Understand that your heroes are human, too, and that they must have compromised on some aspects of their personality to reach the heights you consider valuable.
As humans they are, they are not perfect. They must not be perfect. Everyone has finite time and energy, so they have refocused that energy into their craft, likely sacrificing growth in other areas.
A letter to my fellow readers,
For most of this year, I've not posted anything here.
I've wandered about what I want to do, what I want to become. Did I lose my identity this time?
I’ve deleted WhatsApp from my personal smartphone. I’m not saying I’m not using it anymore; I’m just saying I’ll now use it when I decide to, via WhatsApp Web, on both my smartphone and computer. I’ll give it a batched usage as I do with emails and other social media. Let’s break down why I took that decision.
The base premise: I’m very protective of my time and attention, and I have a weakness of getting hooked up in social media features (the kind of things Nir Eyal wrote in his book Hooked).
We have to be self-aware of our language because the words we utter end up being a reflection (as well as a reinforcement) of our beliefs. Language is the great window of our mindset, for both looking inwards and projecting outwards.
The other day, I talked to an aspiring entrepreneur friend, but later in the conversation, we started talking about removing the focus on unimportant stuff. He mentioned that we should focus on landing a managerial role in BigCo. It got me thinking, "That’s a Freudian slip of his true beliefs."
A while ago, I read an excellent article from Paul Graham called Keep Your Identity Small, and from a while ago, I wanted to expand on that.
Let's start by stating that Identity is a core component of your life. Your Mindset is what makes or breaks your life. How you decide to interpret things, as well as how you choose to act on them, composes the "ruleset" of your Mindset, your default programming, so to speak. It is the origin of your Personality.
For weeks I’ve been disgusted by the recent AI developments, despite how I like how AI can improve much of our lives. Recently I cleared up my feelings about it.
What sickens me about recent GPT-like developments is how some company owners take shortcuts in marketing content generation. If I’m a customer, I’ll feel treated like cattle and stop being a customer immediately. What infuriates me is not the shortcut in marketing copywriting itself but the possibility and the incentive to take other shortcuts that will compromise product quality. Bro-marketers say people don’t care, but I’m no person then. I do care. The temptation is just too great to ignore, and I cannot rely on the mind-strength of others to resist it.
Happy New Year 2023 everyone! Here I come with a controversial short one. New Year's resolutions are mostly useless.
Real winners know that numbered years and named days¹ are a social construct to dance with everyone, so to speak. Being mixed in everyone’s habits and mediocrity mindset, leads to an unrewarding, uneventful life. I cannot stress this enough.
You may have seen companies claim in their marketing material that they abide by a set of values; such values might look like: Kindness, Trustworthiness, and Listeners. Somehow, they disappoint you because deep within, you know they are operating under another set of values, or I’d dare to say anti-values.
Operating under a set of unidentified anti-values is a great way to destroy the goodwill built with customers and business partners and employee loyalty.