Throughout history there have been “exceptional” people who seemed to have the near-mystical ability to ‘walk through the walls’ of culture. They somehow were able to “just do stuff” that nobody else around them seemed able to. (Steve Jobs “no smarter than you” quote). This is often mythologized, pedestalized as esoteric superhuman genius, which in my view is a way for “regular” people to abdicate their own creativity, their own power, which they don’t want to actualize because they don’t want to be responsible for it.

A common feature I’ve noticed in a lot of these exceptional people is that, on top of being well-read, they were willing and able to articulate themselves, their desires, their goals. These goals tend to be emergent from within themselves– a felt sense that there’s some possibility hiding in plain sight that everyone else around them is missing– but also, 1. they tend go on to corroborate and verify the possibility of these goals being manifest (NERD), and 2. they cultivate the courage necessary to commit themselves to those goals (AMBITION) and follow through for decades. And 3, they cultivate the relationships with other people that they need in order to have a supportive social environment (FRIEND).

I just think it’s so fucking crazy that there have been thousands of uncommonly successful people throughout history and we have so much information about how they did what they did, and yet we hardly seem to devote much in terms of time and resources into reverse-engineering them so that we can birth more “exceptional” “geniuses” into the world and have them solve our biggest problems for us. But I think I’ve come to understand why that is. It’s because being “exceptional” is scary. Greatness is by definition deviance, and deviance makes people uncomfortable. Most people don’t actually want their children to be smarter than them. They might say they want it, until the smart child starts making smart observations about their parents. The good news is we don’t need to care about “most people” in order to find, support and encourage healthy deviance.

I could go on for hours but the core thing about FRIEND is practicing good reply game. You don’t have to read Dale Carnegie for this if you don’t like him – George Washington, Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, Montaigne, Emerson, etc all wrote about how to be a good conversationalist and companion, someone that cultivates shared understanding with other people. You can earn the trust and loyalty of other people this way, and together you can achieve what you cannot achieve alone. Good reply game is about collaboration. To be human is to collaborate, even if only with yourself. Collaboration is humanizing. The inability to collaborate is dehumanizing.

My core way of expressing AMBITION is “do 100 things”– which is to say, be prolific. Make lots of stuff. Talk to lots of people. We are all capable of more than we think, and our defaults tend to be derived from social norms rather than a rigorous assessment of what is possible. I’ve tweeted 230,000 times, and I could’ve tweeted 500,000 times if I didn’t restrain myself. Part of why I wrote FAN is to find peers who can encourage each other to be even fuckin weirder

NERD: inhabit a nexus of questions. pursue curiosity. live your life as a big research project full of questions that give birth to more questions. all knowledge can be framed in terms of questions and answers. once you start thinking in terms of questions you can accelerate your rate of learning. again, the interesting thing about curiosity is everyone will pay lip service to it, say its good, until the smart kid starts asking inconvenient questions. Nerds eventually become dangerous because they start splitting atoms. Learning how to manage the power of ambitious nerds requires social savvy, hence FRIEND.

I have a lot more to say about this stuff. But basically FAN is a model of healthy deviance. I didn’t actually set out to write it as such. I initially just wanted to write something vaguely autobiographical and I asked people what they liked about my writing. They liked that my stuff was Friendly, Ambitious, and Nerdy. Only after writing it have I come to see how these patterns are vast and older than me. Max Planck used to host Einstein and friends at his house and they would play music and advance physics together. My grandiose-yet-simple hypothesis is that if you look at history for greatness, anywhere you find it, you will find a cluster of Friendly Ambitious Nerds – people who strove to use their deviance to contribute to the commons and make the world a better place.