This is an “aggregate” blogpost where I dump stuff from my tweets and notes.
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What do I mean by long game? One way of thinking about it is to think backwards from the life you want to lead.
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Change is possible. it will seem improbable until it becomes inevitable. persist. figure out what matters. articulate your talking points. when people resist, argue & misunderstand you, write it down. account for their misunderstandings in your arguments. keep records. persist.
most people typically expect you to give up or go away after a bit of resistance, a bit of struggle, a bit of tedious time-wasting nonsense. don’t give up. play the long game. strategize. recruit allies. revisit your fundamental principles. review. repeat. persist. triumph.
Think long term. work backwards from the outcome you want. ask yourself, what needs to happen in order for this to change? what is the best and most powerful thing I can do to influence that outcome? How do I increase the amount of influence I have over that outcome?
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On sounding confident:
the real long-game power move is
- don’t worry too much about how you sound
- focus on knowing your material inside out
- talk to lots of people
- be willing to stutter and stumble
- fail 100x times
real confidence is getting back up after you fail because you’re going to do better.
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Part of the challenge of playing a long game is you have to develop mechanisms for dealing with the reality that there will always be newcomers who encounter you for the first time, with no context, who will ask questions that you’ve answered 100 times before.
If you’re going to play the long game, every time someone asks you a question you should write it down, and use that to build a “curriculum”.
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“I’m generally bad at sticking to some months-long routine. historically, I tend to work in bursts, that often tend to be like… 2-3 weeks of manic intensity. The real game for me is to maintain a list of my interests, my projects, and to set up those things in such a way that my future self can interface with them well. So for me it’s not about routine… I have to design my creative pursuits to survive routine failure.
Every time you feel a creative impulse or urge, do something about it, write it down, make the thing (or even just a shitty draft of the thing), then index it – connect it to your existing body of work. over time the body of work grows. Congratulations, you’re a creative person!
Do this for a few years, and maybe read a few biographies of creative people, etc, and you start to develop a bird’s eye view of yourself. Y’know, Jung took 16 years to write The Red Book, intermittently, starting at age 38. Maybe your creative life hasn’t even “started” yet.
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i’ve started to encounter people talking about me like I was born micro-famous. 😂
I’m the minority son of a garbage collector, I never went to college. I don’t think I’ve done any devil’s bargain stunt bullshit. I’m just an earnest nerd publishing and replying for 20+ years.
If you look at my volume of output vs my follower count, I actually have one of the worst tweet-to-follower-conversion rates amongst people in the 20k range. Something like 5 tweets for 1 follow. Hardly anybody gave a shit about me for the first 15+ years I was extremely online
I’m not looking for sympathy or pity or praise or anything of the sort – I am very happy and comfortable with the way my life is, and the decisions I have made, and so on. I’m just sharing this for people who continue to misunderstand how the game works
I now make friends easier than ever before because I have social status, yes. But I accumulated that status by being extremely earnest and hardworking and being as kind and supportive to strangers as I possibly could. Go look at my YouTube channel rn. (Comment about how I’m putting in a crazy amount of effort relative to the current level of success)
year 1: “this guy is dumb for putting in all this effort for no reward, nobody is even liking or sharing his content. sad”
year 2: “he’s still at it? what an idiot. he must have issues”
year 15: “well ofc it’s easy for him to make friends, he has all this status and influence”
many of my videos – which take substantial time to make – have less than 100 views, 0 comments. lots of people would give up seeing this lack of engagement. I won’t. and then eventually they’ll be like “yea but he’s a famous youtuber so of course people watch his videos”
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(original thread) hehe; while I’m a marketing guy, I am not interested in people delegating decisions to me and I have no interest in automating anything for anybody’s speedy delight and convenience. no darling, up in this mf we’re going to do things the slow and gruelling way. 50 year long game
one of the first things “they” teach you in “marketing school” (I’m making this up, but you do pick it up by osmosis) is to promise timelines. Promise people they will be enlightened in 3 weeks, 6 pack abs in 3 months. Sorry, I will never do that. 5 year long games minimum
This means that my following is something like 5% of what it could be. If you know, you know. I could be on par with some of the larger 500k audience folks on here, I know what to tweet to get that. But it’s a path straight to mediocrity (sorry). I won’t teach anyone that either
Once you start thinking in terms of “5yr long games” you unshackle yourself from the chaotic speed demon circuit and you can float freely. You make less money in the short run but you develop a truer independence in the long run. At least, that’s what I believe
relevant: attention metrics
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