Success
Life is a game
Regarding these two Commoncog blog articles
Takeaways:
- Scrubs: people “playing the game to play and not to win”.
- The non-virtue of this
- and eventually why you should play to win but that the rules of the game are internally set; you decide yourself which game to play and by which rules.
Noisy internet culture ideology (partly) strikes once again. I postulate:
- Life is too complicated to be a fathomable game to us.
- Trying to impose game like rules on life is a mental tool not part of a persistent reality.
- Trying to judge life trajectories based on said rules is for the most part a socio-hierarchic tool.
Life doesn’t make it easy to know what you want, thus playing by your own made up rules might take you to a place you don’t want to be.
Judging others by a equivalent set of rules is similarly strange.
The framweork is flawed. The simplification just that. Life is not a game.
The rules of the game
The rules we operate by are partially created by us and partially hand-me-downs from otherwhere.
Becoming aware of these deep internal structures and motivations, and ultimatly learning to wield the power of modification over them is a powerful skill.
As all humans modern humans come equipped at birth with some instruments that can be used to know whether one is operating one’s body correctly.
Sadly, I believe the case is that for many of us many of these instruments are out of tune and and that we’ve lost touch with certain aspects of our being.
Nutrition, hydration, movement etc. are all essential but not always perceived as important or valuable.
Emily Ratajkowski and the self
Two enlightening texts on power, womanhood, success and autonomy; control of one self.
Entertainment and social media
The massive growth of entertainment and later social media has led to fairly universal access to material depicting and narrativising other people’s lifes.
D. Foroux here argues that this content is to be regarded as just entertainment; it is not real.
He also argues, with reason I must agree, that getting rich and famous - achieving success based on such externally set narrow parameters - is mostly about luck.
His final point brings us to the notion that one should gaze inwards and develop the things we can exert any semblance of control over:
Once we let go of outcomes, we can look inward and focus on the things that truly matter: To become a good person with values, who has character, and is good at what they do.
Multi-armed bandit life
Henrik argues that finding the best way to success is about optimising the ratio between exploration and exploitation; how much you discover and experiment and how much you focus and go deep.
As with my other beliefs on this topic, I believe it all depends on what you want and how much of it you need to be content; are you content not being the best or even being any good? Would you still do it if you like it?
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