Understanding people—the fundamental ingredient in any personal or professional pursuit—is probably the most practical knowledge you can have. And there’s probably no better place to read detailed descriptions of people than fictional stores.
On greatness and killing your ego.
How do I accept that I won’t ever be great or outstanding? I always thought I had talent, and maybe I’m not bad, but a great many people are far better. I can’t stop thinking this and it’s causing me great anxiety.
Kill your ego, because nothing you do will ever matter. That’s okay, though. It’s not just you. It’s all of us. It’s taken 100,000 years for our species to hump and grunt its way into momentary dominance on this pale blue dot, but nothing we’ve accomplished is all that outstanding when you consider that a Mall of America-sized asteroid is all it would take to turn humanity into the next thin layer of fossil fuels.Greatness is nothing but the surface tension on the spit bubble of human endeavor. On a geological time scale, our measurable effect on the planet is a greasy burp. We are seven billion tiny flecks of talking meat stuck to an unremarkable mud ball hurtling through space in an unimaginably vast universe for no particular reason. There is no difference between kings and cripples, my friend. We’re all the same hodgepodge of primordial goo, and the pursuit of greatness is a fool’s errand.
Pursue happiness instead. Find peace in your insignificance, and just let your anxiety go. Learn to savor the likely truth that the sum total of human achievement won’t even register in the grand scheme, so you might as well just enjoy whatever talents you have. Use them to make yourself and others happy, and set aside any desire to be great or outstanding.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t do your best. You should. If you’re talented, by all means, exploit that talent to the fullest extent possible. Just don’t do it for the sake of greatness. Do it for the sake of happiness. If the distinction is a little hazy, that’s because your ego is doing its best to get in the way. Your ego wants to put you on a pedestal at the center of the universe. It wants to convince you of silly things like jealous gods and life after death. Your ego would never allow you to believe that you are anything other than a special snowflake, which is why you have to kill it.
Annihilating your ego is the quickest way to happiness. Embracing your insignificance will make your anxiety suddenly seem ridiculous. You’ll recognize petty emotions like schadenfreude and envy for the childish tantrums that they are. You’ll stop comparing your talents to others, and you’ll be able to enjoy being good at something without the need to be great.
Of Dragons and Fireballs
So I’m back from home. It seems fitting in a way that I left 2011 one way and 2012 begins and it’s feels different. Going back east always enables me to reconnect to a former self that I often forget exists. Years of moving places, meeting new people and so forth leave me constantly reinventing myself. While this offers me new opportunities, it leaves me wondering what I’ve left behind.
More than anything, going home always makes me remember who I’ve become and more comfortable in that. My uncle always reminds me when I see him, “when you were a kid, you always said you were gonna move far far away and you did.” Then he laughs. I think back to that loquacious little guy and I wonder what we have in common now.
Our hopes and our dreams. He saw the globe and believed the world was smaller than it was at a time when it really wasn’t. Now it is, but I look around and wonder where I fit into this whole mess of things.
Driving back I thought about video games. I don’t really play them. But life can sometimes be like them. If you think back to the original Super Mario Brothers, there are levels and each has a boss at the end. You beat the boss and advance to the next level. At the end, there’s a big boss and you win if you beat said creature. Older games didn’t allow you to waste time deviating on your own little tasks. I watch my brother or friends play current games and it’s possible to be part of the ecosystem while specializing in a particular kind of gameplay. (Guys who only sniper in Call of Duty)
In real life, there’s the path you’re on and where you’re headed. Then there’s all of these extraneous things on the outskirts. I told my dad that when I was younger, I saw possibilities and opportunities and always wanted to take them. Not because all of them were necessarily fit for me; but simply because I didn’t want to miss out on anything. When you traffic in the mysteries of what’s possible, you want an escape hatch or a scratch-off ticket that gives you what you want faster than just hunkering down.
When you’re younger, life seems full of mystery. When you get older, it feels very different. People still impose their will, they still communicate their expectations and want you to ascribe to the absolutes that govern how they live their lives. I’ve always been estranged from these ideas because they simply defy how I see the world and live my life. But I’ve been fighting upstream for years trying to get where I want to do in the face of all of it.
Right now, it’s about building a foundation from which the other stuff can live on. It was interesting when someone said as much without me having to express it. “You’ve got these goals and you’re working towards them. You’re building the future you want for yourself and I’ve got nothing but respect for you for that.”
I try to be ethically consistent. I don’t necessarily know my ultimate destination, but I know what I don’t want now in a way that I never used to and have become a lot better at avoiding it.
So another year of chasing down dragons and dodging fireballs.
“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life.
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
- Steve Jobs
