(2020nov5 thread) I’m not a fan of divvying people up arbitrarily into winners and losers – one should never be gleeful about this – but I do have a subconscious subroutine that does it for me, and it’s very useful mental machinery, even accounting for some small % of error rate (5-10%?)
I am being sincere with my explicit utterances when I say: it is good to be kind, be gentle, be soft, be nourishing, be supportive. I mean every one of those things. And in my experience, as a guy: to sustainably do those things, you have to be sensitive, smart and strong, and you have to win.
In finite/infinite terms: One shouldn’t be entirely obsessed with winning to the point where it consumes you like an addiction. the point is to keep playing. but you do have to win in order to keep playing. you can’t keep losing indefinitely.
“wait, winning? win at what?”
[gestures around] everything. I mean this in the broadest sense. it ranges from little things like “doing what you want” to big things like “living in accordance with your values”. it’s very contextual and every person has 100s of things going on. Part of why i’m vague here is because I don’t particularly subscribe to any 1 ideology or aesthetic. there are as many ways to win as there are different kinds of music genres or art styles. You get to decide and define for yourself what winning means to you. (Monarch thread)
There are children of billionaires who are absolute failsons, dyed-in-the-wool losers.
There are people born in poverty who will sadly never be able to rise above it because of systemic factors, and yet in tiny little ways they are winners.
yes I am channeling Invictus here
you could build a worldview from this sort of thing… good times weak men blah blah. I’m not really interested in that sort of grandiosity. What I try to do is to win at games I personally deem worthy, and to associate with winners that I respect and admire.
I DON’T think that non-winners are “lesser” people, or that they deserve scorn, or pity, or anything of the sort. nor do I think that winners should be glorified and pedestalized. all of those things I think are actually distractions from the real thing
I DO think that winning gives you resources – attention, money, social capital, etc – that you can then subsequently choose to direct towards things that you deem good and worthy. as patio11 once said (I paraphrase) every dollar spent is a vote for how you want the world to be
I won’t be making a habit of talking about this stuff explicitly, because I think it’s something best conveyed implicitly 95% of the time. otherwise it can become a sort of weird farce. I don’t actively evaluate “how can I win?!?!” in every interaction – I just live my life
but I win, and I talk about it openly because I promised my younger self that I would, because nobody else said these things to me. I taught myself how to do it. You can probably do too. Winning feels good. You can use your wins to help and serve others, that they might win too
I don’t think anybody is ever 100% a loser all the way through. everyone has some assets, some small victories, some experience, something. think of yourself as inheriting a city, or a company, or a sports team, etc that’s largely dysfunctional
the first thing to do is to take an inventory of everything. you want to face the full reality of who you are. your successes and failures, your assets and liabilities. what have been the mistakes you’ve made in life? list them out; literally write them down
from here on it’s basically a video game, but the challenge is that you have to always be as clearly honest with yourself as you can. how can you repeat the successes? how can you diminish the failures? what are the contexts in which the failures happen, how do you avoid them?
the early stages of transition are the hardest, because early progress will often force you to face your own incompetence more starkly than if you chose to try to be ignorant of them. like how going for a jog when you’re unfit *hurts* a lot more than eating junk and watching TV
there isn’t any globally correct method for how to approach this. it really is “choose your own adventure”. do you want to start with more/bigger wins, or do you want to start by diminishing your fails/losses? important: do NOT obsess about researching this. choose, & act
the most foundational elements of this can feel silly to state out loud, but some people might have to do this: – you have to believe that winning is POSSIBLE – you have to believe that losers *can* BECOME winners, through the magic of incremental growth and change, and framing
if you don’t currently believe these things, or your belief in these things is kinda flimsy, I recommend psyops-ing yourself to strengthen these beliefs. I have a whole database of things that reaffirm my most powerful beliefs, it’s a thing winners do.
I could go on and on and on. My ebook is titled FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD, but you could just as easily read it as “HOW TO WIN”. (I deliberately avoided that sort of title, because it selects for a kind of audience that I do not want)
so with all of that in mind, and with utmost love and support:
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(2021may30 thread) One of the worst things I did in my late teens was to allow self-loathing cowards to distract me from my goals with their tedious arguments about why I would regret having goals. I don’t regret a single thing I worked on, including every single thing that didn’t work out. My only regret is that I wasted time talking with losers.
These are strong words coming from me, but I mean them in a rather clinical rather than pejorative sense. cowards and losers are people too, deserving of basic respect and dignity like all people. But I don’t owe them my time and energy.
I even can think of at least a couple of dudes who, if they had simply taken the time and energy that they spent insulting other people, and directed that towards literally any pursuit, they would have likely succeeded. But that’s a huge If. like, “if it snows in Singapore…”
Looking back the strangest thing about it all is that… it’s all just allowed to happen. I mean, yeah, there are no rules. People can just say whatever they want and live however they like. I realize now that I could’ve actually ignored any of them at any moment, and I didn’t.
It’s an interestingly common thing, isn’t it? I hear this sort of thing from people all the time too. “I didn’t realize I could just break up with them.” “I didn’t realize I could just quit my job.” “I didn’t realize I can just block/mute/ignore.”
Sometimes there are some things that are extremely costly to change, but there’s also often a huge range of things that you CAN actually change, things that you may not have tried. You can change your sleep, your physical activity, your friends, your story, your self-image.
Someone DM’d me something earlier like “do you have any counterargument for the red pill worldview” and my answer was “lol I wouldn’t bother arguing in the first place”. You can just choose not to get involved!
Like, the way I live my life is my counterargument. I don’t have to set aside my precious time on this earth to debate some tedious shithead about his shitty worldview. I rather spend time and energy building relationships with wonderful, nourishing, kind, supportive people.
There’s this interesting class of person who invests a remarkable amount of effort into telling everybody else that nothing is worth doing. The volunteer corps of the status quo. When they trap you in their pincers, it’s easy to get ensnared in hours of arguments.
But now I’ve had some time and space to reflect, I’m like, wait a fkn minute. Why does inaction need defending? Like, if what I’m doing is pointless, I’m going to find out on my own, right? why does this “friend” need to Do This Tremendous Service of saving me from myself?
Because it was never about me. it was about them. they needed to limit and contain me to keep me from achieving anything, because otherwise they would have to face the uncomfortable fact that they’ve been limiting themselves all this while, for no reason. cowards. losers.
And it took me a long time to admit that I was friends with cowards and losers, because I didn’t want to believe that I was the sort of idiot who’d be friends with other idiots. My god, we were all idiots in one big idiotjerk. I got out. They’re still holding each other back.
Or, you could say, “they’re still holding each other”. there is an intimacy to codependency. It’s safe. Cosy. And familiar. Where nobody will ever do anything dangerous or scary or uncomfortable. The crabs in the bucket ~say~ they hate each other but eventually you have to see…
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(2025may21) I used to think of myself as a loser. I was determined to stop being a loser, then help other losers like myself. this turned out to be more complicated than I expected, bc even if you filter out those who don’t wna change, the remaining group contains a lot of internal conflict
now, everyone is internally conflicted to some degree, and you should probably be sus of anyone who presents themselves as perfectly unconflicted. but there are degrees of conflict, from productive to unproductive and worse
the challenge of trying to help someone who is internally conflicted is you can’t really know if you picked the winning side. some people who come to you for help on day 1 will make you the villain of their life on day 2 and that’s truly tiresome to deal with
this got me reevaluating my original premise. I wanted to help people like myself, but i would never lash out at someone who offered to help me with something I asked for help with. so i found myself refining my parameters…