My first book, FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD, is now available for sale! gum.co/FANbook

You may also be interested in reading about the marketing behind FAN. Here’s a post I wrote at 2,000 sales.

As of November 2022 I’m starting to write FAN 2.0. I’m thinking I could maybe put together a list of all of the blogposts that were in v1.0. I have some notes on a reddit post.

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“What’s an example of a giant internet treatise that lays out a whole worldview and an associated deep problem?” (source)

[cracks knuckles] ok let me try and fit FAN into this frame. The big world problem is, in a handful of words: fragmentation, disorientation, disillusionment, alienation, loneliness, distrust, despair.

FAN is a kind of bottom-up chaos-surfing syncretic MMA-dance to address the above.

Why don’t I just adopt any of the other existing frameworks? well i tried everything I could find, and nothing ever quite worked for me, so my thing is just my personal remix of all the other things. The big things people often seem to miss are humor, irreverence, communion, service.

to put it in terms of other people’s work, if that helps, I’m largely remixing Alan Watts, Emerson, Joseph Campbell and Nietzsche. Mr. Rogers, George Carlin. And ok fine some Jesus and Buddha; look those guys were on to some good shit but we don’t have to get weird about it.

another way of framing all of this is… live your life like you’re in a heroic anime/jrpg. Make friends. Help people on their side quests. Earn their trust and loyalty. Triumph together with the power of friendship for the benefit of all. Help the old lady find her frying pan.

The frying pan side quests are very important!!! It’s always the mfs who think that they’re too busy to help the old ladies who end up weirdly twisted; they’ve drunk their own kool-aid. we are just a bunch of anxious monke on big spinny rock in infinite space. help the old lady

back to the FAN model: the cool thing about the 3-pronged approach is that you don’t have to overdo any one thing too much to the point that you get pwned by it’s dark side. It not only encourages you to not take yourself too seriously, it encourages you to switch modes

Here I think there’s something about my background that makes me different than a lot of others. I was born and raised an ethnic minority in a diverse country in the cultural crosswinds between East and West, so in a way I’ve spent my whole life training to be a chaos surfer.

Lmk if you have any questions