Portrait of the Writer as an Ignorant Fool
Prelude
I scribbled all this down from 3am to 5am last night. Couldn’t sleep. Betcha ass these are major epiphanies for me.
This is a transcription of my notes from last night.
Initial title: Why am I feeling so much pressure while writing posts?
Cos I desperately want to change the minds and lives of the only people reading this post right now - two of my closest friends.
How dare I be so presumptuous? Who do I think I am? Do I think I know what is right and stuff?
Why would I consider this website a failure unless minds were changed and their lives were changed?
No Action, No Right to Talk.
If I write 20 posts and nothing whatsoever has changed anywhere, the world would have been the same without my posts. Might as well have not written them.
What about the personal benefits of writing posts?
There are other ways of getting them. In any case, no need to try so hard to present them well.
Major Realization: Why should they listen?
I’m so anxious and frustrated and worried about how to “convince” people and stuff.
WHAT THE F*CK have you achieved so that they should be convinced by what you say?
SHOW me the f*cking results!
Show me that what you’re talking about actually works.
It can be logical and “Rational” and convincing and stuff… but if it doesn’t give you insane better results than others, it is worthless shit.
No Action, No Right to Talk!
No Impact on the World, No Right to Talk!
Which means, Mr. S-f*cking-PK, you need to Shut the F*ck Up and Simply Take Action.
Take your own medicine.
Grow Stronger.
Increase your Power Level. When It’s Over 9000, then we can think about how to “persuade” others and stuff.
Motherf*cker! Using other people as an excuse to simply sit around and bitch.
Go take Action. Do everything in your power to become stronger.
Forget about trying to change other people’s minds.
When you’re strong as f*ck, you can come back. And then, they will come too. Nothing attracts people like Success.
Important Corollary: No more Evangelizing
I’m NEVER EVER allowed to get upset when people don’t listen to me and don’t change. EVER.
Why?
If I had Won, and Won spectacularly, and if other people could see that, they’d probably do it without another word. That didn’t happen. I’m not even beating the averages. What the f*ck have I really achieved so far?
Shut the F*ck Up and Simply Take Action.
How to get Epiphanies
In “Who should you Respect?”, I pointed out how other people weren’t trying to make an Impact. They were just talking. All talk, no Action, no Results.
I had to keep my eyes peeled open to make the connection. I, the motherf*cking author, was myself talking when I had not made an Impact.
I had not achieved anything spectacular so far, despite all the supposed “rational” things I knew.
I would never in a hundred years have discovered this unless I had written that essay.
I am well and truly sold on writing Essays. (What? I wasn’t before? What the f*ck?)
The Dark side of Teaching
What was the main mistake I made as I began this website?
Answer: I switched into Teacher-mode.
I started thinking about all the stuff that people didn’t know about. There is a HUGE knowledge gap. Heck, people out there believe in God.
Cool. I decided to put my thoughts into words and spread some knowledge.
I kept thinking about how to reduce the gap between them and me. I needed to fix this right away.
But I lost sight of a gap that was 200x as big. Which one?
The gap between me and my potential.
For some reason, thinking about teaching people seemed to stall my personal growth.
I could either think about Growing Stronger. Or I could think about how to teach people what I knew so far.
For some reason, I wasn’t able to do both at the same time.
The Nasty side of Teaching: Mistaken Confidence
And the Nasty part is - I didn’t even realize it.
It didn’t feel like I was giving up growth in some part of my life. It felt like that part was ok, everything is fine, keep going, keep going.
It is not fine.
I had stopped being surprised by things. I had stopped opening up to new possibilities for improvement.
F*ck! When you try to write down all the things you know, the Magic of Essays can work against you. The essays are so solid and real in front of your eyes that they will convince your mind that you know a lot of things.
F*ck! I planned to write a series of posts on Happiness. Then, on Will Power. Low self-esteem. Writing. Action. Hard Problems. It was all gonna be neatly categorized with pretty deep well-thought out posts.
What did that make me feel?
It felt like - wow! I know all these fields really well. I’m going to write substantial, real, practical stuff about them. Cool. Rock on.
Wait a minute! Just Wait a Minute!
“know all these fields really well”
Yo, SPK! I will concede your right to say that ONLY when you have got really good results to back it up.
No Action, No Right to Talk.
Become super-happy. Get most half of the things done that you plan to do. Get rid of your Low self-esteem. Write really well. Take Action on lots of important ideas. And crack a dozen Hard Problems.
Then… Then, my dear friend, you can come back and take credit for “knowing” these fields really well.
Until then, Shut the F*ck Up and Simply Take Action.
Main Takeaway: Focus on Growing Stronger
F*ck being a Teacher. F*ck mistakenly thinking you have “understood” lots of things. Keep your eyes firmly focussed on the results.
There is INFINITE opportunity for you to improve yourself. Keep that in mind, always.
If you don’t, your mind will oblige. It will simply never think again of expanding beyond the boundary you draw around your current abilities. You will never grow any Stronger.
Believe that if you take action you will get Insane Rewards.
Believe that if you write essays, you will gain immensely useful insights that will knock your socks off and render you unable to sleep until 5am in the morning. This shit is real. The rewards of Rational Action don’t diminish as you go forward. In fact, the farther ahead you are, the more you’re able to see just how screwed up you really are. That’s where the real game begins.
The more anomalies you’ve seen, the more easily you’ll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising.
– Paul Graham, The Age of the Essay (emphasis mine)
Teach, but don’t be a Teacher
If you expect your readers to get X amount of benefit from your essay, expect to get 20X as many benefits for yourself. That is how high your standard should be. You must grow with every post.
Otherwise, you’re the “rational” equivalent of the math professor who comes in everyday and just writes out the examples straight from the standard textbook on the board. He never thinks about all the implications, the f*cking deep connections that each theorem has with the other theorems, the enormous research potential latent in every single little lemma of that theorem.
What, you think we’ve exhausted all the interesting ideas we can have in mathematics? You think there aren’t a million better ways of doing things that we’re doing now? You don’t think there a million more ideas out there that we have absolutely no inkling about?
This is f*cking Mathematics, man.
And this is f*cking Life.
Don’t be that professor.
Be the cool prof who is excited to share every single idea in the field because he is interacting with it on a daily basis. He is so deeply involved with the field that, hey, it almost got pregnant that one time. Be the prof who goes silent for 5 minutes at a time because he just had a motherf*cking epiphany based on a question somebody asked in class. Be the prof who regularly does research with his students and kicks ass.
Be that professor!
Get more out of your “teaching” than your audience does.
And, guess what, that simply means that they will get even more the next time! How cool is that?
The Night when my Writing Folly broke
To write or not to write? To teach or not to teach? To watch IPL or not?
Write. But write mainly only to generate new ideas and improve your life.
Not to convince Mr. Special Agent and SGG.
Not to convince the young wide-eyed n00bs out there who need a mentor.
I’m not a “teacher”.
And they won’t listen. And they shouldn’t. I ain’t done nothing yet.
F*ck evangelizing. Build insane success and they will come.
F*ck building a huge list of essays to fool myself into thinking that I “understand” these ideas. I don’t. Not until I see hard-core results in front of my eyes.
Yo, SPK! You wanted an audience? You wanted readers who would change their minds and change their lives like hell?
I’ll give you a reader. That’s you.
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