<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s this entire genre of interesting content along the lines of \u201cso strange\/wild\/weird how this successful person\/company didn\u2019t care about X\u201d. Here are some examples:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A thing my ex-boss Dinesh<\/a> got me to meditate on (not literally, but I think about it a lot) is that product-market fit heals and forgives almost everything. The highest order bit<\/a> is almost the only thing that matters by a long shot, to a dramatic and unintuitive degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can insert your own examples. \u201cIt\u2019s ridiculous how [[successful business]] fails at [[surprisingly basic thing]]\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The useful question my Dinesh would ask me: is it actually ridiculous? Or is it only ridiculous within your model of reality, which expects things to be a certain way?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Approached from a slightly different angle, reality *seems* unrealistic all the time because it deviates from our model of reality. But what is real is already so!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Circling back to the examples: the critical life lesson here is that you can be \u201cunbelievably idiotic\u201d and still win big. Do you realize this? Do you feel it in your bones? Because lots of people don\u2019t realize this. Lots of people think \u201cI will be successful if I become less stupid, less incompetent, less fail, less embarrassing\u2026\u201d This is almost entirely back-asswards, an illusion caused by media bias, narrative bias, selection bias, halo effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am trying to help people see that they can be much more successful than they realize, imagine or expect, because it\u2019s their expectations, imagination and models of reality that are miscalibrated. There is a silly na\u00efvet\u00e9 to this endeavour (of trying to help people see something they\u2019re not seeing), but it\u2019s also very rewarding when you help someone see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dinesh and I talk about this practically every time we meet even now, because it\u2019s so alien & deviant from mainstream understanding. It\u2019s like breathing water instead of air. But with each breath you take, you become more powerful, because you\u2019re operating with a more accurate model of world. (Accurate model \u2192 knowledge \u2192 power)<\/p>\n\n\n\n My understanding of this at the heart of what allows me to basically tweet for a living. It\u2019s a pretty mediocre living (for now!) but it\u2019s freedom. Freedom that a lot of smart angry dudes wish they had but don\u2019t, because they\u2019re too busy being right about everything else except this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can be smart about a thousand things that don\u2019t matter, or you can be smart about like the 5 things that do. Some will ask \u201cwhy not be smart about 1005 things?\u201d The thing is that 6th thing is a distraction from the first thing. It\u2019s endlessly more complicated than what I\u2019m saying, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a way it\u2019s a lil hubristic to tweet about this, but all communication is a lil hubristic because it\u2019s intrinsically lossy. Dinesh and I have been talking about this for almost a decade (damn) and we are both still learning how strange and counterintuitive this is. The shape of one of our theories \u2013 which we argue about \u2013 is that it\u2019s unintuitive because it runs against human moral instincts. We want to treat everyone fairly, everyone matters, etc. And in a sense yes of course they do. But value isn\u2019t distributed that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Probably like 10 of my tweets out of 151,000 are responsible for 60% of the value of the @visakanv<\/a> account. I can\u2019t actually point you to them with confidence because the truth of it makes me uncomfortable. The truth is always uncomfortable. This is blowing my own mind as I write this, this is how unintuitive this truth is- every time I meditate on it it delivers me value. My success in life is almost directly a function of the degree to which I am willing to face the discomfort of the truths I don\u2019t like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s a truth that I\u2019ve obviously been avoiding: hardly anybody gives a fuck about my 2nd ebook<\/a>. Going by preorders in relation to marketing, people are interested in Unlearning Coercion than in Introspect. Introspect is like the album the artist loves that the audience doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I do personally believe there is an intangible beautiful value in caring about things that don\u2019t have market value, I\u2019m very sentimental and romantic like that. I will tilt at this windmill forever. But also I don\u2019t want to be a total sucker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indulgence from a position of strength is aesthetic, beautiful, etc. Indulgence from a position of weakness is pathetic. Many \u201ctrad\u201d accounts on Twitter are aware of this in letter but almost none of them embody its spirit, which is a painful hypocrisy I wouldn\u2019t wish on my enemies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Heh. it\u2019s actually really stupid of me to give a fuck about like, whether people think I\u2019m narcissistic or shameless or anything of that sort \u2013 it actually, quite literally, Does Not Matter. it\u2019s me acting out some trauma from my teenage days. I didn\u2019t expect this to hit me here. But you see what meditating on the nature of reality does for you? It doesn\u2019t spare your feelings! What is true is already so. You go in trying to understand Facebook and you end up getting personally attacked and having your ass kicked by your own truth-seeking mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n