Word Vomit is when I write without editing. Don’t bother reading.
I have been falling in love with Mastery by Robert Greene. It is a book that I wish I had written, no lie. I shredded Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers to bits inside my head when I read it, and I felt an urgent need to develop a clearer sense of what exactly all these successful people were doing. I read about the 10,000 hour rule, but I was curious to know- how exactly do you figure out what your Life’s Task is, how do you figure out what it is that excites you that much? I mentally promised myself to research this to the best of my ability- to find peers and mentors that transcended space and time, to find a blueprint for success. It almost felt like a divine sign when I discovered (on Reddit) that Robert Greene was writing a new book- I had already been head-over-heels for The 48 Laws of Power and the 50th Law, and I was craving a broader picture of success. I needed inspiration, I needed a model to follow that I personally related to and felt an emotional resonance with.
So here I have the book in front of me and I have been reading it with much intensity. There’s nothing in it that I’ve never heard before, but I love the way Greene expresses his thoughts- it almost feels like we’re cut from the same cloth, we’re interested in the same things. (I notice slight differences, of course- Greene is less of an activist, he’s less of a doer, he seems thoroughly content to chronicle everything as beautifully as he can without getting personally involved. Greene is the quintessential advisor, the trusted sage in an era of would-be Kings.)
I haven’t finished the book yet, but I feel like I’ve read enough to start thinking about how to apply the insights and wisdom to my own life. It is now blindingly clear to me that writing is my passion, my Life’s Task. (Well, perhaps you could say that my Life’s Task is to spread ideas and perspectives, to curate content and inspire others, to lead forth and educate, blah-blah-blah, but writing is clearly the vehicle that I should use, considering my natural affinity and love for words.)
So, considering my personal journey in life. I read a lot of books when I was growing up, and am convinced that this was the primary source of my intellectual development. Reading books taught me how to think, and how to express myself. How to communicate, how to persuade, and how to perceive, even. I will forever be indebted to the printing press and everything about humanity and happenstance that has lead to the availability of books in my world. Thank you, everybody.
I had maybe 10 years of reading, but it was notably non-deliberate. I didn’t read because I thought it was cool, or I had some grand ulterior motive or agenda, I read because I enjoyed reading. It was play for me, and to a large extent, it still is. To revel in words, to participate in the dance of another’s thoughts, this has always been a primal joy for me. Lately I have been making an attempt to rediscover the raw pleasure of the experience, and I think I have been quite successful at it. Reading is a lifelong pursuit and addiction for me, and I don’t want it to be any other way. I never want to tire of reading.
Academia wasn’t a great fit for me. I don’t want to blame institutions too much- they serve their purpose, they are useful, they are good, yes. I just never developed the necessary skill-set to make the most of the opportunities I had in front of me. I didn’t even recognise them as opportunities at the time- they seemed like setbacks, troublesome problems to be avoided as much as possible. The only thing I really developed was the ability to shirk my responsibilities and obligations- something which still lingers with me today as a poisonous habit. I would like to eradicate it, I would like to be a responsible man who honours his words and performs his obligations dutifully. This is a work in progress for me, and I am immensely grateful to everybody who tolerates me despite my shortcomings (especially my girlfriend and my close friends, who are often victims of my incompetence.)
I completed secondary school and JC by skiving as much as possible. I repeated a year in JC. I slept through most lectures, skipped school whenever possible and did as little homework as I possibly could. It is interesting to consider that my teachers weren’t nearly as frustrated with me as they perhaps should’ve been- though on further thought, that’s a very egocentric perspective; a teacher should choose, for her own sanity, not to get overly invested in the future of an uncommitted and lazy student. She has enough rubbish to deal with just by being a part of the frustrating bureaucracy that is the industrial-era education system, and the maddeningly thankless job that teaching can be.
Many teachers did express their disappointment with my work ethic. I have been told more than a few times that I could’ve been so much more if I had only put in the effort. For the longest time, I wore this as a badge of honour. On hindsight, this was a pointless exercise in superficial rebellion- what Nassim Taleb would describe as a “cosmetic defiance of authority”. As I reconsider the narrative of my past, I think my refusal to study or do my homework was significantly a manifestation of my own insecurity. I was more interested in being smart than in being hardworking, and I was afraid of what I’d learn about my own incompetence if I started caring about my work. Better to be lazy than stupid, I thought. Better to be uninterested than incompetent.
I can’t reduce my academic experience to just that, though. That’s an oversimplification, a consequence of a sort of bias we all have to construct linear narratives with lucid plots. There were definitely times where I sat down and thought to myself, “Dude, you really have to get your act together and start studying hard for your own sake.” I remember that there was a period of time after retaining in JC1 where I set out to get on the Honour Roll, to try and gain some legitimacy for my inflated sense of self-worth. This was a fruitless endeavour. I think I went about it the wrong way.
To say “I didn’t want it badly enough,” or “I wanted it for the wrong reasons,” both feel overly simplistic as explanations. I think the problem might have been a little more “concrete” than that- I simply didn’t possess the necessary skill-set for navigating the circumstances I was in, and I would quickly get frustrated and give up. I was the proverbial fish trying to climb a tree. I didn’t have the necessary habits in place to get really good at my work, and I didn’t know how to properly build them.
(“How to build a habit” is incredibly important knowledge that we should all be taught on. This will be a part of my self-schooling. How do you deliberately build a habit that you decide is important and meaningful? Margaret Thatcher’s quote comes to mind- watch your thoughts, they become actions, habits, your legacy/destiny, etc. That’s a really beautifully simple idea, but how much time and energy do we actually devote to it?
How many of us actually sit and reflect on our own thoughts, our own habits, on where we are headed in our lives? I didn’t bother with this very much- a teenager would usually tell you that he had better things to do. I did have a few of those moments from time to time, and they were often awfully poignant, and rather depressing. Sometimes my parents or my friends would shake me up and put me in my place, and I would see myself for what I was. This never lasted very long, probably because of cognitive dissonance. It’s painful to be aware of your own failings, and the impulse tends to be, where possible, to get rid of that awareness. I imagine a daily habit of reflection and contemplation would have had a disproportionately significant effect on my academic endeavours, and my quality of life in general. I tend to forget how troubled I was all the time back then, living in constant worry about undone work. I actually would lose my appetite because of the fear I had for the repercussions of undone homework, and this was a source of emotional distress for me in my adolescence.
It is interesting as I write this to consider how I have the impulse to say “I was stupid and unenlightened then.” Yes, I was, a lot of the time, but not always. Sometimes I was clearly aware of how stupid I was being, how incompetent I was at navigating the situation I was in, how pathetic I was. But this almost never translated into significant change- my attempts to get fitter fizzled, my attempts to get more responsible fizzled, my attempts to do my homework fizzled, and I never had the persistence to keep pushing against what appeared to be a brick wall. In those areas, it appears that I developed quite a sad habit of giving up.
Well, that was a rather sad thought to explore. But there is a silver lining in there- having been through all of that was necessary for me to arrive at my present state. (I’m reminded of Guruka Singh’s assertion that God created you perfect the way you are, and everybody is perfect at all times… I’m not religious, and of course, such an idea is easily disputed because absolute, abstract perfection does not exist, but there is something to be said about a kind of calm and graceful acceptance that subsequently leads to more sustainable, desirable action.)
What is exceptionally sad and heart-rendering for me, now that I think about it, is to think about how there must be many students alive right now, going through the education system right now, feeling exactly as I did back then. Nothing anybody ever said to me ever seemed to be particularly helpful at the time (although some of their words continue to resonate with me to this day, and may have borne fruit since, or may bear fruit in the future). I wonder if I can help them. I wonder if my experiences and thoughts can be useful to them, and if I can help them get through their existential suffering better than I got through mine on my own. (Of course, you could say that ultimately everybody deals with their issues themselves, but at the opposite end of the spectrum, no man is an island, and our thoughts and ideas and perspectives are always a consequence of what we are exposed to.) I wonder if I could say or do anything that would be of help to those kids going through what I went through. That would be meaningful to me.
That was a minor digression- back to the idea of a silver lining. Today I believe I am at a crossroads (aren’t we always? LOL. So dramatic)
I just stopped to take a piss, and as I was in the process of contemplative urination (hur hur) I thought about what I’m doing. (Not the pissing lah, the writing.) It occurs to me that if I am successful, or unsuccessful, on hindsight I will be able to choose from a wide range of possible explanations. If I am successful, it is because I have reached a crossroads in my life and picked the higher path. There was a critical mass, a threshold moment of insight where suddenly everything clicked and made sense and I know my life’s calling and I know what I must do. Or… it could also be that I had finally eliminated my sources of distraction (curse you, Internet and your endless supply of exciting content!) If I am unsuccessful, it might be because I thought too highly of myself, I committed myself to something beyond my capabilities, I tried to do something that I wasn’t capable of. Or maybe I just wasn’t motivated enough, or maybe I was motivated by the wrong reasons.
Do you see what I’m getting at? Things go right and things go wrong and our attempts to explain them are heavily modified and coloured by our own selfish interests. I like to think of the self as a collective rather than a single distinct entity (out of one, many!), so chances are, whichever voice in my head has the most political sway or power will get to dominate the discourse on why I was successful or unsuccessful. I think this adequately explains why so many people give different explanations for the same phenomena- our explanations tell us more about ourselves than they tell us about the actual phenomena, which we actually know pathetically little about. (I just caught myself thinking “I hope Nassim Taleb is proud of me for saying that. Haiyergh.)
So the point is, it’s largely pointless to talk about why things happen the way they do. “Things happen for a reason” is also an overly simplistic way of doing things. (We can always find a reason that suits our interests. Our minds are such selfish, manipulative pricks!)
Like that then how? How like that? I find myself thinking of Tim Harford’s Adapt, and The God Complex. (It’s a fantastic book, and I recommend it to everybody.) The God Complex is not to be confused with The God Delusion, which is Richard Dawkins’ criticism of religion. (Another great read, but not relevant to our present train of thought.) The God Complex is a consequence of our selfish manipulative prick minds- it’s when we pretend to know what we’re talking about, or why something happened, or how something works, when the truth is that things are almost always way too complex for us to actually comprehend. The God Complex is a fatal conceit (Ah, Hayek’s Fatal Conceit, about the flaws of centralized economic planning- is an example of The God Complex. So too is Jane Jacobs’ The Death And Life Of Great American Cities, which describes how urban planners suffer from The God Complex. Jacobs must have been a strong influence on Tim Harford, I remember him quoting her in his book The Logic Of Life. Interesting how these ideas develop over the years).
BASICALLY (semi-sorry for that rant, but not really- you don’t have any business reading this anyway, this wasn’t designed for your consumption, but I do realize that I could have written it better, and maybe I shall in the future, feel free to leave comments), things are too complex for us to understand. (This is also expressed beautifully by Taleb’s Black Swan… I can’t wait to read Anti-Fragile, which is the next book I’m going to devour after Greene’s Mastery)…
BASICALLY… (lol) things are too complex for us to understand. We SHOULD study our inevitable explanations of how things happen- but more so we can understand OURSELVES rather than the phenomena we’re trying to explain…
BASICALLY (LOLOLOL) the best way to understand things appears to be linked to the scientific method- through speculation and the TESTING OF HYPOTHESES. (most important) Only through rigorous testing can any insight be truly valid- or at least relatively more valid than cheapskate “I also have” opinions.
So this entire pursuit in a way- this practice of writing, and this attempt to diverge from the beaten path of a University education (rather than diverging within the path, I’d like to avoid it altogether and beat through the thick undergrowth where I don’t really see anybody else going, at least not in my personal life), should be the testing of a hypothesis. Yes, I know, it’s also a kind of retaliatory thing- sour grapes, etc- but after the dust has cleared, and after thinking about it for months, ultimately I have to go with my deepest gut feeling that there’s some magical, powerful source of insight and value to be gained by venturing off the beaten path, but nobody seems to be doing it. Greene wrote about how Wilbur Wright experienced a strange sensation that convinced him that him and his brother, despite being mere bicycle-makers, could somehow overtake everybody who had a head-start over them in the race to develop a functional airplane. The others had impressive degrees, technical expertise and thousands and thousands of dollars of funding, while all they had was their own ingenuity, unique perspective and limited resources from the profits of selling bicycles.
I want to be Wilbur Wright.