Okay it's time for more of this. Time for shitty first drafts and thinking out loud. Last night we had the good fortune to sit down tonight and read some Burkeman. Man, this is a book that I'm gonna read. more than once. I can feel it in my fucking bones.

Tonight's piece touched on... well it puts Steve Jobs and L. Ron Hubbard on the same page. Which if you know anything about Steve Jobs is a totally reasonable thing to do.

But the theme is that everything — I can't help but quote the Steve. I'm a product of my moment in human history — everything you've ever seen, everything that isn't, you know, part of the natural world, everything in the manufactured world that you've ever heard or looked at or laid your hands on. It was made by people who aren't. They aren't magic. They didn't have some special constellation of characteristics that you don't have or aren't capable of cultivating.

As a parent one runs into this all the time: yes darling you can do anything you set your mind to because you're Mommy's gift from the stars. And yet you walk the earth as an adult who's arrived at, you know, whatever station in life you might find yourself. and you're saying things like: oh, well, I'm not, I'm just not any good with maths.

Well the other way to think about these things. The lens that will be a poster I hang on my wall before the year is out. The mantra that's already the lock screen on my phone. The thing I print on t-shirts — because good artists copy, but great artists steal — is this:

You don't lack focus. What you lack is the balls to stay bored and locked in.

Let's take the language example. I'm not good at learning languages. I don't know how to do; it's not a thing I can do. If someone came to you tomorrow and said: I will hand you generational wealth. I will put into your hands the ability for you to not only never sweat paying your bills ever again, but provide you with enough that in the public markets as they exist on planet Earth today, your children won't sweat paying their bills. Your grandchildren won't sweat paying their bills. All that existential dread just evaporates. I can make all that go away. The requirement there is that you must learn another language.

Whether it's learning a language or becoming good at math or putting an art project into the world or any of these things...there's no time limit. The fallacy of I'm not good at math; I can't learn a language; I can't start a business; it's a temporal fallacy. You get to label that goal as impossible because you know that it's not possible to achieve it in within an arbitrary and constrained time frame.

Because of who I am or my circumstances or my environment or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the bottom line is — again, the hypothetical, pick your pick your billionaire lunatic — whomever or whatever represents the unfathomable reward. Are you still convinced that your situation is fucking intractable?

The question is: are you willing to give over as much of your time as it takes to learn the language? If what's on the other side of that effort is everything you want?

This is a powerful idea because what it forces you to do is face down the truth. And I think there are... there are layers of truth within any human being. There's the truth of the sort of Adlerian, or as I like to say, Alderean (every time I read the name Adler I think of the planet Alderan. So that's where I'm fucking coming from). The Alderean truth is this: you lack the courage to put yourself against whatever your goal is, and so you've concocted a narrative that makes the play of the game such that it's not possible for you to attain that goal.

I am bad at learning languages therefore I can't imagine moving abroad. I am bad at math therefore I will never get adequate marks in school. I'm no good with money, or I don't have enough time, or I can't afford to spend my time building my own business that gets me out of being a fucking wage slave.

None of this is said without sympathy. It's not said without compassion. But what this truth says is:

Sugar, your issue is not a lack of capability. Your issue is you're afraid. You lack courage. You lack the courage to say, I'm not gonna watch movies. I'm not gonna listen to podcasts. I'm not gonna surf YouTube. I'm not gonna scroll Instagram. I'm gonna argue the affairs of the day with strangers. I'm not gonna play video games. I'm not gonna see live music. I'm not gonna... Whatever the fuck.

The only thing that's truly standing between where one is today and the manifestation of what one would like the world to reflect is a willingness to push away all of those distractions. To focus on putting one beautiful, delicious fucking foot in front of the other.

Which doesn't mean you can't take breaks. It's okay to say, I'm gonna crank on this thing on Sundays. Or, I'm gonna hit it for two hours first thing every morning, because I'm an early riser, Or I'm gonna put in some extra grind on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Physical training is the ultimate evidence of this truth. No one who has ever developed. a degree of physical fitness that is worthy of respect or admiration or anything... We just had the winter Olympics. Every one of those people was able to arrive at that place, not because they were born with some sort of like lucky hand. That doesn't hurt but it's not a requirement. And it's certainly not sufficient. Again, this goes to the Adler. It's not like they were born and then they spent a bunch of time surfing YouTube and playing video games and, you know, fucking off.

What they did was they said: The achievement of this goal is a thing that is so important to me that I'm going to say no to other shit to make sure that I'm putting in the hours against it. Every day that I wake up, the single most important thing — the thing that gets water and sunlight first — is the pursuit of that goal.

You cannot allow yourself to do damn near anything else with your time, save for basic biological needs, if you haven't put time into whatever the thing is.

Stay bored and locked in, my friends.