Hello Friends,
And happy Monday!
How do you write your own life?
This first answer probably comes a bit late for us, but I hope it will make a difference for all the young/future parents reading this newsletter:
The Most Precious Resource is Agency 10min
When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most.
Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14.
Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, from 11 years old.
Vladimir Nabokov published his first book (a collection of poems) at 16, while still in school.
Andrew Carnegie finished schooling at 12, and was 13 when he began his second job as a telegraph office boy, where he convinced his superiors to teach him the telegraph machine itself. By 16 he was the family’s main source of income.
These exceptional individuals were all "doing" from a young age, as opposed to merely schooling.
The went "off-script" early, usually in more than one way.
And while they may not have wanted to work, the work was nonetheless something that both they and society felt was useful: something purposeful and appreciated.
In a sense they had useful childhoods.
Do children today have useful childhoods?
Agency is the capacity to act. But at school, the “doing” is almost more “being told what to do”.
Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we prescribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence?
By confining meaningful work to an adult-only activity, it is little wonder that adolescence is a period of great depression. It would be surprising if it was not.
Even for smart children, education endlessly ushers them towards an often far and always abstract future, so far and abstract that some children seem to apprise the opposite of agency, they take on a learned helplessness, and downplay that the future is a reality at all.
For a 13 year old today, what is the equivalent of being a telegraph office boy, where he can learn technology while contributing? What about for a 16 year old? 21 year old? What is today’s equivalent to being a studio apprentice of Verrocchio?
There are good reasons that programming is now the typical industry for precocious children.
It is something parents can still allow their children to do despite systematized schooling, and it is also one of the few industries with a permissionless culture. You don’t have to ask anyone. You don’t have to get a building permit or be a professional. You can just create.
This too is a big change from the pre-internet era, and incidentally the reason I became a programmer. I wanted to make things, school did not offer avenues to create, but Geocities did. In fact it was one of the only sources in my childhood simply saying, you don’t have to wait for professionals to tell you how to make stuff, you can just make stuff. Start typing.
The second perspective comes in the form of this nearly poetical - and raw - essay by Radigan Carter. You might not agree with his polarising view on life, but he does know how to share powerful emotions.
You Need a Mission in Life 13min
What is a mission in life?
What do you do every day, constantly strive to get better at, that improves not just your life, but the lives of others?
What is that one thing that you are building above all else, trading your time - no, decades of your life - in exchange to will into existence that is good and beautiful in this world?
That is a mission, and everyone needs one.
When you find your mission, the one that you can’t imagine life without, it becomes the most precious thing you own.
Material possessions pale to insignificance, you realize the possessions you have don’t really make you happy in the way you have always wanted to measure yourself.
Don’t be afraid of failure, just keep moving forward on mission.
If you’ve never been punched in the face, go take some boxing classes.
You will find out it really isn’t that bad, and dudes will think you are crazy when you show up talking about needing to get punched in the face to form positive reinforcement patterns for your brain to work through fear and not be afraid of failure.
When you continue to do this over time, you realize a few things.
You stop putting so much weight in what other people’s opinions are who aren’t there going through what you are.
You realize a lot of people truly have no earthly idea what they are talking about, since people are scared to do things because no one wants to fail and half the time they are just repeating something they heard to feel included in a conversation.
When in reality, there can be no success without the pain of failure first.
Be very careful who you share that you have a mission with. Most won’t understand and it will scare them.
We walk amongst those who just want to be normal, seek instant gratification, stare in their phones at fake outrage, have no standards, are inwardly ugly and outwardly miserable, forgetting what they were meant to do on this earth.
If you try to explain what this is to someone who has no desire to leave the city walls and adopt a mission in life, they will attack you because they would never survive outside the safety of their artificial first world.
Don’t just ignore these people, cut them out from your life completely.
No team worth being on ever had a 100% acceptance rate.
Focus on finding your mission, embrace it, put in the work, nurture it and enjoy the process.
Remember, we’re told freedom is now a board of bankers printing trillions, giving us nearly no interest on assets while credit cards charge poor people trying to live 21%.
They tell us now is a great time to shackle ourselves in debt and economic slavery by buying a $700k house that looks like the rest of houses in the neighborhood with an hour-long commute to work.
But it’s fine, you still have to sit in another meaningless meeting led by people who can’t do 10 pullups, who hate confrontation, and somehow think they have power over people.
Does that sound like freedom to anyone? That’s the other option if you don’t embrace the mission of building wealth.
Finally, a personal lesson learnt: audiobooks are great to get more fiction into your life.
I had never listened to audiobooks so far because I prefer reading non-fiction books on my own terms/speed, and taking lots of notes in parallel. Audiobooks simply do not suit this. At all.
But. They work perfectly fine for fiction. I discovered this after learning that one of my favourite books, The Hobbit, had been read by Andy Serkis, the brilliant actor playing Gollum in Peter Jackson’s masterpiece LOTR movies.
I am enjoying it tremendously so far, and finding it very easy to listen to it before going to bed, or even in other underutilised part of my day such as shower time.
If you have not tried it yet and think it might allow you to squeeze more fiction into your life, there are plenty of free audiobooks out there.
Thanks for reading, and have a driven week ahead,
V