“Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. They do everything in their power not to have any. And therefore, the great man, in order to exist, must possess a force of attack which is greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of people.” — Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867)
If you want to do great things, by definition you have to behave differently than Most People.
Deviance is socially discouraged. Nobody achieves greatness (hit target nobody can see) without passing through the crucible of cringe- of caring about something, believing in something, when the consensus doesn’t.
“If you want greatness, you need deviant people to do deviant shit and constantly try to one up each other”
Rudolph meme: “Deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable”
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Great Ideas
“Talent hits a target no one else can reach,
Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer (1844) [source]
Most people recognise good ideas but not great ideas. Great ideas look like bad ideas, or are otherwise incomprehensible in the existing paradigm.
In fact, I’m not sure anybody recognizes great ideas, because it’s almost impossible to tell in advance. What actually matters then is something more like sensitivity to the process, openness to upside, ie “this could be a great idea”. (This vaguely reminds me of what the Pixar Braintrust folks said about the fragility of new ideas.)
Big limiting factor that keeps people from having great ideas is the fear of looking stupid, incompetent, incomprehensible, insane, etc. most people have internalized cultural regulations against this, which makes great ideas both inconceivable and inexpressible. Miscarried early.
Big part of why great ideas are hard to perceive is because they exist outside the existing configuration. Good ideas play nicely with the existing config. Great ideas deviate, break, depart from existing config. A great idea needs a whole support structure that doesn’t yet exist.
Recognising greatness is a retrospective activity. Touching greatness is a matter of improv, play, living into possibility, full-hearted experimentation. what if it were true, what if, what if, what if. Lightness amidst darkness. Battlefield ballet, ayy.
“Good writing is clear, persuasive, entertaining. Great writing is disturbing, ambiguous, disorienting.” – thread by @richdecibels
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Many of those who accomplish the inconceivable, are cursed to die attempting the impossible. (original thread)
Imagine everybody in your life telling you can’t do something… and then you do it. While this is glorious, it also means you will never fully be able to trust anyone again.
Everyone was wrong when they told you you couldn’t become Emperor of France, so maybe they’re wrong when they say you can’t invade Russia in winter.
Some people will read the nations quote at the top of this post and think “that sounds so cool”, but it is also simultaneously grotesque. If sanity means being normal & well-adjusted to the social norm (which it does), it is technically insane. Greatness is deviance from the norm, ie insanity. When Steve Jobs said “insanely great”, the “insanely” wasn’t hyperbole.
Few things make your brain hit the frying pan harder than being right when everyone else was wrong, especially if it was about something consequential. It might be the single quickest way to go literally insane, if we define sanity as being well-adjusted to social norms.
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This was from a thread i wrote of notes in prep for a talk I gave at Thesis Conference
it seems to me lots of greatness is downstream of really disagreeable people having productive conflicts. “explode safely w little bit of danger”
greatness is deviance from the norm. deviance is innately sorta disagreeable. the challenge is to allow deviance to flourish and then reintegrate back into normal society in a positive-sum way. in the hero’s journey the hero is supposed to return from the abyss w/ elixir of life.
sad thing is there must be so many deviants who have the potential/capacity for greatness who are too deviant, who lack the right mentors, the right encouragement n support structures. people who could’ve advanced fields by decades but not by themselves.
so we seem to need something like a beauty-and-the-beast dynamic, the public-facing charismatic front-end hosting dinner parties and so on. this feels like a very old idea about grumpy artists/creatives/hackers etc and their agents/managers/handlers, nothing particularly new here.
ig from that frame what Im looking for is really just More Activity. a recurring feature of great scenius is “high social intercourse”. there have always been human switchboards of talent like Mersenne, and I want to catalyze 1000 Mersennes (for a start).
i will wanna weave in the main things about my best essays – via We Were Voyagers, stuff about specialization and trade, and making status games more glorious / seeking greater global maxima, ogilvy’s “strive for the company of immortals”
via Are you serious?: not all who are serious will be great, but i think greatness almost always requires seriousness. the questions to ask here ig are how do we identify and select for seriousness amongst early-game players? gotta go with proof-of-work, some visible output, do 100 thing
tragically there will probably always be proto-ramanujans and losevs out there that nobody knows about because they dont even get the chance to work, but we gotta start somewhere. hopefully strengthening this memeplex will direct some attention and encouragement their way too
even writing this thread i find myself thinking we could be doing more right now with very little. one thing we could do is like a monthly show-n-tell of some sort. another thing is to have people compete to collect the most interesting work they can find from smalltime strangers
the question is why aren’t we doing it? that’s the big “fuck me, fuck you, fuck the sky and fuck the zoo” question. it probably boils down to fear. it probably boils down to social regulation. greatness is deviance. deviance is a punishable offence
so actually my main task, my main job with this talk, is to challenge some mfs to be ballers and do deviant shit. that’s da main ting, all else is window dressing. i want every mf in that room to at least consider going hard for the glory of valhalla
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an interesting ongoing experience of my life is that I’ve witnessed, in a small-medium way: what it’s like to do things that other people consider deviant, then succeed, and then witness people reorient around the success. my twitter account as a “phenomenon” is an eg but not 1st
properly deviating from the norm is very scary, it is *by definition* insane, and if you are honest with yourself and rigorous in your thinking you will question your sanity. And that’s not a fun or comfortable place to be which is imo why so few people really do it
“Sanity and survival: a guide for deviants” might be another essay/book I gots to write
“think and communicate in dominos” I think actually rather succinctly captures a lot of it… 🤔 there’s some amount of intention-concealing that is polite/courteous to do but too much of it is not ideal… “joke about outcomes u want” is also a clever part of it…
so many of the things around us that we take for granted as completely normal, even critical or necessary, was once some person’s batshit crazy idea that other people mocked and derided
like… “doctors should wash their hands” – Semmelweiss died for this
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Old thread – the tweet I was quoting got deleted.
Filters have almost never filtered for talent, they’ve almost always filtered for professionalism, ie the ability to maintain an image of civility. Talent often has the essence of barbarism about it.
“If you guys want these crazy ideas, crazy stages, this crazy music, this crazy way of thinking… there’s a chance it might come from a crazy person.” – Kanye West
Ogilvy: “The business community wants remarkable advertising, but turns a cold shoulder to the kind of people who can produce it. That is why most advertisements are so infernally dull. Albert Lasker made $50m partly because he could stomach the atrocious manners of his great copywriters.” // “Courtiers cannot create potent campaigns.” “Talent is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters and rebels.”
My wife would make a better journalist than 99% of journalists. But it’s bc she’s pathological about asking questions and demanding the truth. She’d probably get fired if she joined an actual newsroom, for asking too many questions. So some of the best journalism in 🇸🇬 looks like this.
“being a product manager means being an interface between normies and weirdos . the weirdo can interact with the normie but the normie will fear and despise the weirdo. thus the normie passing pm is a neccessary buffer” – @NLRG_it
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dudes in my DMs who think they should live like Steve Jobs or Jiro Ono when they’re not running Apple or a michelin restaurant
to be updated
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From a speech I gave at Thesis Conference 2023: i’m guessing most people here are already warm to the ideas i’m about to say but i’ll say it again, harder, intentionally. I think we should all be writing more, vlogging more, podcasting more. A common feature of a lot of the most productive scenes of history is that there was a high level of social intercourse, people exchanging information at a tremendous rate. Once you’ve selected for thoughtful people, filtered out the most sloppy/selfish/superficial stuff, simply talking more yields dividends. I want all my smart friends to talk more, publish more. There are some people who need to hear the opposite suggestion, people who spend more time networking than doing anything else. But even then I suspect that… it’s worth having some people fulfill that role. It depends on your personal utility functions, what is easy to you, what is obvious to you. We all gotta specialize and trade. Jane Jacobs wrote that all wealth is created through import replacement, specialization and trade. So specialize and trade. Introduce your coolest, smartest friends to each other. Tell them i asked you to do it.
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good ideas are appreciated immediately, great ideas aren’t.
good ideas exemplify the best of the current way of thinking, great ideas are typically the result of a whole new way of thinking.
If you have a good idea, it’ll usually resonate with people. if you have a great idea, you’ll get confused looks and you’ll have to explain it patiently over and over until they get it.
good ideas plug nicely into existing structures. great ideas need entirely new structures that don’t currently exist.
having great ideas can be a curse. you might be too far ahead of your time. there’s a tension between (1) requiring a path from good to great, and also (2) grappling with the truth that the good is the enemy of the great.
complication: as mentioned earlier, when you have a great idea, people will be confused by it. this also happens when your idea is shit.
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