(og thread) When I was a teenager, the dominant criticism my closest friends had of me was that I was too arrogant, and they were right. I was too caustic, abrasive, eager to nitpick, quick to criticize, and I was way too certain of myself. I spent my entire 20s trying to correct for this.
The social niceties stuff were relatively trivial for me to address. learning to be gracious, patient, I could manage all of that. But “too certain of oneself” goes order of magnitudes deeper. It goes into philosophical territory about risk, certainty, the nature of knowledge.
I very seriously experimented with beliefs like “almost everything I know is wrong to a degree I do not understand”, “my mental models are contaminated beyond repair”, “I have been indoctrinated and need to be deradicalized”, I subjected myself and my mind to radical rewrites.
Over 8+ years I wrote over 800,000 words of introspective journaling, investigating my own mind, investigating the investigator. I read & talked to thousands of people from around the world to seek out different ways of thinking, seeing, being, believing, knowing, understanding.
I tried to think of myself as a robot that needed debugging. I actually made substantial progress with that I tried to think of myself as a garden that needed tending. I made substantial progress with that I tried not to think of myself at all, and I (felt like I) transcended progress itself.
I experimented with trying really hard, and I experimented with not trying at all I experimented with scheduling and calendaring my life, and I experimented with throwing everything to the wind I questioned everything several times over, and I questioned nothing.
And… at the end of it all… in the middle of it all… I attained a level of calm clarity that, ironically, gave me even more of an aura of “certain of himself” than ever before I know how it looks, I know how it sounds but my priority is to live and speak honestly.
it’s not that I don’t make mistakes. it’s not that I don’t get things wrong. I do! but I am like a musician who’s skilled at improvising – I recover from my mistakes gracefully, I work them into my playing what troubles some people is that I am insufficiently self-deprecating.
and I am not a “natural” at this – this skill is something I’ve picked up from a 15+ years of practice and study, the way a skilled musician would and I talk about it openly because when I was a kid I wished someone would tell me this stuff, and nobody did, not quite
I can return now to my friends’ original criticism and discern what they were trying to say, that they couldn’t quite articulate properly. there are many different latent messages encoded in a statement like “you are too certain of yourself”
1. your frames are too rigid → this is something you can fix by learning to be more flexible with your frames 2. you are too confident → this conflates bluster and bravado (bad) with the casual, sleepy ease of having deep knowledge
(people often think of confidence as bluster and bravado, loud and obnoxious. that’s often actually insecurity. the good stuff is often really quiet and natural: the casual, almost sleepy ease that comes from knowing your stuff really well)
I have rebuilt myself from scratch in the absolute wilderness, in total isolation, in the dark night of the soul
twice
having done it before, I know I can do it again
the result is a kind of fearlessness that attracts some people and repels others
¯_(ツ)_/¯
recent meditation has made me realize that I have been trying to mask this, trying to suppress this, to be polite. to be civil. to not be arrogant. to not intimidate and scare people. but this is dishonest of me, and I want to live an honest life.
btw, here are some of the things that my friends were telling me I was cocky and arrogant about: 1. that I was going to marry my first girlfriend (I did) 2. that I was going to build an international audience (I did)
3. that I was going to make a decent living without going to university (I do) 4. that university professors would want to hang out with me, an autodidact (they do) 5. that I was going to be hired for somebody who respected my idiosyncrasies, without a resume (I was)
6. that I would have a successful business and be invited to speak/lecture at universities (done that) 7. that my band would play at the esplanade powerhouse stage, despite not being great musicians (we did) 8. that I would be the #1 search result for my first name (pretty much?)
9. that I would write and publish books that hundreds of people would want to buy and read (yep) I could go on. Looking back, I think the right frame is: they witnessed me disregard their internalized shared limiting beliefs, and saw this as a status violation on my part
looking back, I’m not sad that they were wrong about me I’m sad that I allowed them being wrong about me to let me be wrong about myself I definitely allowed their thinking to contaminate mine hanging out with unambitious people definitely dimmed my own ambition never again
also, they never admitted to being unambitious – a thing that I might’ve been angry/mad about a few years ago, but now kinda chuckle about. it’s absolutely fine to be unambitious. you can live a good, simple, worthwhile life. the worst thing here is the *pretense* of ambition.
people who *pretend* to be ambitious waste the valuable time and energy of actually-ambitious people, sucking them into their sitcoms and distracting them from the actual adventures they ought to be going on
but, yknow. people gonna people. there’s no sense in getting mad about it. the thing is to focus on finding the people who get you.
I am not looking for people to affirm me, tell me I am so great, agree with everything I say, etc. I don’t want that. I don’t want fanboys or haters (who are fans too). I’m looking for other creative, ambitious, playful people to play with, folks who prioritize doing cool things
I am here to find the others. Part of doing this means volunteering to be hyper-visible, which means being vulnerable to attack. I debated with myself internally, extensively, for years. I didn’t feel worthy, and simultaneously, I was afraid.
but when I see the friendships that people forge with each other in my mentions, I realize it is the right thing to do.
I would honestly kinda prefer it if there were someone else I trusted to take the lead… but nobody sees things quite the way I do.