The world seems to become more & more rewarding to those who do extreme things, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a good or bad extreme. More rewards are constantly being made to those who move fast, break things, fail often, and fuck around.
Most people are so afraid of putting themselves out there, overthinking every small step even when they have nothing to lose already.
Even when modern day content seems so overwhelming and social feeds feel like an information hose and google processes 98k searches per second and youtube processes hundreds of videos per second, this doesn’t fairly put into proportion the amount of people who create stuff and try out against people who just consume stuff all day every day. Because it will be something like <1% against 99%+.
If everyone was moved to create, I think we could be looking at even more information exhaustion at a 10X fold rate, and then the battle of attention grabbing becomes the new job market. You wouldn’t be constantly looking to take on the reins of a specific role at a company, but rather be looking to take on the attention of a specific audience at a niche.
I do think that creating things is itself an act of always trying. And trying means that you’ll probably lose more than you win, but that’s okay because you probably need a few wins anyway! So it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve failed, you might as well fail as much as you can as early as you can.
From this week’s James Clear newsletter:Related: link
The concept is you lose a lot to win some. And loss will always be & feel bigger in comparison; like it’s a requirement. So you have to be in peace with the fact that a positive sum comes at a cost every time.
You have to break lots of things to fix some things, try lots of things to stick with a few things, know lots of people to have a few friends, create lots of stuff to win from a few stuff, put as much messages and pieces and artifacts in the world to win big from just a few of them.
In hindsight it could feel like 95+% of efforts lead to zero results, and only <5% of efforts lead to 100% of results and you have to be comfortable with spending time and money and resources and putting in work that probably isn’t paid and doesn’t in lots of ways correlate to any meaningful output and be okay with it, each and everyday.
The only shortcut is to never miss a day. Because sometimes you get lucky. And you never miss a lucky day if you try everyday.
In 2020 I read The Millionaire Fastlane –fwiw I wouldn’t read it today just because of the weird name– and it discussed 3 lanes in which most people tend to end up in within their lifetimes: Sidewalk, Slowlane, and Fastlane.
On the Sidewalk, people are just living for the moment; they prioritize immediate gratification. Just watching life as it happens, so they do more stupid things like max out credits, little to no savings, no investments, etc. True freedom is impossible.
On the Slowlane, people follow the rules the system says it will hopefully pay off on the very long term. So they tend to conform to the average baseline of living, take a steady job at the big company, invest in the stock market, etc. True freedom is only achievable after decades worth of work.
This path looks like this:
On the Fastlane, people are going through the extreme discomfort of making their own path out of thin air, because it doesn’t even exist! They do hard things that have low chance of success and keep iterating till it happens. So that in the end, it feels like a shortcut. They find a way out to do good for themselves and their families based off of the paths they CREATE. True freedom (time & location) is attainable at a young age.
This path naturally feels like the right way to live life, and while the system (school → uni → job) got us convinced that the above path is the norm, a more realistic path will probably look like this:
Clarity
Life in the grand sum feels like a game in which a few people are engaging, failing, embarrassing themselves, winning big, taking loot home, and the entire rest of the server is just observing, commenting, ranting, complaining, congratulating – reacting to whatever happens to any player in real time. Players are busy playing, observers are busy reacting. It seems all of life is feeling more & more like this.
There’s a close & weird imitation between social media & real life in terms of proactivity & reactivity. In both, a bunch of people are building things out of nothing, and another bunch are just waiting on what to do next based on it. It seems plausible given that social media is only an extension of real life in many ways, so it was only destined to be that way since the beginning.
All advice we see in books & movies seem to be trying to get people to just move – Move and go somewhere and talk to people and create things even if the destination, or motive, or outcome are still unclear. Because clarity may present itself along the way, but it sure won’t at the start.
If this ‘creation of things’ we talked about is of utmost importance, then it seems we have to search for whatever we like to create independent of any results to keep doing it. If intensity & continuity are prerequisites even when lots of it goes unrewarded, then the reward has to come from the process of creating itself. Lots of work has to be put in the dark before only some of it gets to see the light.
Fuckarounding
Because there’s no limit on the fuckarounds you could do, and because you probably only need one event to change courses, fuckarounding is practically all upside and zero downside. You can try infinitely and you have to be right once. So you can put out a 1000 pieces of content and one will change your life, you can start 20 businesses and one will change your life, or spawn a 100 ideas and one will change your life.
This simple fact coupled with compounding makes people who understand this combo very well off very early on. When people do something significant -that is to say when people are right once-, the amount of fuckarounding to hit the next one right thing becomes significantly less. So wins generally feel like a machine with gears; when something works, other things work, and then lots of things magically start working together, with less & less effort from your side. Now far from behind it could seem like this state -of lots of things working- is so far away, even though it is probably due to few & small wins to start with.
The more you believe in abundance, the more of it you create. And because we have no reason to ‘believe’ in abundance before things start working, the first few wins are always the hardest. The first 100k is always the hardest, the first few friends are always the hardest, the first few lessons of learning a new thing are always the hardest. When we see results, even a little bit, our belief in abundance tend to increase which creates more of it, which creates more results 🔄
Thanks for reading!
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