i just feel in my bones that there are about 5-12 essays knocking around inside me that if i just get out of my system i will feel a relief i have not known since childhood

they are about: luckmaxxing, variance, deviance, attention, focus, practice, failure, risk, wretchedness, language, media, comms, perception, dynamism, constraints, chaos-surfing, reply game, teamwork, collaboration, project management, frames, stories, winning, strategy

maybe i’ll try to do one tweet on each thing real quick and see if it makes me feel better

luckmaxxing: past the birth lottery which you have no control over, it is discernable that there are some contexts that have higher rates of collision than others. you can increase the exposure you have to luck through a myriad of ways. you do have to survive long enough tho

variance: there’s good variance and bad variance. a lot of culture and the structure of civilization exists to suppress bad variance; prevent bad shit from happening. but you can’t really suppress variance selectively. can be very lucrative to examine how u r suppressing urself

deviance: greatness is deviance. there’s so much time and energy that gets weirdly misallocated imo because we don’t really want to acknowledge this properly. people talk in euphemisms about this. success is alienating and dehumanizing! some fresh clarity here will be v good imo

language is always being renegotiated in real time. we can make it better or worse. clear language allows people to think clear thoughts. when terminology gets clouded, it can be useful to redefine things from scratch. clear thinkers and writers are a huge public good

media is the means by which we interface with the wider world beyond our immediate senses. it becomes more powerful every year, it shapes our thoughts, our sense of ourselves, our peers, the world, our identities, everything. navigating it well requires several kinds of finesse

communication was always challenging; even in the ancestral environment people were surely struggling with miscommunication. it’s harder than ever in the modern media environment. it’s magic that anybody understands anyone ever. we are too quick to blame each other when it fails

perceptions rarely capture the truth of anything. we seldom think to question our perceptions. of course nobody has the time to reexamine everything all the time, but we can learn to at least step lightly. it might seem like a lot of work but it’s v gratifying, essay to explain

dynamism: as the opposite of stasis. things are always changing all the time. the environment is always responding. everything is ecologies. there’s something both startling and soothing when you really see how this cascades through everything. the second note changes the first

everything is resource-constrained. if you wanna do anything substantial, you’re going to have to be sensitive to this, or something is gonna “run out of battery” unexpectedly and jam your whole operation. often the best way to know how things work is to study how they fail

chaos-surfing is largely about understanding all of the other things i’m talking about here. a lot of it is about focusing on what you want and not getting swept into any particular whirlpool. gotta hop from wave to wave and stay afloat

reply-game about is deeply understanding “the second note changes the first”, and responding to people and things in ways that are additive. that build out on the implicit proposal in the first utterance. get good at this and you improve everything around you by yr mere presence

teamwork is just people practicing good reply game with teach other. there’s the utterance-level play, and then there’s the setup play where you set things up for each other to make better utterances. small groups of friends who get good at this birth entire new genres, worlds

actually collaboration and project management etc are just me repeating the reply game thing again. to collaborate is to labor together. a project is anything that cannot be completed in a single sitting by a single individual. good reply game is the essence of all of it

a frame is a container within which something happens. there’s artistry that happens within existing frames, but truly exalted artistry imo is the stuff that subverts those frames. this ties up with deviance: existing frames tend to be “burnt in” and can’t surprise people much

stories are maps of meaning, significance, consequence, etc. “what’s the point of stories” is a funny Qn, because stories are how we answer “what’s the point” of anything. we determine our values, priorities, everything from our stories. introspection is abt inspecting yr story

winning– the important thing here is that it doesn’t have to be within popular existing games, existing frames, existing models of success. you can define for yourself the outcomes you want and then celebrate the progress you make towards those outcomes. helps tremendously

strategy to me is just a matter of thinking about what you want, examining the landscape of possibilities, plotting out possible paths, trying things out, evaluating what works, repeating. weird to me how uncommon this is. probably seems like a lot of work to ppl who havent won

-fin. useful thing i got out of this thread was a reminder of “the second note changes the first” (remix of Miles Davis / Victor Wooten’s ideas), that’s going to be useful in multiple contexts

having done some light sketches, i’d now take a different approach and ask what are the itches i’m looking to scratch? I think a better frame here might be, what do I keep getting annoyed by re: people’s misunderstandings?

there’s a lot there, lol, i’m tired just asking the question. gotta pace myself. but the tiredness confirms the relief suspicion. writing Introspect was a huge relief for me, there are several other knots to unknot that will be of similar relief, and i do allude to them above