Our never-ending goal
Our never-ending goal is to enrich and deepen our experience through (1) the relentless pursuit of doing, achieving, and realizing more,1 (2) the continuous cultivation of greater and deeper appreciation for what we have, and (3) a ongoing commitment to spreading that depth and breath of experience across as many distinct people as we can.
Background — why care?
Let’s start with the most fundamental question: Why am I here?
I don’t have one answer. The best I can come up with is threefold:
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Experience: Take in as much of the full gamut of sensory input from any given situation as possible. The more “embodied” I can be with whatever I’m doing—whether it’s a full-body experience or just a mental process of learning—the better.
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Grow: Learning, building skills, trying and failing to achieve things—growth is almost impossible to avoid, and yet it can be enhanced or slowed down, depending on how we approach things.
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Create: Self-expression is inherent in how we approach life, as well as how we approach things that we do. The more we can show up “authentically,” the more self-actualized we can be in our work and our lives.
I’m trying to turn the volume knobs on those things up as high as possible.
To a large extent, this is an internal struggle. A lot of it plays out in the real world, but how well I do at these three things seems to be directly correlated with the mental and physical processes that play out inside me.
Now, nothing in this section talks about any specific aspect of the human experience. I’m not making some claim about legacy, accomplishment, procreation, or conquest. Those may be worthwhile and even necessary aims to resolve in their own rights, but I see them as secondary by-products of the actual meaning, or purpose of my life, which is the smaller, more fundamental concepts that I outlined above.
I believe focusing on the external measures is a distraction. Focusing on the internal measures, by contrast, ensures efficacy for anything and everything.
You might see me contradict this. Hey, I’m trying. 🙃
Values
Ok, I’ve really shot myself in the foot with that title.
My “purpose” is wide and multifaceted. I am here to learn, grow, and create. And as I do that, I seek to shed clarity, smooth out paths behind and before me, and empower people to do more with less. I’m a champion of clarity and a fiend for efficiency. I love art and a good flourish, but I think that clarity is one of the best things we can achieve in life. It’s easy to add noise; it’s hard to take it away.
Clarity is key.
Same with efficiency. It’s easy to make noise and hustle and bustle. It’s hard to find and do the right thing, the effective thing. It’s usually less about controlling the process and more about poking and prodding it only where and when actually necessary. Knowing when not to act is more important than knowing when to act. Tools that effectively target the highest leverage points are divine.
So, my north stars are:
- Clarity
- Efficiency
My personal core values are:
- Irreverence/objectivity - intellectual freedom (or “cognitive flexibility”)
- Human autonomy/free will
- Lower chaos
- Honesty/truth, unveiled info
As far as things that I want to work on, they flow from those.
I care about:
Footnotes
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It’s important to make the distinction that “more” does not strictly refer to countable, quantitative measures. It can be an increase in cardinality, sophistication, complexity, or (perhaps paradoxically) simplicity, where a simplification represents a deeper understanding and more fundamental leverage point of the underlying phenomena. ↩