thinking is somewhere in the know to say aspect so what that if you sit with that and you really feel it what you realize is that you feel more than than you can say you feel more than you like what you think about something and what you feel about something the feeling is much more nuanced the feeling is much more and think about you know um intuition right like so one of the ways I think about intuition is that it's like you have a felt understanding of all of the Ecology of relationships of things around you one of my favorite stories is uh I think in one of Malcolm gladwell's books he talks about a fireman who goes to a fire and like a senior fireman and like all the firemen are trying to work on the Fire and he's just standing there and he's like something's not right we got to get out like it's weird we got to get out and then he gets everyone out and like a second later the whole house collapses he he didn't think what's going on he felt it and what he felt was it turns out um he felt that H the the fire is not going away the way it should the smoke there's not enough smoke for this level of heat there must be and turns out that the fire was in the basement so it's way hotter than what they were used to and like but that's something he felt he didn't think it right and I feel that similar to that kind of intuition and that kind of intuition requires domain familiarity and expertise so it's not the Lac aasal hm I feel like you know the world should be more like this or I feel like you know I mean having an ice cream if you want to have an ice cream go ahead but like you know it's like I feel that that person is bad vibes like you know okay those those things are kind of it varies from Context to context but what I'm getting at is there is so like going back to the T Hughes quot the amount of feeling that we are able to experience and like surf the waves of because like our education systems and civilization as a whole right to minimize um inconvenience to people because we all smooshed together in very cramped environments civilization is I call it you know it's like a iterative potty training right like at the most fundamental level please don't [ __ ] in the street don't [ __ ] in front of your friends like [ __ ] in the toilet right and [ __ ] on like try to do it at appropriate times you know so like party training is good like you want people if maybe if you if you're a barbarian in the wild you can [ __ ] wherever you want whenever you want doesn't bother anybody else but like it's a public health issue if people are [ __ ] everywhere so people need to be party trained right and what that means is you need to be like emotionally reg like you need to regulate your feelings you think you want to go now no you got to hold it in and go somewhere else but okay so that's that's party training and then you go on to I'm angry no you shouldn't be angry like you saying you get socialized to be less aggressive Rive right like you need to we need to find ways to express our feelings in healthy ways and in good containers that don't hurt other people un like excessively or unnecessarily or whatever but so from civilization point of view that's a little bit more complicated and complex than it can manage so what it does is it tells people to suppress themselves and it enforces this through culture and institutions and everything else and so you have all these people who are suppressed all the time and they feel like [ __ ] and they don't really know why and then they take drugs and then they all all of those things but um it is possible once you are awakened to this reality to realize that you have the capacity to re-regulate yourself in a way that is optimal for you right so the the thing is civilization's mechanisms are optimal for civilization and we all enjoy the benefits of civilization so you know I'm I'm not like anti- Civilization or anti- capitalist or anti whatever it's just we inherit the circumstances that we're in it's on us to take it and I double it and give it to the next person no I've got the idea in my mind of being over civilized yeah there is a degree of over being over civilized and under civilized the bureau imagine how to a barbarian civilized is an insult like you people need contracts to make to like do things together like you don't trust each other you put people in boxes in jails like it's just you know it's a different uh value system right it's certainly something that I've had to get over um did therapy twice a week for around about the last year or so and uh in that you're basically inviting somebody into a very intimate part of your home and they're pointing at all of the weird stuff that you've got and they're like why is that single Spike on the floor over there and what's that disused train set about and what's this thing and what's that thing and I notice that you keep on walking over to the sink backward as opposed to forward or whatever whatever and um one of the things that I realized was that I have a people pleasing tendency I see other people's emotions as my responsibility that their well-being emotionally is on me and that it's it's partly uh my problem and what the one of the issues that you come across with that is it's very difficult to advocate for your own needs or your own wants or to learn to forcibly say no because you know that invariably this is going to cause some sort of imposition or discomfort to somebody else and if your concern is ever making anybody else ever feel uncomfortable it's very unlikely that if you will subjugate your own desires in place of their well-being right even if you're in the right even if you as a person that is you should advocate for you um so that's been a sort of a really interesting way of literally trying to un civilize myself in some regards I guess and the curse of the people pleaser is that people can tell or like you know Discerning people can tell if you are like stiff in a way that's like oh you I need to put your needs first and then subconsciously or consciously if they've thought about these things they know that they can't entirely trust you to take care of your needs and so then they don't they're not not pleased right like they and then they don't trust you and then it's like oh you want to make them feel better and they're like I don't trust you you know like well you said it you say it in the seriousness essay that it's like this sort of odd uh roundabout um uncomfortable truth of life that the more you don't care about what other people think about you the more they seem to like you yeah it's crazy it's such a you know I'm writing about all this from a new Angle now where I talk about like uh a blessing Ness spiral upwards and a wretchedness spiral downwards and like it's so tragic cuz the more blessed you are the more blessings you receive and the more wretched you are the more principal all the way up all way exactly that yeah and it's it's so harsh actually you know it's like every time you cross a threshold suddenly everything's just better and I think people know this instinctively which is what part of what drives the desire for like um wealth and like social climbing is that you know that at the next level something are less bad and like you know I remember once my wife and I um I think it was during covid or something there's a discount on like the Fus hotel in town and so we decided to go and so it it was wonderful and then we had breakfast the next morning with all these people who are very obviously wealthier than us like a whole tax bracket or two tax brackets higher and I it was such a lovely environment everyone like people are playing with their children everyone was speaking politely and I found myself getting kind of angry like man rich people people have it good and not just that they have consumer um you know Surplus or consumer surplus not that they have spending power right it's not that they have fancy things it's that in the nice neighborhood it's peaceful it's you know I'm sure there's problems that I'm not aware of like there's more pressure you know like there's more like they seem to have a lot of like family squabbles about inheritance and stuff so like every context has its own upside and downsides but in that moment I was like whoo like I am underestimating how much I would actually appreciate like having the access to those kinds of spaces which is uh well think about how much less stress there would be on you you know there's this sort of pover this odd poverty trap which is poverty is expensive yeah yes poverty is very expensive if if you're constantly having to get credit lines extended if you're having to work two jobs which means that you can't improve your education or your qualifications to get a better paying job you're kind of stuck and then you some people get to escape velocity in in one regard or another and some people you know the Elon of the world the Bezos of the world have this sort of I don't know like infinite money glitch or at least it seems like that to everybody else and then you think what sort of quality of life comes along with that and uh yeah it's it's a weird it's a weird thought to consider uh the advantages that wretchedness spiral and that that sort of ascendancy spiral as well yeah yeah it's just such a and you know it's almost too much to think about sometimes I think I think again like everyone is living in the immediacy of their reality right so it's like you have what's on your to-do list for next week you know what's on your you got to ship this thing for work you got to deal with changing the oil on the something you know it's all these nitty-gritty things and it's challenging to step back and really see the big picture and have like a Long View of what do I really want my life circumstances to be and you know it's uh yeah it's a lot it's it's what's your what's your advice for people to sort of continue struggling cheerfully when things aren't going quite as they'd hoped ah man I have been in that state for the past couple of years is uh it's funny because you know when I was it's like U so I I have struggled differently at different stages of my life and currently it's the best Stage you know like I'm I'm when I was a teenager I was struggling with you know my family didn't believe me when I said I want to be like a an author and like my friends you know not don't like didn't like that I'm I I struggled to get people to take me seriously and like those struggles were in some ways harder but in some ways also I guess more freeing so this goes back to every stage is different and has his pros and cons uh but so in my current stage like I've I've written two books that I'm happy with and my readers love them but but like instead of directing my energy towards like doing marketing for them and selling more books and whatever I feel like I got to move on to the next project and like do the third thing and that has been a struggle for me because I mean I guess any any interesting work creatively is going to be a struggle because you're trying to birth something that doesn't already exist and so you have to find New Perspectives and you have to you you want to say something and it hasn't quite been said before and you don't know how people are going to receive it and you know it's it's just it's just a lot and I have woken up very often and be like oh my God what am I doing with my life oh what am I what am I how am I going to do this thing why is progress so slow you know like there's all these unpleasant thoughts and I have to it it takes effort to contextualize things for myself like I have to actively remind myself when I go for a walk or something and be like visa do you know you're living your dream your your teenage self's dream like if I could talk to my 17y old self and be like oh yeah you know I don't have a job I just write and I talk to people I just do whatever I like I just you know he'll be like what how is that possible like how like you succeeded like you've made it man I'm like yeah I just feel like U you know I it's there's this quote from Steve Jobs again where he says when you haven't succeeded yet when you when you're like a nobody right it's fun to fantasize about all the riches and all the things that about dreams like Grand dreams but once you have some means once you have some money money you have some Authority some influence whatever now the chance of your dreams coming true is not zero it's not one either it's like in between and you have responsibility for to make that happen and it's a burdensome responsibility I feel and like you know I always feel survivors guilt as a creative you know why me why not I know that there are people who are surely more talented than me more intelligent more articulate whatever but you know maybe their mom is sick and so they've never had a like they've had to work extra hours and so they have had time to write right and I always feel like I got to make it for that guy you know cuz he by care that's maybe my I feel like it's a little bit similar to to your people pleasing stuff maybe I'm not sure but like anyway you were asking about how do I help people who want to struggle creatively or struggle cheerfully right there's layers to this but I think Mark Manson has a quote about like whatever you do you're going to have to eat [ __ ] I don't know why I'm saying [ __ ] so much in this call whatever you're going to do you're have to eat [ __ ] so find the flavor of [ __ ] sandwich that you like right like find the thing Orient yourself toward the pains rather than the pleasures yeah like what pain can you endure and like what so imagine you struggle at a thing for the rest of your life and on your death bit you know maybe you had like some minor success but it never really fully paid off but you imagine yourself so imagine you like this is a great great exercise by the way a thought experiment of visualize your old self and visualize your your young self and like just have a conversation with them so I imagine like a 90 or 100y old visa and I I imagine a few different versions of them but like one one of them is like Visa I've been working my butt off for 50 60 years writing every day and I have not achieved any great success and then but like I'm like but did you did you love it and he like yeah I loved it you I love I love writing I love playing with words I made friends with other authors you know we discussed things that were interesting and and you know it was a good life I can I can visualize that if you told me something like well imagine Visa you know being a software engineer and like never really like you know I I could I I know I could do it if I wanted to I don't want to though it's not you know so find the struggle that you enjoy for its own sake and you don't mind not succeeding at and then you can like you have the the energy to keep going and I guess Define for yourself small victories that are victories to you even if it's not victories to other people and I found you know so I've been writing for a long time there were things that I wrote like 10 years ago or like many years ago where nobody in my life then cared about my writing but I thought it was good and then now 10 plus years later when I do have an audience I can share that old stuff with my audience and they're like whoa this is really good I'm like yeah I know right you know so it's like if you are a success to yourself and no one else sees it but you have to see it right if like and there's a quote for I think from Les Brown like if no one else will see it for you you have to see it for yourself like you have to be honest about what you think is good work what you think is this was worth doing I think this is worth doing I think this is worth struggling at and if no one else sees it I'm just I I will see it for myself and then you try and find one other person who can see it and then another person and then another person right and then um in that kind of mindset I think um you can try to be cheerful about it that's all this other like project management nitty-gritty stuff so like don't attempt extreme large projects that might like syn your ship if you fail you know like I think uh n said something like write 100 like uh outlines of essays or drafts or something like so you can if if you can like so the saddest thing I see from time to time is like an author who spent or like a startup founder or an author who spend several years of their life and a lot of their money and their resources and whatever working on a project that turned that they had like this kind of white whale idea like oh when my novel is done yeah and then you do this really big thing and then you talk to people about it for the first time and they're not interested and then that's just so depressing and so disheartening whereas what you want to do and this is part of like being cheerful and whatever you want to do little sketches little outlines little drafts and then share them with people and then like see how they respond and if you just talk to people every couple of days even just a regular conversation you may notice at some point you make someone laugh or at some point like their eyes light up and those are the moments that you want to like collect and and pay attention to and like you do more of that I love the idea of sort of the challenges that the person who's not yet successful but not a total Noob uh is encountering and the fact that sympathy for Successful People is very unpopular but there is uh there is certainly a new skill set that everybody needs to learn like just imagine that you get toward where you want to be not even where you want to be just imagine you get toward where you want to be what fears are going to come into your life that you don't have right now well what about the fear of losing something right you've got something to [ __ ] lose now that climbing higher simply gives you further to fall you've got the onus on you to continue doing the thing because if you don't you've actually risked something now as opposed to before you know if you haven't made any if no one reads your blog if nobody cares about your t-shirt designs if no one's supporting your sports team or you're buying your products or whatever what does it matter if you quit it doesn't care it's all on you it's just a passion project but that's not the the case anymore and you've got this beautiful idea of the scarcity Sprite and uh it it really sort of spoke to me you say this particular ghoul looks to me like a scarcity Sprite a grabby anxious being terrified of coming across as ungrateful out of touch and selfish terrified of losing or squandering the opportunity that fortune has granted us it's a sort of emotional flashback of some sort and that's something I expect I'll have to sit with and meditate on as I revisit this a small part of me shyy raises his hand like a kid in a classroom and says it's okay if you lose everything I'll still be your friend yeah man dude [ __ ] unbelievable that sense of support from yourself from the past I'm proud of you for doing what you did yeah that's I have my moments huh yeah you know it's a when I write you know when I hear this right it doesn't feel like me you know it I I I can recognize that it's me but it's my it's kind of a peak stake me or like when I'm in the middle of the thing right it's uh day to day I don't feel like my best self or I don't feel like my best writer self but like I got to keep doing stuff and then it just comes by in flow um Elizabeth Gilbert has a great T talk about this where she talks about the the myth of the genius of the creative genius like in a sense where it's like she she goes back to because she was a successful author of Eat Pray Love and she described how when she was a struggling author people were like how are you going to feel never making anything worthwhile like what if you're never going to make it and then immediately after she made it immediately people are like oh aren't you afraid you're never going to match up to that success and she's like what the [ __ ] man like know so yeah and so she looked up like the history of how people thought about these things and like I think in the Roman times or like Antiquity people like okay people get possessed by genius from time to time so if you do good work it's not you you don't get the you don't get full credit and if you do bad work you don't get full blame you know it's like the creative sometimes just creativity happens and we are we are vessels for that right and uh but yeah with regards to the Gusty Sprite it's really I don't know I I think maybe maybe I like indoctrinated myself a little bit with like video games motivational stuff and like but I I feel it to be true you know like uh I really just want to have my own back I really just I think there a quote from Monte where he says you know you can try to be clever and fancy with all your words and stuff but on your death bit you're going to really confront the the barest like beest troops about yourself like did you live up to what you wanted do you forgive yourself for whatever do you and like those very basil things and I yeah I think about that a lot I'm like how can I be a better friend to myself so that I can be a better friend to other people and actually it's funny it's funny that I'm so quick to go from that first sentence to the next it's like uh you know like selflove or self-care therefore that I can help other people right it's yeah this subjugating of desires I must put other people first who am I to ask for the attention even from myself my attention should be paid onto other people no dude I'm uh I'm I'm balls deep in in that challenge at the moment speaking of the Tactical stuff you know we can we can talk Mark Manson quotes all day you spent a good bit of time looking at procrastination oh yeah what what is the tldr 30,000 foot view as somebody that needs to write lots of words and do things self-powered every year what's the tldr of procrastination yeah so you know what's funny I spent like years reading everything I could about it analyzing it psychoanalyzing myself and everything and these days I don't even use the term anymore I don't I don't you know it's uh I think one of the most major things I've learned is that you you really have to focus on the outcomes that you want and not the outcomes that you don't want and even describing things in terms of procrastination somehow I feel it tends to like re reinforce the procrastination you know so I don't know this is a slightly radical view I can try and answer the question directly but like my my my meta view is that um you don't even need to use that term you know like think about what you want ask yourself what's in the way of getting to what you want and and the problem is you know very often procrastination is like trying to protect you you know it's trying to protect you from doing something that you don't actually want you know like um my wife and I have been procrastinating on renovating our house for years and years and I eventually realized oh I don't want to live in this neighborhood and I not being honest with myself about that and like but my subconscious protects me from making a costly financial decision like a very costly financial decision by just putting it off like no no let's just keep looking let's whatever and the moment I realized that oh I actually want to be in a in a better neighborhood then like it's so easy to fall into I'm going to go see an agent I'm going to go look at houses and like everything is just flows from there so yeah I think a lot of times procrastination is you know you maybe you don't you don't actually want to do the thing and I think people struggle with like well but I need to pay the bills so I have to have a job so I have to which is fair right everyone everyone most people go through that but I think a lot of things boils down to to like the story you're telling yourself about why you need to do what you're doing uh I I have been helping some friends with these issues recently and one pattern I keep noticing is people have like this Taskmaster inside their head that's like beating them up over and over again like you should be doing this thing why are you not doing it like you're so lazy you're so whatever and it's it doesn't get to the truth of why you should or should not be doing it what you are what you care about what you're afraid of um and yeah so when I was talking to my friend he he was trying to spend less time on Twitter and I'm like why why why he's like oh because I spend so much time on Twitter and Instagram and whatever and I don't get any work done and so I should spend less time on those things and I'm like I don't I don't think that's actually true you know like somewhere out there there's someone else who spends twice as much time on the socials as you but they're happy because they achieving their goals right so like why are you why is it that you're focusing on lowering the thing that you think you don't want instead of increasing the thing that you actually do want and then we we like we talked about that for like almost an hour and we got around to well he wants to be like doing some research stuff but he hasn't you know made a study plan he hasn't and his initial plan was oh I'm going to read this whole textbook in a week and that's that's not possible it's a thick dense textbook so you got to partition the thing so you know he it's so interesting when you lay it all out it turns out that this guy has the thing he wants to do has like and you know if you split him into two people imagine that there like the the client and the worker right like the CL no that's client is not the right word but like split him into two people one person asking the other person to do a job right like the manager and the worker the manager is giving these really vague you know requests like unreasonable timelines no no unclear what needs to be done what needs to be shipped or whatever just get work done and the worker is like [ __ ] this [ __ ] you know like I'm just gonna goof off and watch play video games or whatever because there's the the gradient of work to be done is just so out of whack that they're not going to do it so you you you have to respect that there's some part of you within you that will not accept shitty management right so people are shitty bosses of themselves and they you know guess guess some funny territory here where people might might be like oh yeah you know like bad workplace environments are horrible my boss sucks my this whatever and like how are you managing your own home your own head and your own whatever and people inherit the talk from their parents from their teachers from their whatever it's like you got to work harder you got to do more you got to like it's very it's nebulous vague and and so I always ask people and I ask my friends uh what are you really trying to accomplish why what is the most like sensible reasonable interesting exciting way to do it um and like if you if you really want the thing and the path to getting there makes sense and you can see your progress towards the thing and video games do this really well which is why video games are so fun to play you have some Mission you have some objective and like you know you know how much xp you're going to get from each monster you kill you get the goal you get the skill points it's very clear they've the the game has done the hard work of project managing your tasks for you so you go in there and you have a good manager in the game and is shiny and colorful and whatever but like you can do the same in your own life with your own projects you know so it's like if you're practicing guitar or whatever like how much are you practicing what specific thing are you trying to do what prog what's the reward like what song do you want to be able to play and when you make that progress progress feels good and what's interesting is that I think people don't even feel that they deserve the right to feel good making progress on their work that's the real painful thing they they feel that work should be miserable and difficult Puritan work ethic yes and that's what really and they have that which is like imagine a boss saying oh you're all going to have to grind grind every weekend every night and the employees like yeah sure you know and then they just the heart's not in it and then so then you get this confli this this um just this D this the person becomes unintegrated they get split selves and you have these phrases like Revenge bedtime procrastination where basically like your your you know and so it's your prefrontal cortex that's making all the plans it's like the manager it's a shitty guy it's like you know um in law of the Rings there's King theodan and then there's the Worm tongue Whispering poison in his ear it's like a lot of people's prefrontal cortex is Worm tongue and it's like you know you you you got to do more this you got to this not okay that kind of thing and it's it's when you see is that and then you're like and I have this whole analogy with oh Gandalf is a friend who sees what's Best in you and encourages you to grasp your sword of of uh agency and do what you actually want to do and um yeah so when people's like and when you get tired like your your your prefrontal CeX shuts down it's like the boss leaves the office and then what people going do they're going to goof off they're like we've been grinding on this thing that doesn't make any sense but let's just you know like we need to have fun too so we're going to and at that point you feel like your you're you're burnt out you're tired and you feel you have no choice but to like go along with the thing and next thing you know you're an AB Bender it's 3:00 a.m. you've been playing like and then and then you feel bad about that and then you feel bad about that and then and you justify I should be harsher on myself and then it's a it's a the only solution the only solution is to grip things more tightly yeah I um I wrote this essay yesterday and uh I actually spoke it at a live show last night so this this might be interesting to you I wrote I think type A people have a type B problem and type B people have a type a problem insecure overachievers need to learn how to chill out and relax and lazy people need to learn how to work harder and be disciplined given that you subscribe to me I'm going to guess that you're probably type A some version of a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity as Andrew Wilkinson says yeah I have a tweet like that and it's um ghoul for my prickly friends and prickles for my gooey friends and there's a whole there's a whole bunch of things like that which just like yeah everybody over extends the Moree that they are good at and again it's like coping mechanisms right and it's like um in like DND and video games it's this concept of a glass Cannon which is like a character who can do a lot of damage but like dies very easily and you think oh why is he like that and it's like oh he's because he dies very easily he has learned to do a lot of damage and so he takes pride in that and that his identity becomes tied up in that and it's just you know it's that yeah H the yeah it's it's a lot and I you know if so you asked for the tldr and I went on this long rambly cir circular rent but I would say at the heart of everything you have to really step back and observe the patterns non-judgmentally right like you because and you know you have to ask like I I recommend really abstract questions like uh how might this look if it's easy or how might it look if it's done skillfully and beauti Y without anger without you know like um you one of my favorite things um in the book easy way to quit smoking by alen car they insist that you keep smoking as you read the book and it's like why would they do that right it's because part of the the cycle of addiction and this is true for all addiction so and procrastination can be a kind of addiction um part of what happens with the smoker who wants to who kind of wants to quit but is struggling to and then he tries to quit but he's like half-hearted about it and then eventually he lights up again and then he feels guilty and shamed that he did that and that is a high arousal emotion he gets stressed and he wants to smoke more so there's that Loop and then there's like The Meta Loop that keeps the loop going harder and when the book says I want you to keep smoking you're like am I being punked right because you assume that you're supposed to not and that just creates this tension that makes it difficult to mess with the process so same with like budgeting software or even diets and this the the good ones say uh don't change you're spending just track it don't change your like food habits this the first month just track it just just see what you're doing and like don't judge just observe and like when people are able to comfortably just observe what is happening there are all there like breathing room that opens up and you're like oh maybe I don't have to play video games until 3:00 a.m. in the morning and so yeah and I I had an issue with like schedules as a child like with school timet taes and stuff like I found it very like stressful and traumatic and the idea of even using opening up Google Calendar and putting I'm going to do this work today this work at this point whatever I hated that and because I felt like I was always dishonest and when I put whatever I would get excited and fill in with lots of stuff and then I would miss it and then I feel bad and then the cycle continues and what someone suggested that really worked for me was only schedule the fun stuff which again it sounds immoral it sounds like ah gas you know like it's a it violates the puritanical thing right what do you mean schedule the fun stuff but if you say I'm going to play 1 hour of video games every evening you no longer feel this anxious grabby I might not get to play tomorrow so I better Play 3 hours tonight and then you don't sleep and then you know your sleep gets [ __ ] and then everything spirals worse and worse so if you begin with the premise that to to do your best work you have to be emotionally well morale has to be good again which like people don't don't want to admit until it gets so bad that it's horrific and then they don't even get to enjoy then the only rest they get is that they fall sick and then it's like what kind of leisure or Recreation is that like you're just lying in b you don't get to go and see things you don't get to hang out with your friends right so you schedule the good stuff and then you will get you know like nobody wants to be on a beach vacation for like years you know like people feel I would like to sitay at the beach for a year no you wouldn't like three weeks maybe two or three months is about as long as anyone would really enjoy a Beach vacation most people I guess uh before you start to go ah you know what what am I doing same for like you know there there's only like if you were tasked with eating as much chocolate cake as you could You' probably eat I don't know somewhere between half a cake to one cake or something whatever your number is but you would eat so the people who when tasked to have pleasure they tend to contain it reasonably but when they've been suppressed away from pleasure that's when they eat three cakes and then they feel like horrible and they want to throw up and then and then next morning they're like I'm never going to eat cakes again like you know it's it's it's um yo-yo extremes and it's just chaot it's just bad so you want to dampen that extreme yo-yo stuff you want to like schedule the fun and the pleasure and I remember so clearly when I was working and I was like 25 and I felt I don't have the right to have fun I have like overdue work I don't have the right to one of the saddest days of my life was I think 2015 or 2016 the New Year's Day my wife was like in both me and my wife were at home and I was anxiously trying to get work done because I had gotten myself into such a spiral of self-loathing and whatever that I'm not doing enough work that my poor wife was sitting in the living room by herself while I was working and I can't even tell you what I was working on I don't remember you know it's it's how so I was I'm like never again you know like like prioritize what's important to you you are a human being who deserves love and space and and it's not even even if you don't think you deserve it like that's what good performance requires you know I hope you get to the point where you feel that you deserve it but you know even you know like and sometimes I say like LeBron James slept like 12 hours a night and like freaking God Almighty took a day off on Sunday right so you know schedule your breaks and like yeah cultures like historic cultures have like the Sabbath and you're supposed to respect the Sab of because that's how you decompress yeah well it's wild I think about sometimes me and my friends reinvent [ __ ] that was literally with us from the beginning of time like you know you know what I've really enjoyed doing really enjoyed taking like one two days a week and just not you like not working quite so hard you go hey guy that's called a weekend like it's [ __ ] baked into your calendar look Visa dude I appreciate the hell out of you I love your work I love your writing where should people go they want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing uh the most interesting stuff that's happening for me right now is on my substack so if you go to visagan v. substack sub St but follow both I guess you can just Google me v i s a k a n v you get my personal website that has links to my YouTube channel and and everything else dude I appreciate you thank you thank you so much for having me this is great thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode there is something else you will absolutely love right here go on give it a tap