“Guernica” - Pablo Picasso

In a previous post I talked about being extreme, but how does one actually do this?

Well, to take this idea to the extreme (and of course it has to be), you would …

You would let your home fall into disrepair, the clothes on your body disintegrate until they are barely held together, your hair grow out til it touches the floor. This is what it looks like to be extreme.

That's one way of being extreme, what's another?

Quoting Edwin Land, “If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess”. Take everything you do, and multiply it by 10x. Read a book? read it 10x. Write a tweet? spend 10 minutes on it, rewriting it over and over again until you get it perfect. Cleaning your room? Clean the rest of your house, and your garage, and your whole street while you're at it. Go for a run? run 10x the distance (ok maybe this one is a little out of hand). Meeting up with a friend? plan a bunch of other activities simultaneously, so you're doing shopping, polishing your nails, getting extra cardio with ankle weights, sketching a landscape, walking the dog, taking photos, stretching your muscles for flexibility, practicing your rap skills, planning out new recipes to make at home.

Yet another is,

Only eat foods that come from regions with an even number of vowels in them. Only allow yourself to talk about a single topic for a whole week, then switch to a different topic. Craft a bouquet solely out of handpicked petals for your loved one. Force yourself to always have to be with someone, so you schedule friends to meet with you in between activities, like a baton pass race where you are the baton. Write out every single word you speak, to force yourself to be slow to speak. Consume a burger ring every time you hear someone apologise. Cover your local park with posters saying "Have you seen this person?" with a picture of yourself on it. Make a smoothie solely out of food gathered from the wild. Assign each room in your house a different book and enact a scene from that book each time you enter.

By this point, you're probably thinking, all of this sounds insane, why would anyone do this? But that's precisely the point. You do these things so that you can be different, because no one else is going to do them. You owe it to the world to do things that no one has ever done before, because that is the point of variance. We are not all built the same, and that is intentional. We have an obligation to express the differentiation which has been so generously endowed upon us.

To be extreme is to have an immense respect for life. You do not wander through life aimlessly, assenting here and there to things without much thought. It is to be fully committed in who you are and the decisions you make, to go well beyond the point of no return. To suffer social repercussions for everything you believe in, because you are so utterly convinced, that the suffering is worth it.

Thanks for reading this edition of Meditations. I plan to do a more extensive breakdown of this idea later on. Please get in touch if you’re interested in workshopping it with me, and subscribe to Meditations to get notified when it comes out.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed reading this, consider sharing it with a friend who might appreciate it.

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“Guernica” - Pablo Picasso

In a previous post I talked about being extreme, but how does one actually do this?

Well, to take this idea to the extreme (and of course it has to be), you would …

You would let your home fall into disrepair, the clothes on your body disintegrate until they are barely held together, your hair grow out til it touches the floor. This is what it looks like to be extreme.

That's one way of being extreme, what's another?

Quoting Edwin Land, “If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess”. Take everything you do, and multiply it by 10x. Read a book? read it 10x. Write a tweet? spend 10 minutes on it, rewriting it over and over again until you get it perfect. Cleaning your room? Clean the rest of your house, and your garage, and your whole street while you're at it. Go for a run? run 10x the distance (ok maybe this one is a little out of hand). Meeting up with a friend? plan a bunch of other activities simultaneously, so you're doing shopping, polishing your nails, getting extra cardio with ankle weights, sketching a landscape, walking the dog, taking photos, stretching your muscles for flexibility, practicing your rap skills, planning out new recipes to make at home.

Yet another is,

Only eat foods that come from regions with an even number of vowels in them. Only allow yourself to talk about a single topic for a whole week, then switch to a different topic. Craft a bouquet solely out of handpicked petals for your loved one. Force yourself to always have to be with someone, so you schedule friends to meet with you in between activities, like a baton pass race where you are the baton. Write out every single word you speak, to force yourself to be slow to speak. Consume a burger ring every time you hear someone apologise. Cover your local park with posters saying "Have you seen this person?" with a picture of yourself on it. Make a smoothie solely out of food gathered from the wild. Assign each room in your house a different book and enact a scene from that book each time you enter.

By this point, you're probably thinking, all of this sounds insane, why would anyone do this? But that's precisely the point. You do these things so that you can be different, because no one else is going to do them. You owe it to the world to do things that no one has ever done before, because that is the point of variance. We are not all built the same, and that is intentional. We have an obligation to express the differentiation which has been so generously endowed upon us.

To be extreme is to have an immense respect for life. You do not wander through life aimlessly, assenting here and there to things without much thought. It is to be fully committed in who you are and the decisions you make, to go well beyond the point of no return. To suffer social repercussions for everything you believe in, because you are so utterly convinced, that the suffering is worth it.

Thanks for reading this edition of Meditations. I plan to do a more extensive breakdown of this idea later on. Please get in touch if you’re interested in workshopping it with me, and subscribe to Meditations to get notified when it comes out.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed reading this, consider sharing it with a friend who might appreciate it.

Share