A trapped thought is infinite. It loops round and round like a proton collider, gaining weight and power over you with every lap, and has nowhere to go but back into itself.

The only exit is movement.

Charles Dickens fought insomnia and writer’s block with walking. Darwin had a “thinking path” — a gravel loop behind his house he circled until eureka. Nietzsche said only thoughts reached by walking have value.

Christopher Nolan drew the plot of Inception. J.K. Rowling did the same for The Order of the Phoenix. Da Vinci was constantly sketching. The second you move, you externalize the internal fog and give it shape, the thought stops being infinite.

It becomes understandable.

Moving a thought out of your head acts as a filtration system. It lets you see the cracks, the weaknesses your mental masturbation obscured, and gives breathing room for improvement. The loop becomes a line, an identifiable one, with an end.

Stop trying to solve problems by sitting still or by spending more time at your desk. Walk. Say it out loud. Put it on the page.

Movement as a way of life

The more I examine my daily routine, the more I realize how much of it centers around physical movement: rock climbing, walking, cardio (jump rope/rowing), soccer, push up variations, pull ups.

As a creative I perform best when clear-headed and have unconsciously built my life around movement, because movement is the gateway into clarity.

Firstly, movement is the basis for flow — as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is peak performance, and is essential to well-being — and the more I experience flow through movement, the more I can replicate it when writing.

Flow is also fulfillment in a bottle, and chasing it instead of happiness will lead to a life of excellence as flow is a by-product of teetering on the edge of the impossible, by living a life filled with constant challenge — like Napoleon and his conquests, or Churchill and his never-ending battles in politics — you are forced to grow in the moment. Physical movement is a microcosm of this idea, it’s a conscious, self-induced replication of fight-or-flight challenges.

As Mihaly wrote: “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Secondly, bodily practices — calisthenics, hiking, sports, yada yada — are great tools for skill development, they open you up to new ways of seeing the world, and are often social hubs you can frequent to create relationships with like-minded people.

When you have a clear goal in mind, alchemizing separate disciplines into your routine will accelerate your progress. Practicing a single discipline, unless you’re restricting yourself to reach the 0.001%, is constricting to both body and mind.

Take me, for example: I’m quite tall (standing at 6’4 and 190lbs I look like more like a wobbly balloon guy than the thick redwood mass you’d imagine from my fridge-sized description) and want to feel good in my body, not just look good, but feel light, agile, and powerful.

Jump roping and rowing are the perfect cardio-focused movements for me because — I fucking hate running — and they instill in me a sense of rhythm and lightness. I’ve become more agile and graceful on the soccer pitch thanks to my consistent jump roping. Rowing helps me build a more powerful back for great posture, strength for rock climbing, and is great for lean muscle mass.

Each movement serves as a distinct piece of my look-good-feel-good puzzle.

Rock climbing makes it easy for an introvert like me to socialize, develop problem-solving skills (projecting a climb demands breaking down the route, holds, and correctly identifying, usually through trial and error, the correct sequence of holds), and will hopefully get my back and forearms swole.

I’ve played soccer my entire life. In retrospect, it’s the seed of my passion for movement. Running and training during quarantine instilled in me a love for fitness and challenge. I speak of movement like crack, I simply can’t imagine living a sedentary lifestyle, the benefits of exercise are too wonderful.

As with the mental arts, the more ways you move, the more ways you have of operating in the world. The skilled grandmaster operates on a strategic dimension and the musician on a rhythm one. Movement is a learning tool and a powerful driver for creative fuel.

Creation is agency practiced

The reality of “creation” and creativity is far rawer and more actionable than you imagine. Creation isn’t about creating something from nothing but your raw, creative juice, and is more akin to practiced agency — the act of imprinting your will onto the world.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: vice enters our lives through idleness.

It is in the mundane that procrastination seeps in. The more you allow procrastination to reign over your days, the more power it will hold over you, until it becomes a way of life; everything too scary to start and nothing too urgent to finish.

Creation is the antidote to this mediocrity, and is a tool for improving character and life experience.

When you take consistent action, you realize the world is a malleable place. It responds to your touch. By consistent action I don’t mean consistent success or consistently climbing Everest.

Conversing is action. Cleaning is action. Learning is action. Writing is action. To become more creative is to accept that you are, by nature, all-powerful. We are limited only by atoms and ourselves.

Creativity isn’t about doing things well, bu about building confidence in your ability to do things, even badly. Like readiness, creativity comes to those willing to start scared.

Resistance is a liar

Between you and every worthwhile action you could take stands a lone force, Steven Pressfield called it Resistance — that’s right, capital R! I like Steven because he observed something intriguing about Resistance… he noticed that the worthwhile actions aren’t hard in and of themselves — sitting down to act is the hardest part.

The more mindful I become, the more I see Resistance’s ugly mug attempt to Sisyphus me to mediocrity.

Every time I sit down to work, Resistance, like Odysseus’ sirens, comes onto me seductively, promising me dreams of comfort if only I went and did something else.

Your internal reasoning during this intense micro-moment will determine your course of action. Allow Resistance to win enough battles and, as with procrastination, succumbing to friction becomes a way of life, everything looks too hard, too scary to attempt. So you stay stuck and the sirens stay sucking.

But had you started, Resistance would’ve dropped quite quickly. Sirens can’t tolerate the will of a strong man.

Fear is always present before action, and disappears inside it. Feeling “ready” is a by-product of acting when “unready,” being ready means being prepared to try and prepared to fail. Fear comes from attachment to the outcome.

Resistance leads you to believe that your self-worth is somehow tied to the result of your actions. Disregard this vain whisper. The only failure is in retreating when it’s time for action.

You gain confidence after starting scared and confused and unready. You learn that you can do things while being unsure of their outcome and… nothing happens, you don’t die, you don’t get shunned by anyone, nobody really notices, or cares. You are free to try and fail and learn and to do so as many times as is needed.

As Rumi said: “the path reveals itself as you walk it”.

Decisiveness

Introspection is self-imposed friction. The more you think about your problems, the less time you devote to, actually, solving them.

Reality distorts around action. In studying the greats of history I noticed an outlier pattern: each, from Napoleon to Steve Jobs, worked with furious pace and high standards of excellence.

Steve Jobs was famous for his “reality-distortion” field. When told by his team that something simply couldn’t be done, he shrugged it off and told them to find a way.

As he was revolutionizing the car industry, Henry Ford pushed his workers to that same limit. Napoleon, for one, didn’t believe in the impossible. “Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools,” he said.

Their ideas may not have been perfect, but they were tested against reality and history is proof that these ideas prevailed. As Patton wrote: “a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

Make as many decisions as possible. I learned this from Alex Hormozi during my bro-cast phase. The more decisions you make, and the faster you make them, the faster you move through life. While your competition is taking 3 months to make a decision you’re already stacked 25. You make the call in the moment, deliberate a bit sure, but fuck it if you’re “wrong,” the worst outcome is that you learn what not to do.

Stop waiting for 90-100% of the information you wish you had. Click the big red button when you’re at 50-70% of what you wish you knew — a fast wrong decision can be course-corrected, a slow wrong one never buys back the time it cost.

The goal isn’t perfect decision, but fierce execution. Agency is a superpower.

Attention is intention

As we’ve established, you can’t build from nothing. The warmth of a fire comes first and foremost from the chopped wood. You need inputs — and every input you let in becomes an output.

So consuming was never really about how much, and more so about what.

Where attention goes, energy flows. What you pay attention to is what you worship. What you worship is what will be reflected back onto you. As within, so without.

Attention is more important than time, because attention is how you spend your time.

All the powerful attention-economy companies take your money because they control your attention. Modern society has taken the conscious control of attention and incinerated it, our attention spans are fucked and we have no direction, rendering most of us unable to dictate the course of our own lives.

Let that sink in [you hear a door knock]. Let it in.

99% of your problems stem from your inability to control your own mind.

To take back the reins and move violently towards your goal demands that you take back control of your attention — this must come before trying to “improve your attention span” or go through any “focus guides” because it doesn’t matter how many roses you plant if your garden is weed-infested.

Clear out the junk first. I recommend deleting all social media. If you don’t want to, at least remove them from your phone, or set some screen time limit, you’re a grown ass man, don’t let some shitty app control your life.

Every single piece of content you consume is slowly molding you, every video and article is meant to persuade you into believing something. Understand this and carefully craft your consumption-diet toward the beneficial, i.e. what will move you toward your goal.

Once you’ve cleared the junk, you must become obsessed with focus. Focus must become a way of life. Focus on matters of only the utmost importance. Most “problems” or whatever drama bullshit you may have are unimportant and, given time, will resolve themselves.

Understand this: feed your mind slop (through what you tolerate, through what you read, watch, listen to, pay attention to) and you will think slop, see slop, and become slop. Ignorance is bliss in our times for the simple reason that everything we consume is engineered to be addictive, not beneficial.

Titles and images are engineered to be emotionally striking — omg I can’t believe this, I really should click on this to find out more huh! Short-form content is engineered like a casino, its sole purpose is to Succubus its way into your soul and strip you of any originality.

Reduce cognitive burden to null so that your attention is saved for matters of importance — matters such as health, family, financial freedom, and whatever your specific goals may be in those categories.

Focus on you. Your craft and goal. Do not look over your shoulder. It doesn’t matter what political games the Epstein-cunts play, it doesn’t matter if something terrible happened on the news, it doesn’t matter, not because the world isn’t important, but because you have no power to change 99% of what you consume.

Feed your obsessions

The only question left now is what you should point your new-found motion to. The answer is simple: what you can’t help pointing it at.

Naval, on his Sell the Truth episode, says that when he starts obsessing over one thing, be it a new startup idea or running, he feeds it. Reading everything there is to read about it, learning, researching, practicing, implementing, improving, obsessing over this one idea.

Then the obsession fades a little, and you find a way to keep the practice in your life, as a fundamental part of who you are.

Paul Graham wrote that great work is done by following your curiosity. “Curiosity,” he says, “is the best guide — it never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth your attention. if you’re interested, you’re not astray.”

Above all, what you create should interest you.

The beauty of following your obsessions is that they inevitably link and overlap. Movement becomes a way to clear the mind for creative work. And the more you follow your obsessions, the more you can filter every experience through your new-found skills — you gain new mental models, new angles from which to strike the world.

The more you obsess, the better your decisions, the better your life.

The greatest creative act is that of creating yourself

WARNING: this article has never been about making or doing things.

Every act of agency and decision to create is a chisel strike on you.

Michelangelo said he didn’t create his statues. He merely saw the figure trapped in marble and carved away everything that wasn’t it. You are the marble.

You are both sculptor and clay.

You have control over everything in your life. Just as you can choose anger and jealousy, you can choose clarity and peace. You wake up every day and mold your life with the choices you make — life is what you make of the little time between birth and death.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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While he was perfecting his magnum opus, the Mona Lisa, 51 year old Italian painter, scientist, anatomist, and inventor Leonardo da Vinci spent the better part of his time underneath the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. The now 738 year-old establishment was treasured by Leonardo for its corpses.

Why?

Because he was a painter, of course.

He wanted to deconstruct a smile, and to do so with surgical precision. This required he peel the skin off corpses, in doing so he could clearly identify which muscles pull the lip and which nerves are active when smiling, he wanted to identify every detail — just what physically manifests on the face when happy?

Leonardo’s artistic work was magnified by his scientific rigor. The plants in his paintings were terrifyingly accurate — look at the meadow in his Virgin of the Rocks and you can name the flowers, columbine, primrose, greater stitchwort, by species. In an age when every other painter saw background greenery as mere filler, Leonardo was botanically exact. And his Mona Lisa would be held to this same standard of excellence.

He cut open many bodies in his life, brazenly paying grave robbers to bring him more. From these dissections he filled hundreds of pages with drawings of human muscle and anatomy. Near the end of Leonardo’s life Antonio de Beatis, secretary to a traveling cardinal, was shown the notebooks and came away stunned. Leonardo, he wrote, had “written of anatomy with such detail… in a way that has never yet been done by anyone else” — and told him, that he had dissected more than thirty bodies.

The Mona Lisa wasn’t merely the work of a painter, but the work of an anatomist who could paint. With Leonardo you can’t separate the two, or three, or the five interests that made him legendary: as an artist he used science to understand the body; as an inventor he used birds to understand flight.

Leonardo is the polymath. The Renaissance polymath. Not some Substack self-proclaimed polymath chud with a long résumé of half-interests — a little Reddit moderation here, a little science experimentation there, with a sprinkle of cold-approaching when courage flares.

A polymath is guided by curiosity, sure, but the force of his curiosity is deeper and more potent than our Reddit chud. The polymath understands his curiosity, guides it, and allows his interests to bleed into each other, like how the sky freehands gorgeous sunsets by spontaneously mixing crimson red, clementine orange, and daffodil yellow — beauty and skill are found in the spontaneous mixture of seemingly separate elements.

Every domain the polymath touches becomes a new way of seeing all the others. The deeper he goes in any given one, the more he conquers what matters most: his own ignorance.

The Fox & The Hedgehog

Natural selection is a breeding ground for effective survival strategies. Every species on Earth has been through the wringer, and Mother Nature categorizes her infants quite clearly: every living thing sits somewhere on a spectrum.

On one end, the specialist, an animal that’s maxxed out a single stat. On the other hand, the generalist, who spreads across everything. And Mother, cold accountant as she is, renders her judgment swiftly to both parties.

Consider the specialist at its most magnificent: the giant panda. The giant panda is the Mona Lisa of single-purpose engineering. Its entire anatomy, akin to a bear whose rebuilt its jaw, gut, and manufactured itself a wrist bone that serves as a fake thumb, is built solely to eat and process one plant — bamboo is 99% of its diet.

The same can be said of the koala with eucalyptus. Absolute tanks of the game.

In evolutionary terms they are also fat chuds, dead men walking if you will. Their entire survival strategy depends on the world’s balance. Turn the thermostat on just a tad or chop down their forest or create any unprompted change, and the panda just… does nothing. It starves.

No adaptation, no changeup, just straight ass.

Verdict received: specialization is an evolutionary dead end.

As Robert Heinlein wrote, “specialization is for insects.”

Now let’s examine the chad generalist; the rat, raccoon, crow, the human.

Quite unremarkable in most aspects, we have no claws, no fur, no night-vision, some of us no bitches — but we’re able to eat mostly anything, live mostly anywhere, and adapt spontaneously to ever-shifting circumstances. Boring, but un-killable.

Sixty-six million years ago when an asteroid the size of a mountain struck the Earth and the sky caught fire and forests burned and plants died, the most specialized, most dominant creature during that time, the dinosaur, died with them.

The creatures that evolved out of the ash were small, boring, generalist mammals who could eat seeds, fungus, and insects.

We are descendants of generalists. Polymathy is the oldest, greatest, most marvelous evolutionary strategy there is. “The fox knows many things,” wrote Archilochus, “but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The many-models mind is able to hold contradictory ideas and has fluid shifting skill-sets, allowing it to operate in reality far better than the hedgehogs who cram every problem through one grand (spiky) theory.

Second verdict received: generalists rule the Earth.

The Latticework

A mental model is a way of thinking that helps you interpret and understand the world; a toolbox where each tool handles a different kind of problem. The more of them you have, the more angles you can filter a problem through, and the more complete the world becomes.

As we’ve established, the specialist has one model, and to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, i.e. a limited quantity of mental models restricts your ability to thrive.

Warren Buffett’s right hand man, Charlie Munger, built his great fortune off mental models. His whole schtick was what he called a latticework of mental models: ideas drawn from physics, biology, psychology, economics, and history, all strung together so that any problem could be filtered through all of them at once. “Eighty or ninety models,” he said, “will carry about ninety percent of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person.”

His definition of knowledge was simple: not knowing many things, but building a structure through which many things can be seen clearly at once.

That’s all this is about: the more lenses you have, the higher the chance your responses to life’s unpredictability are of being correct. Better cold calls, better reads on people, better bets.

Game theory is a lens. Evolution is a lens. Supply and demand. Thermodynamics. Stoic dichotomy of control. Metaphysics. History.

Each field you go deep in broadens your way of seeing all the others.

Darwin, for example, didn’t come up with natural selection from biology… he drew it from an economist, Thomas Malthus, who was writing about human population. The structure of benzene was found because Kekulé dreamed of a snake biting its own tail. Da Vinci, as you’ll recall, used birds to understand flight.

History shows that the highest leverage skill is, and will continue to be, connection.

You create inexplicable outcomes when you operate on a dimension normies cannot see, a dimension they don’t have the keys to.

One caution, however: the map is not the territory. A model is a representation of reality, not reality itself — you must hold your ideas about the world loosely, and when one stops fitting the world or your current problem, drop it.

Models aren’t meant to serve as trophies you collect and collect and point to when others question your intellectualism. The deeper use for models is to triangulate effective solutions to life’s problems by shooting from multiple angles onto a single target.

Making the conscious unconscious

Mastery, driven by learning, comes down to two things: pattern recognition and pattern execution.

Recognition is knowing what to do, when, and why — the pattern. Execution is knowing how — the mechanics. In soccer, recognition is vision to see a through-ball; execution is being able to correctly shift your bodyweight, strike the spot that’ll create the desired spin, correctly dose the power, hold off the defender, and do all of this in the space of 0.5 seconds.

Mastery is unconsciously knowing what to do and being able to act upon it instantaneously.

When you practice, you’re making the process unconscious. You are taking something that used to grab you by the balls and demand your full, screaming attention, and smoothing it down to the automatic part of the nervous system until you can do it unconsciously.

A beginner spends 100% of his conscious attention on the basics: where are my fingers, where do I kick, yada yada. A master spends only 5%, which frees the other 95% for a dimension of the game the beginner cannot see: space, timing, energy, predictions, the feel.

The master has more room in which to operate. He’s made the conscious unconscious and bought himself space to operate on the higher, more impactful, dimensions of the game.

That’s what polymathy is all about: driving each skill down into the unconscious, clearing bandwidth, and aiming the freed attention at the next skill. You drill a lens or skill to the point of normalcy — it’s just the way you see the world now — and continue onward.

Before we get into the actionable steps you’ve been feining for, there are two rules you must follow.

First, build mastery while doing the real thing (or as close as possible to the real thing), do not limit yourself to “practice,” it’s often a fine form of mental masturbation. The type of practice you’re most scared of, the one closest to real high-stakes performance, is the highest ROI, highest XP mission.

Second: know your craft.

If the body is the tool — think soccer, piano, weightlifting — the mechanics, mastery over bodily functions, should come first.

If the mind is the tool — writing, philosophy, code, strategic thinking — the understanding, pattern recognition, comes first.

What mastery does is intertwine mental model and action. Like how self and action fuse, and disappear, when in flow, so too will mental models become infused into your actions. The master musician inhabits music theory when he plays.

He’s studied it so thoroughly that it’s gone unconscious, and is embodied in his playing.

Practical steps to building polymathy (the fun part):

I. Feed your obsessions

Obsession is fuel for mastery.

Naval calls it feeding the obsession — when something grabs you, you follow that bitch all the way down: read everything there is to read, practice, research, implement, until the fever breaks.

Life is like a succession of short stories, of short obsessions, every one of them bringing you new skills and perspectives. Every one serving the next.

I’ve had soccer, then Youtube, now Substack and writing. I don’t know any other way to live. I follow my obsessions and build skills that will help me succeed in that field and those skills then feed my next obsession.

One rule: don’t obsess at random. Follow the skills that are on the intersection of interest, profit, and leverage. Ideally it’s something that can actually pay, that’s adapted to how the world is moving, and that genuinely interests you.

As Paul Graham wrote, “if it interests you, you aren’t astray.”

Greatness is the destination, curiosity is the path and obsession the fuel.

II. Literally just do the real thing

Vice enters our lives through idleness and so does mediocrity — most people think and think and think and masturbate around doing the thing, in waiting they allow analysis paralysis to grow and fear comes to rule their life.

Fear is slain by action. When it comes to mastery and confidence, the sword is mightier than the pen. No amount of thinking about mastery will build it.

Social skills are built in social situations.
A jump shot is built by shooting.
Articulation is built by writing.

Agency is fuel for confidence, personal growth, and fulfillment.

In doing things, especially things you’re bad at, you realize the world is more malleable than you think; it’s a giant sandbox, and you are king of your own imagination. You can just… do stuff. “If it is humanly possible,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “consider it to be within your reach.”

You do what you can’t until you learn you can. And surround yourself with agentic people, you are the average of the five people you spend time with, and people who just do things have a mystical way of bending reality around them.

III. Steal from the greats

You are not the first person to want what you want. Someone has already done it, or something close, and left their tracks in the mud. You are to shamelessly follow these tracks. As the saying goes “good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Steal your dad’s warm charisma, your favorite teacher’s authoritative demeanor, your grandpa’s discipline, sprinkle in your mom’s kind words and Rock Lee’s inspirational way of life. Theft is fuel for improvement.

When a young Benjamin Franklin decided his writing was weak, he took the finest essays he could find — the Spectator papers — and jotted the bares bones of each argument, put them away for days, then rewrote the whole thing from memory, comparing his version to the master’s to find exactly where he fell short.

Take apart what made the greats great. Steal their beliefs. Apply what fits your needs. Keep what comes out yours. Originality is dead, always has been, steal like an artist baby.

IV. Second-brain

Franklin’s trick worked because it forced one thing… articulation.

You don’t truly know something until you can articulate it in your own words. If your writing, or speech, is muddy, so is your thinking.

So build somewhere to think.

A second brain — mine is the usual productivity nerd Obsidian vault, my own library of Alexandria I consult when writing these essays — where every valuable idea is kept and explored, and dissected and connected to other valuable ideas.

The greats of the past all had a form of this, usually in the form of a commonplace book — they had a second-brain but not Megan Fox or Obsidian! W progress.

Steal from them and build your own.

Whatever your second-brain may be, I recommend three steps: capture what you learn in your own language (notes should never be copy-pasted); then close the source and write a summary from memory (it will be bad but that’s good, because the cracks in your thinking are how you map areas for improvement); then turn the concepts into questions and come back to answer them.

Capture, compress, interrogate.

And write mini-essays — where you explain an idea as if teaching a child. In this way you practice the Feynman Technique, articulation, and value proposition — three high-ROI skills in one practice.

The second-brain is where ideas and domains literally connect and bleed into each other.

V. Get in the grain

Your environment is more powerful than your willpower. Most people will never do all of the above because of their shiny phone and shiny social media and shiny distractions — greener grass everywhere guys! — 99% of us live in an environment that makes focus impossible.

Instead, strive to make distraction impossible: block sites, turn off notifications — I’ve had DND turned on for as long as I’ve had a phone, I don’t understand how you can live with something beeping in your pocket, DEMANDING your attention every few minutes — work in a focus-inducing environment, find the right music for work sessions, create a ritual that gets you in the zone (I listen to the melody version of Shock The World before every work block).

And rest. When you take short breaks while learning, your brains replays what you’ve been focused on up to twenty times faster than you performed it, that quick rest is a great way to exponentiate your learning speed.

So work in deep, undistracted blocks — then stop, and let the unconscious clean up.

For more on focus:

VI. Surround yourself with like-minded people

An underrated, misunderstood really, part of polymathy is environment. It was no accident that Da Vinci’s genius, next to Michelangelo’s and Botticelli’s, flourished in Renaissance Florence.

The individual brilliance of these men was a result of scenius.

Scenius, a term coined by English songwriter and musician Brian Eno, describes the genius that belongs not to an individual but to a scene: a place so dense with ideas and rival talent that simply being there makes you greater than you could ever be alone.

Florence was pure scenius.

A city of a hundred thousand that somehow produced men we still revere today, some 500 years later. Da Vinci was watching Michelangelo who was watching Botticelli, each one stealing and learning from the others, all of them bathed in so many different ideas and, most importantly, a collective standard for excellence so high that greatness became almost ordinary.

That’ll be all from me. Get to building now.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

Weekly articles Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday 10:00am PST.

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Great men are akin to sharks that smell blood. They didn’t think about “how” or “why” or “what if.” They smell blood and they attack. Instinct, not careless animal instinct, but intuition refined by preparation and repetition, precedes consideration for danger.

Sharks and lions and conquerors aren’t introspective beings. They might disappoint Marcus Aurelius, but what they lack in superficial philosophical thought, they make up for with pure, raw action. They don’t need to categorize their strengths and weaknesses or “optimize” their lifestyle or psychoanalyze their chud life. All of those are substitutes for the real hunt, ways to feel progress without accomplishing anything tangible, like endlessly sketching a cathedral without ever laying a single brick.

The more I write about introspectiveness, the more I realize how hindered I’ve been by my own mental masturbation. The action-oriented version of me is surely miles ahead now, while I, blinded by my own ignorance, continue dragging my thick mess of thoughts behind.

Self-psychoanalysis is (mostly) a waste of time. A cope, self-imposed friction between you and the real work — the brick laying, in-reality-blood-and-sweat work.

All great conquerors, past and present, lived a life of flow. Of presence. They faced constant challenges — be it war or the high-stakes, high-stress environment of mainstream sports, that demanded they improve — every day an opportunity to break through the chrysalis of yesterday.

Challenges imposed by reality, not some dream-like philosophical thought experiment, challenges like starting an online business, attempting a bench PR, training for a marathon, demand in the moment evolution and adaptation. This kind of repeated effort creates confidence, ease.

This kind of instinct and playfulness is earned. Flow only arises when challenge = skill. The best can have fun in extreme, high-pressure all-eyes-on-me moments because… they’re the best — they’ve trained themselves to be.

An idiot in motion will achieve more than a genius at rest.

As a shark is playful in its movements, so will you learn through effort to drop your shoulders, breathe, and…. [exhales] relax. Playfulness is the frequency of abundance. The more you live in the present, the more you live period. Life isn’t happening in the frameworks or systems you have.

Operating from instinct is the fruit of mastery.

Stop thinking about mastery. Get to building it.

Attention & energy economics

Napoleon would, after reading a letter, let it drop to the ground, as a brown leaf does in autumn, not wasting a pico-second crumpling it up or throwing it away. This may seem trivial, but over a lifetime — especially one spent as ferociously active as Napoleon’s — small acts of energy conservation compound.

Napoleon was adhering to the principle of energy economics: for an animal to survive, it needs to take in more energy over the course of its life than it expends.

To survive is good, but to thrive is even better. Which is why we must apply, as Napoleon did to energy, the principle of attention economics to our lives: i.e. on top of consciously preserving energy, we must consciously preserve attention.

Your life is a map of where your attention has been; where attention goes, energy flows.

Energy spent is a by-product of attention spent.

Focusing only on matters of the utmost importance and disregarding the rest (most matters) is how most of the greats operated: Oppenheimer and Einstein, when working on literal reality-shifting projects, knew better than to trade focus for cheap entertainment.

Napoleon lowered cognitive burden on anything inessential to absolute null. Pre-firing small decisions — meal prepping, preparing outfits — is how we can apply this same principle to our modern lives and it’s how conservation compounds; leaving you light and sharp for deep work.

As discussed in A Guide To Being Exceptional, this needs to become a way of life.

How you do anything is how you do everything. To master focus, it must be applied to your every action. Single-mindedness and presence are skills and must be practiced rigorously. Don’t study while listening to a podcast, don’t read with a second-monitor video.

Just focus.

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For the simple reason that our economy revolves around attention, conscious control of one’s own attention is the most valuable skill of the 21st century. Companies like Meta make $200 BILLION a year selling predatory hyper-targeted ads because they control your attention. Whoever controls the flow of attention effectively controls the world.

Gaining deliberate control of your attention is the first step to, alongside clarity, intellectual and personal freedom. He conquers who conquers himself. If you allow the loudest voice or the most dopamine-inducing edits to control your attention you will remain adrift, unsure, anxious.

Never waste attention. Grip it. Steer it.

Be ruthless and precise with the inessential. Given time, most “emergency problems” will fix themselves. Focus instead on your craft, as Marcus Aurelius said:

“Do what nature requires at this moment. Start straight away, if that is in your power: don't look over your shoulder to see if people will know.”

Don’t look over your shoulder. 99% of news is garbage hyper-emotional extremes designed to distract you. Same with most content on most platforms. Control your attention. Direct it on matters that move you forward in this world. On self-education, on human psychology, on mastering your sport, your craft, your art, on becoming well read, on developing an elegant yet powerful physique.

Focus.

You are the protagonist of this world

In the press conference post José Aldo slaughter, Conor McGregor was asked how he had so masterfully predicted the fight’s outcome, he had done so the previous Thursday:

"If you can see it here [points to head], and you have the courage enough to speak it, it will happen." He continues: "A lot of times people believe in certain things, but they keep it to themselves, they don't put it out there. If you truly believe it and become vocal with it, you are creating that law of attraction and it will become reality."

Belief is the basis for success.

Your self-image is the ceiling for what you can achieve. Conor’s self-image has no ceiling, it naturally followed that his achievements didn’t either. Every great of the past believed in his own fortune and destiny, almost to the point of madness. One must be irrational to chase a future he has no evidence for.

“If it is humanly possible,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “consider it to be within your reach.”

Every figure you idolize is not a mountain blocking you, but a map showing the path.

They believed in their own greatness before the world did. Why shouldn’t you?

Maybe you do have a gift, a talent, an idea that you could change the world.

Maybe the only obstacle is you.

“A person's destiny is something you look back at afterward, not something to be known in advance.” — Haruki Murakami

Destiny only makes sense in retrospect.

You can’t know your destiny in advance, so believing in requires pure audacity — the trademark of greatness. You must bet on yourself before you have any proof. All of the greats operated from this irrationality. It’s as vital to any climb as the sun is to the flora surrounding you.

Action spurred by an irrational belief (one founded without evidence) in yourself will create evidence to support that belief. What your peers will acclaim as “foresight” was simply audacity; the guts to chase what could be before it is.

You must believe yourself rich before the world proves it to you.
You must believe yourself a conqueror before the world proves it to you.

When you’re audacious, you become a shining star everyone looks to. There’s a certain romanticism in doing things that’ve never been done — most of us love adventures and the idea of pushing frontiers into new lands and knowledge.

People follow and respect those willing to try novel things, because we know that putting yourself out there requires risk.

Definiteness of purpose

Stumbling across a dump of a village, a soldier looks to Caesar and asks “could you imagine living in a dump like this?” to which Caesar responds: “I would rather be the first man here than the second man in Rome.”

This was a man who knew exactly what he wanted. This clarity fueled his confidence. He indebted himself, so much money that you couldn’t have repaid it given five lifetimes, he bet on himself, way beyond rational men — if the invasion of Gaul and the return to Rome hadn’t been successful, he would’ve been destroyed.

But he wasn’t. He succeeded.

Having studied hundreds of successful men, Napoleon Hill wrote that “definiteness of purpose” was the common quality. “What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve,” he wrote.

Anxiety is a symptom of purposelessness. When your chief aim is definite, you gain clarity — which easily feeds action. When you can clearly envision the peak, the climb up isn’t so bad.

For the wandering souls, I recommend letting your curiosity guide the way.

As Paul Graham said: “If you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you’ll be proof against distraction. If you’re interested, you’re not astray.”

If you’re interested, you’re not astray.

Once you’ve found what you desire, you must chase it relentlessly. Bet on yourself. Burn the boats as Hernán Cortés did.

Combine definiteness of purpose with belief. Go all-in. You will be forced to undergo tremendous internal growth, which is the catalyst for external success.

Selective irrationality

(This idea can be applied to both the individual and collective)

This is the single defining trait of every great individual and collective force. Selective irrationality means having a definitive set of values you won’t compromise on. No matter what happens, these values are untouchable, they are the driving force behind innovation, progress, and conquest.

Selective irrationality is the choice to manufacture beliefs in a universe that offers no absolutes. The strong — both individual and collective — have forged their values and refuse to negotiate. A system without shared, coercive beliefs dissolves under hardship.

Stories are the ultimate tool for cohesion and influence — society is maintained by stories; money, countries, religion, all are stories we choose to believe in. Epic stories bring people together, nations without a strong shared story are weaker for it. “A civilization doesn’t survive on just meat and wine — it must have ideas beyond itself,” wrote the Brothers Krynn.

Modern society, especially in the West, has little selective irrationality.

Individualism has uprooted fundamental, shared beliefs upon which empires of the past were built and the molotov mosh-pit of politics and social media pit us against one another.

In times of real crisis, which we haven’t known since WW2 and the Cold War (times during which society displayed more selective irrationality), we will struggle unless we become cohesively irrational and defend our values.

On an individual level, selective irrationality begins with standards.

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Standards

Excellence is a habit. It is practiced and maintained via standards — the things you tolerate from yourself and others.

Standards are, like beliefs, the structure of identity. You are what you do, you are what you think, what you love. What you tolerate and demand from those aspects of the self will determine your energy and attitude — which the Universe feels and responds to.

What do you allow yourself to think? Do you indulge in negative emotional cycles?
Do you allow yourself to cheat, slip?

Standard matters because what you find normal ultimately finds you.

On a collective note, great collective forces have used extreme standards to push the frontiers of human innovation and progress. The Roman legions, for example, carried with them a golden eagle, which they had to defend to the death from enemy troops.

Under no circumstances must our eagle fall into enemy hands. We fight for this eagle. It is our pride and joy. Such standards drove the Romans to excel on the battlefield.

Companies like NASA, in the beginning and during the space-race, had this extreme competitiveness and cut-throat culture. It’s having a culture that values excellence that drives... excellence. The top companies today, SpaceX, for example which is threatening NASA’s space supremacy, thrive on this culture of extreme excellence.

It’s quite like selective irrationality. Selecting excellence as your uncompromising shared (and individual) value will drive excellence and force peak performance. Organizations, those that wish to be the best, should always be meritocracies. Merit must be valued above all if you want excellence.

Value doing things well. Value excellence.

Of thought. Of action. Of taste.

Excellence is a form of self-love.

A lot of these principles I learned from Nic Munoz’s podcast (great guy he’s also on Substack) → These Leaders Will Teach You to Literally Win at EVERYTHING

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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An inexplicable, mystical, marvelous force of nature that bends the very fabric of reality — without meaning to, it attracts everything in its vicinity. This force we can trace to every great leader and conqueror. From Napoleon to Alexander the Great, from the Mongols to the Romans — the conquerors of old possessed a natural gift for distorting reality.

Fittingly, the Romans — although they had no understanding of gravity —  called the weight of a powerful man gravitas.

The force that exudes from a great soul and reverberates in the hearts of those around him.

Alongside gravitas, the Romans had dignitas (the worth of man) and auctoritas (the value/standing that worth conferred). For a great man to be great, he had to possess all three. Someone with such internal strength that it cascaded onto the world, tearing and molding it, as a powerful river does to any boulder in its path, was someone fit to hold power.

As Within, So Without

Aura and personality — vital components to charisma — are the felt after-taste of a full cup.

Our full cup is an emotionally stable internal state.

Understand this: everything is internal.

Everything can be solved by looking inward and steering your emotions, beliefs, and thoughts — all of which contribute to frequency, aka: identity, self-image, self-concept. To create reality you must first create, or re-create, yourself because the reality you experience is a direct consequence of who you are and the way you perceive the world.

To me self-improvement is a fundamental necessity to anyone desiring external success.

Let’s assume the position of Michael Scotch, a corporate worker — yes, the usual trope, but plenty enough for our purposes: let’s assume he wants a raise.

In order to get this raise, he must be recognized as a good, valuable employee to his company. The definition of “valuable” may differ from context to context but let us go with these terms:

• increase profits

• increase customer satisfaction

• improve work culture

• demonstrate ethical virtues

For any of these to occur (external results), our office worker must undergo internal growth.

Increasing profits may demand extra work hours — which demand discipline.

Increasing customer satisfaction demands charisma and persuasion — which demand a desire to learn and critically assess oneself.

Fundamentally, everything in Michael Scotch’s life is determined by who he is: the contents of his character, the contents of his mind, and the contents of his soul.

Everything within will be reflected without.

This idea, dear reader, shines light on the fundamental nature of charisma: it cannot be faked.

Your unconscious internal state will always leak out and steer your life — it’s through will and discipline that our unconscious is tamed and steered. Without efforts to improve one’s internal state, it will come to “direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Your internal state is a mass. The three following principles are the three ways that mass bends the world around you.

Conviction

During my brainstorming process, the first image that flew onto this draft was of one of my friends. No place is better to start digging than from familiarity, so I got to work dissecting his character.

I can confidently tell you that his defining trait, and the root of his charismatic nature, is conviction. Everything he does, he does with absolute faith that it is the right thing.

“I just say what I say. I am who I am. They know it. I know it,” he said to me in the middle of a discussion on dating. For better or worse, he’s unapologetic in what he does — a trait that inspires respect in some and disdain in others.

Conviction is similar to the Latin word fides — meaning trust and good faith. Trust, particularly self-trust, means strength, and the strength of your internal state leads to your reality.

Whether you like it or not, and whether you agree with their ideas or not, people who speak and move with conviction draw admiration. As noted, they may draw disdain or fear, but usually from those who have identified in this conviction something they themselves are lacking — usually leading to ressentiment.

It’s better to attempt something, and risk failure, with conviction than to never step up.

We applaud these people who stand up, as there is personal risk in doing so.

By standing up — as soon as you make it known who you are and what you believe — you will cast a shadow. An antithetical element in opposition to your beliefs. By attempting to rise, you risk to fall.

For many people, it takes years of self-study to learn what they believe to be true. This process is made infinitely harder by the attention-economy and how informationally obese we have become. Now more than ever, the importance of defining fundamental personal truths (about religion, about what you can achieve, about life itself) has never been more vital.

No Love Island AI slop burger chud has ever been charismatic. Because he has never defined what it is that makes him who he is.

Conviction will also lead to intellectual honesty and opportunities (ones you would have missed staying dick-in-hand, afraid of speaking up).

An important part of charisma is being able to hold contradictory beliefs simultaneously — which is imo the definition of intellectual honesty.

When I think of this watercolor blend between intellectualism and charisma, being articulate often comes to mind.

In a sense, articulation is just a subset of charisma because articulation, fundamentally, is about saying what you currently believe to be true with conviction while understanding that your perspective may be limited, and that growth is always possible.

You can believe yourself strong and powerful while coming to terms with your own imperfection. You can chase perfection without believing in it.

Conviction in your ability to do and grow is what will lead to opportunities. Doors that remain closed to those afraid to step out of the cave will open to you. Being able to articulate your own value, be it on the Internet or in the workspace or in the dating market, is about conviction.

Detachment

In the sacred Indian region of Kurukshetra stands a prince named Arjuna — some say the finest archer alive. He’s fighting in the epic Mahabharata war, the oldest war India remembers.

Riding his chariot between the two armies, he freezes.

Across the field stands his enemy, across the field also stand his cousins, teachers, and friends.

To win this war, he would have to kill his own blood.

He drops his bow to the ground, unable to move. He would rather die than fight.

His charioteer was Krishna — a god in disguise.

“You have a right to your actions,” he says to Arjuna, “but never to the fruits of your actions.”

Arjuna picked up his bow and fought bravely. He fought with everything he had, detached from any idea of victory or defeat. His duty was to fight, and he would do so without attaching any positive or negative connotation to it.

He fought detached. He fought well.

For a while, this idea confused me.

I couldn’t just “not care.” I really really want to achieve great things, how am I supposed to get anything done if I’m care-free?

The click for me was the following: detachment isn’t something you magically click into, it’s not a puzzle piece that will somehow just fit into who you currently are. It’s something like a practice, a practiced internal state and belief that with or without [enter thing you want] I will be fine.

Again, detachment stems from a full cup.

A life rich with growth, friendship, and purpose is an abundant one. Having an abundant mindset is the same as being detached.

Ok. Does that get you any closer to being detached?

No. No it doesn’t. But it’s an idea worth sharing, and one that will make sense as you practice and spar with this idea daily.

What will lead to detachment isn’t something I can say to you, but something you must do for yourself. You must build a full life.

Michael Scotch, for example, has been working on detachment for a while. And instead of following the mental masturbaters who speak on the subject, he’s decided to focus on building.

Meeting new people at his rock climbing gym. Signing up to the local wrestling team. He’s started taking care of his health and meditating. He feels good. His cup is filling up.

He won’t feel desperate for a promotion at work because his fulfillment comes from his full life. When the time comes for a promotional assessment, he’ll remain calm and steady — traits his company likes — and perform to the best of his ability. With or without the promotion, he’ll be fine.

Understand this: detachment is not about “not caring” — detachment is about directing hunger at the process, as opposed to the outcome.

You can care deeply about what it is you do, without letting your emotional state be disrupted by the end result. The best of the best care more about how they do what they do than the potential result.

Scoping in on every day life, detachment is attractive.

Not giving a shit whether people agree or disagree with you draws respect from your peers. We respect those willing to put it all on the line for what they believe. On the contrary, we have neither respect nor admiration for those who do things so that we might like them a tad more.

I find detachment to be a fundamentally Stoic practice: letting go of what you can’t control, removing the filter that labels experience as “positive” or “negative” and simply living. To experience life without letting emotion label the moment, warp your perception, and thus your reality.

The goal is to direct attention to what you can control — your daily actions, your beliefs, your perspective — and let go of everything else.

I was overthinking on my way to class the other day. First days are always like that.

I was playing and replaying scenarios in my head, a whirlwind of thoughts and potentialities, like Doctor Strange but with no powers or coolness. Suddenly, I stepped back — I’ve been meditating for some years now and am acutely aware and mindful of everything happening up here [taps temple].

Stepping back, I realized all this overthinking was like flailing around.

I was expending all this energy doing a whole bunch of nothing, changing nothing in my reality, and just creating negative sentiments about the future for no good reason.

I could, instead, just be present and focus on what I can change. I could visualize the outcome that I did want. I could just be, without trying to change something that hasn’t yet happened.

That’s detachment in practice.

It’s fundamentally about mindfulness. You must consciously steer your unconscious so many times that its overthinking nature gives way to peace. Every time you notice yourself walking away from the path, you gently steer yourself back, like a big ship lumbering across the waves to a better destination — and you must do so without attributing any negative emotion to the fact that you’ve strayed a bit.

To those who need the least, comes the most.

Seriousness

I read Connor Jennings’ “Everyone can tell if you're a serious person” article a while back and immediately tied it to charisma.

Charismatic men are usually serious. Not cold, stone-faced assholes who do nothing but discuss business. But serious people.

Being a serious person means doing small things that add up: showing up on time, fulfilling commitments even when you don’t want to, not wasting time, saying what you mean.

Everyone can tell if you’re serious. And they won’t take you seriously until you are — because if you aren’t taking your own life seriously, who will?

The first time I heard this a certain kind of nervousness struck me.

I thought of the times my parents wanted a certain chore done and I was downstairs playing on the 5. I thought of the times I showed up to practice late because I thought it was aura. I thought of the times I half-heartedly agreed to something and went back on my promise.

It didn’t feel good to realize that maybe… I wasn’t a serious person.

Because I want to be serious. And I want to be taken seriously.

Not only because the external world rewards seriousness but also because being serious is a form of self-love.

What kind of person lets themselves appear sloppy to the world?

A Love Island AI slop burger chud, not a serious man.

Unseriousness — which is similar to drifting slowly across a vast ocean, with no direction or desire for direction — stems from a lack of self-authority. Schools teach us to wait for big daddy teacher for instructions and guidance. If not your teachers, your parents are the loudest voice in your life — which is fine if they lead you to seriousness, but eventually you will have to step away from mommy and daddy and become your own man.

You will have to become a person of authority over your own life.

The best way to practice seriousness is through agency.

Stop waiting for permission to live.

Set goals as big as you can conceive them — goal setting and striving for greatness is, I believe, the best way to develop seriousness. Think of Napoleon and Caesar — men like that who wrote their own destinies were serious. This seriousness led to respect and admiration from their soldiers and peers, key traits to succeeding as a leader.

Live unapologetically. Say what’s on your mind and chase what’s in your heart.

How you do anything is how you do everything. Seriousness is a way of life. Some people don’t bother washing their hands after cracking the toilet bowl. Please, don’t let that be you. Direct focus and attention to doing things well and excellently, because, as Will Durant said: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

Seriousness is a habit.

Carry your own weight seriously.

Conviction is gravitas.

Detachment is dignitas.

Seriousness is auctoritas.

Charisma is gravity.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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As much as knowledge is great, little is more powerful in the big games — business, politics, academia —, than the people you know. It’s not what you know about the world, but who you can contact in it that matters. Relationships are levers. Give me enough of them and I will move the world.

Self-improvement nerds have an obsession with stacking knowledge. Granted, it’s never been easier to stack information and this habit has one of the best difficulty-ROI ratios (low friction: high ROI). And it compounds. It snowballs. Know enough and you develop perspective, which leads to action on dimensions that normies cannot see. Knowledge is power.

But you will, due to biological limits, always be limited to knowledge of one. You are a lone man. Ignorance is thinking you can know everything about... everything and make it to the top by yourself.

Yes, through enough hard work and luck, you might be able to climb any mountain. But the journey is faster, not to mention more enjoyable, when done with others. Relationships open doors to hundreds of other perspectives and ideas — perspectives and ideas that would take you years to develop. And they’re right there, out in the world.

People are doors. Doors into their world, into their connections, their ideas. People are force multipliers for your base knowledge.

Academia, for example, is largely the accumulation of knowledge, which can mostly be done alone; but getting your work known and rewarded is largely the accumulation of relationships. Most games of success follow the same current: in order for your knowledge to be valued, it must be shared — people are the gateway to the recognition of your work.

Imagine if the cure for cancer was in the mind of a timid doctor, too introverted and afraid to share his findings. Humanity would lose out on one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs ever.

You might not be curing cancer. But you do have ideas/work that are worth sharing. Relationships are a necessary part of the ventures that push the frontier of progress.

Success is ultimately understanding the balance between compounding knowledge and compounding relationships.

Go out into the field instead of studying the field. The map is not the territory. It doesn’t matter how much you know about color if you’re confined to a black-and-white room.

I’m not telling you to become some extroverted, outgoing freak of confidence. Recognizing that relationships are a necessary, enjoyable, part of the game is enough. Understanding that social skills and charisma are as rewarded, if not more, than knowledge in this world is a key perspective.

The last image I’ll leave you with is that of who you could be: the dangerously educated and fiercely charismatic, charming, man. The modern renaissance man, if you will. Imagine the power and precision with which you’d attack the world. The gratitude and presence that would fill your days.

You owe it to yourself to connect with others and compound your relationships. They bring with them the riches and fulfillment of external and internal success respectively.

Embrace challenge and motion

Vice and decay enter our lives through idleness.

When you practice agency, when you literally just do things — especially things you can’t do —, you learn that the world is a malleable place. Reality is frozen imagination. The world is a giant sandbox in which you are king.

The best way to gain confidence is to embrace the friction that comes with doing. People who just do things are usually highly agentic, and I find that highly agentic individuals have a strange way of bending reality around them — think of Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field.

As a wise man once said: “wait too long and you’ll be dead.” You will never find out what you’re good at if you do nothing. You must do, struggle, and learn. That is how growth occurs.

The fool precedes the sage. Your ability to be bad for as long as it takes to get good determines your ceiling. Tolerance for discomfort is the trait of the highly successful.

In practice, this means doing.

Writing, even if you suck.
Rock climbing, even if you suck.
Learning astrophysics, even if you suck.

A good indicator that you’ll grow by doing something is if you suck at it. Friction will force you to create something: a new belief — maybe the one that yeah, I am someone who can get shit done — a new mental model, a new skill.

As Van Gogh said: “I am always doing what I cannot yet, in order to learn how to do it.”

The more action you take, the more things you realize you can do. To discover what you’re capable of, an attempt must be made.

The man who does nothing learns nothing, and thus has no room for excitement or growth in his life, which will lead to immense dissatisfaction.

Even if you can’t get really good at writing or coding, there’s immense satisfaction to be found in the act of learning itself. Learning to learn is one of, if not the, highest ROI skill out there.

Imagine if you became an unstoppable force of learning and overcoming friction. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know, you’ll figure it out. Imagine if you carried this agentic confidence around — just how much would your world change?

If you don’t try to be the best, you’ll remain average

Being the best is a higher standard and goal than “being good.” It’s more concrete. And thus will spur more action than the vague idea of “goodness.” Being good is easier to fake than being the best, and chasing it is also less rewarding.

Like honor, value is something that you have to risk losing. Pursuing excellence means risking failure, which will push you to work more than if you were merely chasing above average. It’s always better to set a goal as high as you can conceive it, and then pursue it relentlessly, than to set something you believe yourself capable of.

Growth comes from uncertainty — risk will force you to develop yourself.

If there’s nothing on the line, you don’t need to change much. If everything’s on the line, you have to get your head out of your ass and get to work.

So being the best will not only force growth — which will help you in your quest for excellence — but it will bring more fulfillment. I don’t find “above average” to be satisfying. Realistically, anybody who puts in a little work can be considered above average.

Excellence demands something more. It demands hard work and focus. You have to be willing to be mediocre in most areas in order to be exceptional in the one that matters. You become extraordinary by being ordinary everywhere else.

Pursuing excellence demands focus too. You can’t pursue excellence in one domain while trying out five other things. Excellence will force pure, deep, singular focus.

The quest itself for greatness will usually get you closer to it. Immense satisfaction is found in the act of climbing for greater heights. To quote Camus: “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

One must imagine those who dare to be the happiest of men.

Master the art of focus

Focus is a skill you need to cultivate and protect. No skill has more leverage than focus — being able to consciously concentrate attention for long periods of time, both micro (work sessions) and macro (goals).

Focus is a force multiplier. You should never compete on unit of time; how long you worked on something, when you can compete on unit of focus; how deeply you worked.

Writing for 1 hour with 10 units of focus is better than working 4 hours with 1 unit. The focused fool beats the distracted sage.

Micro-focus (day to day):

Optimize your diet — carbs, for example, take a shit ton of energy to digest and focus requires energy. Limit heavy processed foods and carbs before heavy work periods — I usually skip breakfast, both because I’m not hungry in the morning and because it’s the intermittent fasting I’ve practiced since high school.

During your work day, you can either work or digest.

A hunter performs best when hungry.

Environment — because focus can be understood as a lack of distractions, you have to make your environment distraction-free. Your environment will always be more powerful than your mind, focus is made easier when your surroundings promote it.

Remove everything in your environment, your desk or work station, that could be a potential distraction. Your phone, most distracting of all, should remain in another room.

Music & pre-work — I listen to energetic classicals and OST when working (to each his own, find what gets you in the groove and stick with that. I, for one, can’t listen to lyrical songs when working, my mind latches onto the lyrics and it distracts me).

The things you do before you work have a huge impact on how you work. It’s pretty hard to go from playing video games or scrolling to working or reading. Your brain operates in wavelengths. Asking it to go from the frenetic Love Island fruit brainrot mode to monk focus mode is biologically stupid.

Friction arises when work is the hardest, least enjoyable thing you do. When you cut out fast food burger habits — the usual suspects: Instagram, scrolling, porn, yada yada — your work becomes the “funnest” thing you do.

Focus as a way of life (macro focus):

How you do anything is how you do everything.

Focus needs to become a way of life: train your brain to do one thing at a time, be focused in everything you do.

Single-mindedness is key here.

Focus on one goal at a time. The more you reach, the less you can grab. It’s tempting to, for example, start a 2nd youtube channel for extra content. It’s tempting to post on 4 platforms simultaneously. It’s tempting to master rock climbing and run marathons.

It’s tempting. And it’s distracting.

Progress is smoother, and more exponential (because focus is a force multiplier), when you focus everything on one pursuit at a time.

Start, learn, grow, master. Then branch out.

Your self-image is the ceiling for what you can achieve

You will never outwork your self-image.

The man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can’t are both right.

Your self-image affects the perception you have of the world, and more importantly, your role in this world. Believe yourself weak and small and you’ll never achieve anything noteworthy, because you don’t believe yourself capable.

Self-image, known metaphysically as frequency, is energy. The world responds to this energy. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people depending on the energy they output.

No matter how morally correct you may be, if you project insecurity and negativity, those are what you’ll receive. Good things come to those who move as if the world is in their favor.

It’s like agency: if you believe that the world was rigged in your favor, that things come easy to someone like you, that you can do anything you set your mind to, how would your reality change?

It doesn’t fucking matter if you don’t have any evidence to support these claims. Anybody who ever did anything extraordinary operated from a place of irrationality — belief without evidence.

You need to believe yourself in the place you want before the world proves it to you.

Your perception is a self-fulfilling prophecy. On a neurological level the brain looks for what is front of mind. It’s why you see red cars everywhere after buying one.

Your thoughts create energy — if you’re constantly spewing belittling, negative thoughts, that is what becomes front of mind.

Thoughts are like stones — and, for scale, you have roughly 6,000 thoughts per day —, they stack. They become mountains.

Those mountains rule your life. This is what Jung meant by the unconscious manifesting itself as fate and ruling your life: what you find normal (your mountains), finds you.

Your self-image and perception of the world, which you can control, create your fate.

Optimize for interestingness and curiosity

Paul Graham wrote in his essay “How To Do Great Work” that “if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you’ll be proof against distraction. If you’re interested, you’re not astray.”

If you’re interested, you’re not astray.

So long as the path you’re on is interesting, it is the right one.

According to Paul, curiosity is a powerful driver for progress (both personal and work-related). You choose your work field or purpose by following your curiosity, curiosity gets you to the frontier of that field, makes you notice the small break points, and drives you to explore them.

Curiosity makes you dangerous.

You will never master something you aren’t passionate about. You can’t always develop passion instantaneously — it’s something to be nurtured —, but your pursuit should have some initial attractiveness.

As you go deeper into your interests, they should fascinate you more. The more they do, the more likely you are to excel.

You can’t compete with someone who wants to progress, who finds it fun.

Leverage

“Give me a lever long enough and I will move the world,” said Archimedes.

In other words, what you do matters more than how hard you do it.

This is why thinking in principles and understanding the underlying structures that rule our world — human psychology, natural selection, game theory — is so important.

Mental models are force multipliers for actions; they allow you to act on levels others can’t see. They are levers in and of themselves.

Charlie Munger developed his “latticework of mental models” through multi-disciplinary thinking. He believed that the more models he had, the more prepared he was for life.

Mental models are like tools in your toolbox: the more, the better.

There are a ton of mental models we could dive into — Red Queen Effect, Compound Interest, reciprocity, escape velocity, Law of the Minimum, Competitive Exclusion Principle, — but I’d rather we go back to leverage.

In the mighty ‘26 knowing what to do matters more than ever before, especially if doing work online. It’s tempting to switch from writing to SaaS to dropshipping to lowballing people on Facebook Marketplace with AI agents — it’s also how you waste your potential.

Leverage is a cure to FOMO.

“But I don’t know what to work on.”

Re-read the previous section. Read Mastery. Read How To Do Great Work.

Naval advises that we focus on four forms of leverage:

• labor

• capital

• code

• media

The last two he called “permissionless leverage” — levers accessible to all that do not require authority from anyone.

Just think: you are free to build an army of robots to work for you while you sleep, you are free to create life-changing tech for the people of the world, you are free to build a social media empire from which to spread virtue and beauty.

You have access to the greatest technology ever. Humanity’s entire knowledge base is at your disposal 24/7. You are free to learn from — and copy — brilliant inventors, businessmen, philosophers, and builders.

It has never been easier to change your life.

Knowing what to avoid is also a powerful form of leverage.

AKA: addition by subtraction. You must pull the weeds before planting the flowers.

Think of the fitness-obsessed burger who lifts heavy every day and supplements gorilla nut — all the while eating processed shit. His progress (we’ll just assume he’s cutting) will be limited by the big 0 in the equation.

No matter how hard he tries to add more supplements or train more, his progress will remain flat.

Extrapolating this to other areas of life this means:

• removing bedrock negative beliefs you may have before doing mirror affirmations

• removing bad friends and influences before meeting new, more positive, ones

• removing micro-plastics and estrogenics before doing TRT

“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid,” Charlie Munger said, “instead of trying to be very intelligent.”

Be consistently not stupid.

That may be the highest leverage lever.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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Take tennis, for example.

At the very top, it’s a winner’s game. Points are won by the immeasurable difference between talent and hard work. Pure brilliance, and only brilliance, takes the point.

Everywhere below that — which is to say, where you and I stand — the game is different. It’s a loser’s game: double faults and home run balls and frustration. The 99% attempt to mimic the brilliance of the 1% and fail — reaching for the stars is how they lose.

To beat an amateur all you have to do is keep the ball in play and wait — he will eventually beat himself. Like the way a good jiu-jitsu master never overpowers you, instead using your own strength, and your ignorance of true strength, against you as leverage.

Nearly every game that matters is a loser’s game. This doesn’t mean that most games that matter are for losers — but that the goal, the best strategy, in those games is, paradoxically, not to attempt victory.

Charlie Munger got rich on this idea: don’t try to be brilliant. Just be consistently not stupid.

That’s how you win 99% of games (that matter).

So which game are you actually in? What is the game every single modern man, consciously or not, is playing?

Underneath tennis, underneath everything you do really, there’s one game that rules all. Every choice you make, every door you notice and every one you walk straight past, every plan and blunder.

All of it is decided by your thinking.

The quality of your life is the quality of your thoughts.

This is the real game. And, as we’ve established, you don’t win by being brilliant.

Victory comes to those who avoid the losing move.

In our game, the losing move is relayed thinking.

Your brain builds itself around what you use. Practice something and see something and try something and your brain lays wiring down a tad thicker — neuroplasticity baby!

This rule also runs the other way: stop using a circuit and your brain scraps it. It’s called synaptic pruning — the hungover brain takes out the trash on anything you no longer need.

Thus the moment anything thinks for you is the moment you (literally) destroy yourself.

MIT did a ‘lil study on this. They wired up people while they wrote — some alone, some leaning on ChatGPT.

The ones using AI showed the weakest brain activity in the study: a forty-seven percent drop in neural engagement vs the people writing using Actual Imagination.

Afterward, most of the AI “writers” couldn’t quote a single line of their own essay. They felt no ownership of it. Because it wasn’t theirs. No thinking had happened.

What I find truly scary with the increased AI use in basically every domain — micro (work) and macro (thinking) — is that this dim brain activation isn’t a one and done kinda-thing. Take AI away and the brain remains dim.

Now. Think about the billions of people opening AI every week to “help me think this through.”

Humanity is relaying its gift to artificial humanity.

Scary. Terrifying. This needs to stop.

And it’s also the biggest opportunity of the 21st century.

Thinking is the highest leverage game there is

For as long as there have been people, there have been the rulers and the ruled, the strong and the weak. And for most of our history, the difference between them was a simple skill: literacy.

In ancient Egypt, maybe one person in a hundred could read. They were called scribes, and literacy kept them exempt from taxes, from forced labor, and from the army.

You could climb into the ruling class on literacy alone.

In others countries, literacy helped you avoid death — for centuries in England, a man sentenced to the gallows could walk free if he could read one line of Latin from the Bible (Psalm 51, the plea for mercy).

They called it the neck verse because knowing it saved your neck.

The literate were spared. The illiterate were buried.

When the Gutenberg press made reading cheap, literacy doubled, and doubled, until it became available to all.

AI is like the anti-Gutenberg press — I know, fantastically creative analogy.

But it’s true.

Big AI likes to present itself as this great equalizer. But it’s simply rebuilding history’s hierarchical wall between the rulers (thinkers and literate) and the ruled (unthinking). Thus the new high caste will be the same as in the times of old: the few who still think will be the few who rule.

Remember: we know how this game works. You don’t win by being brilliant — you win by being consistently not stupid. Refusing to relinquish thinking is the not-stupid move.

To think is to win.

Keep thinking while they stop. Develop yours while theirs regresses. Move to a superior position while they move (themselves) into a terrible one.

People naturally opt for the path of least resistance. Always. And here, the least-effort move is naturally to let AI become a bigger and bigger part of your life. To let it seep into your journal entries, your cooking, your music, your fashion, until every part of you is unrecognizable yet perfectly reflective of Claude’s “taste.”

Reject this idea of living and you immediately win. You win by not consuming shit content. If everyone is living self-destructing lives, you win by being the average.

Stay normal. Stay you. Don’t fall prey to the attention-economy. Feed your obsessions. Make connections. Travel. Create. Move your body.

You know what to do. You aren’t stupid. You being here is proof enough that you’ll win.

The distance between you and the unthinking will compound until it’s enormous.

I think therefore I am

Indeed. Without thought, there is no tangible “you.”

You cannot have personality or taste or excitement without the electrical and chemical signals passing between the neurons in your brain.

Thinking is the basis of progress. You’re here because you want to improve and learn — you had to think, or feel, something resembling hunger.

“I can be better than this.”

“I can learn more. I want to learn more.”

Without thoughts like these, humanity wouldn’t be much of anything. It’s thanks to individuals who fueled their own curiosity that most of humanity has access to clean water, housing, and plentiful food.

Thinking is the basis of progress.

I. Write

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking”, Joan Didion said, “what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.”

Writing goes beyond the mere storage of thought, into development, creation and analysis of thought.

Every bulletproof idea or business plan you fomo into cracks when met with pen and paper. You somehow just can’t word it together. Your logic and perception of the world begin to feel flawed and cracked.

Which is good.

That’s what writing is all about. Writing is about exposing your thinking and your preconceived notions about the world. You may think yourself high and mighty because you, ironically, think that you know a lot about, say, politics or cooking or philosophy. But it is easier to know (or to appear like you know), than it is to do.

“There is a crack in everything,” Leonard Cohen wrote. “That’s how light gets in.”

Writing swiftly breaks your neat tidy thinking. You can see the cracks. The cracks are how light gets in. To write is to attempt better thinking. Clearer thinking. Sharper thinking.

To write is to grow.

You don’t have to start writing on Substack or, God forbid, on X to write.

To write is to capture and develop thoughts. That’s it.

Journaling:

I keep a daily “this is what I did today, this is how I feel” journal. It’s one of the most stress-relieving and attention-sharpening habits I do.

By capturing your life, you refuse to lose it. This doesn’t need to be fancy. Unless you so wish, you don’t need to describe the color of the sky or try to sound poetic. Flow of consciousness is more than enough.

Note-taking:

Most of my writing happens away from the Substack draft page.

I consume a lot of content. I read. I watch. I distill. Obsidian notes are where I store and develop the knowledge you see in these articles.

That is where my thinking develops. I encounter an idea, or a quote, or a person, something that makes me tick, and I write. I attempt to distill the author’s worldview and mix it with my own, while connecting to ideas that seem familiar.

Note-taking, when done correctly, develops your thinking. It trains attention and the multi-disciplinary muscle. The more you connect, the more you perceive.

Good note-taking is not merely copy-pasting interesting lines.

My note-taking process is simple:

• go through the material

• write down anything, in my own words, that marks me along the way (do not attempt connection or expansion immediately)

• expand and connect and grow at the end

Sentences and quotes connect and become paragraphs. I may create new Obsidian notes on an idea that I found particularly interesting and wish to further explore.

Article-focused Obsidian notes:

The Art Of Strategic Thinking (how To Become Wildly Successful)

1.42MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Find A Way

156KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

How To Articulate Yourself Persuasively

410KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Essay-writing (mini and long):

By far the most powerful of the three. By far the most daunting.

Journaling captures. Note-taking develops. An essay forces structure.

A complete thought. From foundation to chimney.

The process reflects the word itself. Essay comes from the French word essayer — to attempt, to try. French writer Michel de Montaigne essentially created the writing style four hundred years ago. He wrote them to find out what he thought. To explore what puzzled him.

An essay is an attempt.

Which is why it can be so scary: you are forced to wrestle with what you actually do, or don’t, think — and whether you think at all.

Write about why you think philosophy is moral masturbation. Write about why indigo is better than normal purple. Write about religion and art and health.

Anything that interests you. Anything that puzzles you. Explore it.

Essays are the ultimate use of the Feynman Technique (learning by teaching).

II. Feed your obsessions

You were born curious.

We all are. If you’ve drifted from this childlike curiosity — of wondering why the sky is blue and why grass is green — it’s because educational systems fail to instill, and maintain, the beauty of curiosity.

Tests are about memory more than they are about knowledge. We are taught to learn based on what is “needed,” not what interests us.

Curiosity is a superpower. It brings joy and growth and purpose.

So when you feel an irrational hunger for something — a game, a war, a question — it is your duty as an ambitious intellectual to hunt this obsession. Feed it. Read everything there is to read. Go on Wikipedia rabbit hole quests.

Obsess.

When you’re genuinely curious, you learn faster and deeper. The things you genuinely enjoy learning you remember longer.

Da Vinci filled seven thousand notebook pages with diagrams and notes on water, flight, anatomy, and the odd shopping list. His obsessive nature, his ability to connect, his polymathic lens — those are what made him immortal.

Curiosity, especially in multiple areas, creates dimensions that specialists and normies can’t see. When you see what others can’t, you can act on a level that produces results they can only deem mystical.

Perspective is power. Curiosity is fuel for perspective.

There are so many things to learn yet everything is one art. Everything is fundamentally about shaping the way you see the world, shaping the way you think.

Movies, for example, which some may deem mere entertainment, I find to be one of the most fascinating sources of knowledge. Same with manga and comics — growing up in France, I devoured comic books, the tall slim European kind that I can’t seem to find anywhere else. They shaped who I am today.

What you consume, you become. Feed what you find interesting.

III. Think in Principles

Most of what you “believe” is borrowed and was conditioned into you; usually instilled during childhood from teachers and parents. This is fine. You’ve come this far thanks to the beliefs and virtues you learned at a young age.

The problem comes when these beliefs are all you ever have. Growth must come from something new. It can’t come from something you already have.

Thus you must form new beliefs and ways of seeing the world (mental models). But if you don’t see yourself as an authority figure, you will depend upon whoever is most convincing or loudest.

This is how, as Oscar Wilde wrote, a man “becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.”

To create new principles with which to navigate this complicated world you must take a belief down to bedrock — to what you can see is actually true — and build from there.

This is called first-principles thinking.

Here’s what I mean:

For a hundred years, every high jumper who high jumped did so the same way: sprint and sea otter jump over the bar.

That’s how it was always done.

Then a gentleman named Dick Fosbury — who couldn’t master the sea otter technique — decided to fuck around and find out.

He started asking: what’s the actual goal?

Get my body over the bar.

What fundamentally decides how high I can clear?

Where my center of mass goes.

Dick won Olympic gold in 1968 by breaking the mold — he was clowned then, he is revered now.

This you must do to your own beliefs.

Take one you’re certain of and examine it. Ask why. Then question that answer. Keep peeling — beliefs are like onions, they have layers! — until you hit the core: the bedrock truth.

Learn to think in first principles and life’s unpredictability becomes easier to navigate.

You start seeing what others miss, and being able to act on these ideas, produce results that look like magic. You’re simply pulling strings on a dimension they haven’t learned to see.

Here are some models you can steal:

• Inversion: ask how you’d lose — now you know what to avoid (think of the loser’s game from the beginning).

• Second-order thinking: go beyond the first consequence. Ask: then what?

• Compounding: small inputs compound — consistency is rewarded.

• Leverage: what you do matters more than how hard you do it.

• Entropy: everything drifts toward chaos unless you spend energy (think of your environment, your relationships, your mental health, yada yada).

• Lindy Effect: the longer an idea has survived, the longer it’ll keep surviving — value is measured in time, that’s why old books are so valuable.

This is just the tip of the iceberg: comparative advantage, Nash equilibrium, the Pareto principle, the Red Queen effect, activation energy, Hanlon’s razor, the list goes on.

Charlie Munger called it a latticework of mental models; he reckoned about eighty of them, drawn from every big discipline, cover ninety percent of life.

IV. Do hard things

What do writing, obsessing, and thinking from scratch all have in common?

They’re all hard pursuits. Which is good; the brain grows on friction.

Discomfort is the point. Not something to be avoided. The goal is to get comfortable being uncomfortable, because then nothing, no skill or project, is off limits.

I’ve always imagined that doing hard things is like Goku training in a high-G room. It’s hard in the moment, yet when you step back out into the normal world, everything feels 10x easier.

Psychologists actually have a name for this: desirable difficulty.

The main ingredient to our high-G training, desirable difficulty, is the stuff that feels effortful, slow, and frustrating. Ingredients which the brain converts into durable wiring. It’s because you had to work for it that they’re so valuable.

If it’s too easy, you won’t grow — something has to be on the line, i.e. you might fail.

“Hard” is anything outside of your comfort zone — physical or mental.

• a course on literary analysis

• a challenging essay

• a nickels and dimes workout

• a cold approach

Everything you want is on the other side of discomfort. Comfort lets you glide through life without ever thinking, and without ever needing to develop your thinking.

The fool comes before the sage.

You have to be willing to struggle and be “bad” for some time before you see progress.

Most of the things you’re scared of doing aren’t objectively difficult anyways — your image of them is what’s holding you back. The more you wait, the more your imaginary fear grows, preventing you from taking the action that would make it vanish.

“It’s not because things are difficult that we do not dare,” Seneca wrote. “It’s because we do not dare that they are difficult.”

So choose discomfort. Become comfortable with it.

More than anything, you should fear leaving your potential in the dark because you never learned the value of effort.

So here we are.

You don’t need to be a genius.

You need to remain sovereign in thought.

That’s it — keep thinking, develop your thinking, while everyone stops.

You’re already one of the few. You, a) clicked on a self-education essay and b) read all the way to the end — I have faith things will work out just fine for you.

Continue on this path. Continue learning. And write. Feed your obsessions. Think in principles and collect mental models — look broadly, at structure and incentives. Do hard things on purpose.

And have fun — what’s the point of all this anyways if done without some joy and laughter?

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

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It holds a beautiful teardrop shape. Still enough that you’d testify in court that this flame is a thing.

But it isn’t.

There’s no flame in the way there’s a rock in your hand. Every particle of it is new, moment to moment. A flame is more like an event. Beauty that exists only because heat melts wax, the wick drinks it up, the heat tears the liquid into vapor — wax burns only as a gas, never as a solid — and this vapor detonates in a reaction too fast and too constant for the eye to catch. And the gorgeous flickers of gold are flecks of carbon flashing white-hot in the half-instant before they poof.

Without this process, there’s nothing.

Now look at your hand.

Most of the matter in it is not the matter you were born from. That’s because you’ve grown. While being watched by Father Time, you’ve learned and shed and rebuilt yourself — cell by cell, atom by atom. And still the shape of your hand held. Still the pattern persisted.

You are stuff, literally and metaphysically and philosophically, that is in constant motion.

Without motion, there is no order. Without order, there is no beauty and growth.

Heraclitus, twenty-five centuries ago, said the universe was fire — “an ever-living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures” — and that no one steps in the same river twice, because nothing alive is a thing. It’s a flowing, ever-changing, becoming thing.

He was right and the peak of flowing is, funnily enough, flow. The opposite of entropy. Where self and action become a single flame. Where you’re most burning, most alive, because you’ve stopped being still.

That’s what makes fire great. A flame can grow. It can spread. It can climb into a bonfire and light a whole field, nay, the whole world.

A fire’s entire nature is to grow.

To reach and climb and devour and take in more and more. Growing more powerful, more majestic, more confident and masterful.

And a bigger fire — the life you want — grows based on what you feed it.

This is the most important skill there is — knowing how and what to feed your fire. And someone has to show you. Someone has to care for your small, sputtering flame and teach you what makes it burn and what makes it choke.

My first teacher was a stranger on the Internet.

I was thirteen, maybe fourteen.

Home sick from school and feeling like absolute shit. And then I clicked on a random video — something about mental health.

A British guy in a small room, calm voice, steady eyes, talking straight into my soul.

Go outside. Go on adventures. Move. Build a routine. Meditate. Journal. Make friends.

His name was Hamza. I liked Hamza’s ideas. And I was, at that age, perfect kindling. Ambitious but shy. I had all this dry wood stacked up and he was giving me a lighter.

So I ate and listened to everything he made. Especially his longer guides — on money and masculinity and productivity. The whole self-improvement canon. It was great.

And my fire caught. God, it caught. I was focused and I hadn’t felt this happy in a while. And then, after a year or two I think, I noticed something I didn’t really want to notice: my fire was lit but it wasn’t growing.

I was maintaining, through a self-imposed prison of routine and habits, an ever-moving but going-nowhere flame.

The trick routine plays on you is subtle, but once you see it, there’s no going back: routine still creates movement. It flickers and burns.

So you feel productive and disciplined — like you’re actually going somewhere. This cannot be, however, because a routine is, by definition: the same fuel, the same things, done in the same way, producing the same result.

No fire grows by routine.

Fire grows one way and one way only: by reaching out and catching the edge of something it hasn’t touched yet.

To reach is to be alive.

You think our ancestors looked at mammoths and said nah, too big, let’s stick to acorns and stay virgins.

Fuck that! They said bring it on, you overgrown rat, my friend [tongue-clicking sounds] might die but our tribe will have meat for three years!

Fire leaps and grabs and throws sparks at everything nearby, hungry, indiscriminate; everything around it is fuel.

Hunger is our greatest evolutionary advantage. The moment you stop striving for more is the moment you become smaller — not calmer or wiser.

As Naval said — “it is easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them.”

To reach is to do what you can’t

To go beyond the confines of easy routine — which encapsulate repetitive comfort and maintenance. That’s growth.

As Van Gogh said: “I am always doing what I cannot yet, in order to learn how to do it.”

Nobody grows by getting better at what they’re already good at. Growth means reaching past your own ability, into stuff that makes you clumsy and slow and bad.

You try and fail and learn, until one day you learn you can. The discomfort you feel when reaching into the darkness is growth.

Agency is fuel for your fire — literally just do things, enough waiting.

The fool comes before the sage.

Without action there can be no wisdom.

Slowly, your fire will start to throw heat. A growing fire gives off warmth, a literal feeling people feel the instant they come near it.

And by warmth/heat I mean confidence, ease… aura.

Agency builds evidence. And confidence is just a stack of evidence, built through voluntary discomfort, that you’re someone who gets shit done.

Between stepping up to shovel and pushing off, there's no question. The more you act, the more you move through the world with conviction and self-love. Action is the gateway into confidence, mastery, ease, comfort, and love.

Of course, as with most philosophical ideas we love to masturbate over, this is easier said than done. Most people are afraid of discomfort. They don’t want to be bad at anything. Especially not in public.

And so they stay cold and stuck and small.

And remember that cowardice is a more destructive force than you can imagine. By keeping yourself cold and small you, a) deprive yourself of your dreams and b) deprive those around you of the best version of you.

Self-improvement is an unselfish pursuit. We see and treat others based on what we cannot find in ourselves; thus to improve yourself is to improve the very society you inhabit.

The inverse also holds. By refusing to grow, by refusing to be bad at something in the beginning, you effectively contribute to the decline of society.

Definiteness of purpose

Purpose is nothing more than the pull between vision (the fire you’re trying to become) and anti-vision (the life you want to avoid).

Away from the ash. Toward the blaze.

Napoleon Hill — whose Think and Grow Rich you must read, as it is og capital M Manifesto of Self-Improvement — spent essentially his entire life (87 years) studying what made great men great.

He boiled it down to definiteness of purpose.

“The starting point of all achievement,” he called it.

A single, definite aim, wanted — in his words — with “an intense, burning desire.”

Focused fire becomes a blowtorch, which goes through steel and mediocrity and pierces the universe’s heart to proclaim itself as indeed being alive.

If you do not have purpose, as Jung warned, the unconscious will manifest itself into reality, and you will call it fate.

This isn’t meant to scare you.

Purpose will come whether you want it or not.

Humans need purpose to survive — purpose is how we create order over entropy.

And you don’t even need a clear vision to find purpose. Definiteness of purpose ironically begins with the unknown. Once again, the fool precedes the sage.

“Traveler, there is no road,” Machado wrote. “You make the road by walking.”

You make the road by walking.

A definite purpose only sharpens with agency. The path reveals itself to those who walk.

We are human becomings

A fire, remember, is not a thing.

It’s an ever-growing process, kept alive only by what feeds it. The same is true of you.

You are the fire and the hand that feeds it. You are Michelangelo and his David. What we call Life is the wondrous, scary, marvelous, daunting continuous process of creating yourself.

There is nothing more important. There is nothing more beautiful.

Every minute detail, every video you watch, every rep, every conversation, every thought, every bite of food — that’s you, chiseling away.

Find what lights you. Learn from it. Grow. And then outgrow your Hamza — that’s what teachers and lessons are for. They’re meant to serve as sparks, not inhibitors to what you think is possible.

Continuously tiptoe along the line between comfort and challenge. The Goldilocks Zone of progress is darkness. It forces you to burn in order to light your own way.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

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To drive a black cab in London you have to grow part of your brain.

It’s mandatory. You must grow your brain — whatever that means.

To test your attempts at brainmaxxing you must — nay, you are forced — to tango with The Knowledge. A torture test one must pass to have the honor of driving a black cab taxi through the pub and fish & chips filled streets of The Big Smoke — the name us old timers give to London!

It’s a hyper-complex test. Beyond the grasp of us normies.

When scientists put The Knowledge knowers into an MRI they saw it.

The back of the hippocampus, the memory part of the brain. It was physically larger than yours or mine. The cabbies had grown it. Like a bicep.

Because — and this is a shocker! — the brain is a muscle.

It bulks or shrinks around whatever you make it lift or don’t lift.

Cabbies understand neuroplasticity — internet buzzzword! They understand Hebbian Theory; neurons that fire together, wire together. Whatever you repeatedly do, you build.

The memorization of 26,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks gets physically stored in the hippocampus and the meat must grow to hold this vital information.

Direct attention at anything long enough and your brain changes.

This is neuroplasticity.

You are what you keep doing.

For accurate educational reasons, we will now compare the philosophically and culturally rich London cabbie drivers, masters of 26,000 streets, to 7,000 iPad kids.

A fair fight.

Scientists scanned the brains of more than 7,000 adolescents — one of the biggest studies of children’s brains — and lined the scans up against how much time each pre-teen spent on their phone.

The more they scrolled, the thinner the cortex.

And by cortex I’m referring to matter across the brain. The judgment regions, self-control regions, and the default-mode network (the tissue that holds the “this is who I am” beliefs).

Actual brainrot. Thank you, Zuckerberg!

He too understands Hebbian Theory.

Which is why we now have millions of brains and people and their complex ever-changing personalities and beliefs about the world, thin in the most important places.

Leaving them shallow and weak.

Predictable.

Which is what big Zuck wants. Predictability rewards you with hyper-targeted ads because Meta knows what you’ll click, buy, and believe. Making him more money…. because who else is going to finance Mark’s $300M megayacht?

And beyond the first world context of the attention-economy we love, predictability makes you mediocre.

You’re like a vending machine other people have the code for. They can push and tickle you any which way — luckily you kill more people than sharks every year so maybe there’s a chance for some success! —and get any behavior out of you.

You can spend your whole life like this. Just being walked toward a direction set by those who understand human psychology. A millimeter of your brain at a time, you are becoming mediocre.

Of course, most chads who use Zuck’s apps and buy the latest trending Arc'teryx + Birks combo fit will disagree with this propaganda. They know better. We all think we do.

You’re too smart for your own good. Intelligence makes you great at explaining your self-destructive tendencies.

Luckily, you have the strength to end these patterns.

You have the ability to destroy the old and create the new.

You just need intention. With a sprinkle of agency — because you kinda need to do stuff if you want new stuff.

Neurons that fire together wire together is an impartial amoral son of a bitch law.

Slop or cathedral, it doesn’t matter a bit! Your brain is going to be sculpted by something. We are unable to function without direction. We naturally gravitate to distractions and pleasure without it. We thus naturally gravitate to the slow neuroplastic chisel toward doom and despair without intention.

So let’s get to rewiring yourself.

You have 3-6 months to learn this one skill (on intentional neuroplastic-rewiring for the betterment of the self)

Boom! Dan Koe/Hussain Ibarra Substack title!

I’ve read a couple articles on neuroplasticity but not that much because I’m tired of re-reading viral evergreen-ideas. What I have done is apply this super dope concept to my own life in a niche way that’s fun (for me and will be for you too):

Steal everything.

Literally.

Neuroplasticity works best when you steal the behaviors, beliefs, ideas, goals, yada yada, that you desire.

I steal constantly. It’s the only way I know to grow.

From films, from manga, from books, from strangers and family and random Dostoevsky quotes — beauty will save the world! Every micro-interaction and moment in life is a chance to steal something. A way of thinking, a catchphrase, a fashion sense. We are human becomings.

Neuroplasticity strapped on top of Picasso’s stealing like an artist makes a fire cocktail! To steal is to grow.

Plutarch wrote the Lives for exactly this: study a great man, take what’s great, become it.

Study mediocre men too. Take what’s not great. And vow not to become it. As Abe Lincoln said: “I learn from everybody, even if sometimes it's what not to do.”

Theft will make you authentic. Polymathy will make you great.

Look at Naval. There’s no one like him. He’s irreplaceable.

And it’s because he’s studied so much of everything.

Philosophy, code, meditation, history, everything knitted into a Naval quilt of escaping competition through authenticity.

Authenticity and success are by-products of aiming neuroplasticity at greatness.

Repeatedly steal what you want to be until it becomes a standard, a way of life.

Steal Kanye’s delusional optimism. Steal Naval’s obsessions.

To larp is to live.

You become a category of one by repeatedly stealing and learning from categories of one. Slowly your brain builds this muscle. A literal muscle of greatness.

What you can actually do (for real this time):

1. Catch yourself

You won’t believe how many times a day your brain fires onto mediocre thoughts and negative patterns. It’s like… a lot.

It took me years of meditation to notice this.

Hundreds of times a day my brain unconsciously jerks itself toward self-destructing thoughts like a fly to shit. The millisecond a thought arrives that isn’t beneficial — that doesn’t contribute to building what I desire — I push it away. And redirect my attention to the good, true and beautiful.

Because the more I focus on those, the more they grow.

The more I meditate the more I realize how powerful of a practice it is.

In the beginning it’s lowkey breath-work. And then it becomes about concentration and focus, which makes you more productive. Then it steers into emotion and thought. Then it becomes about the simple act of watching and noticing, never forcing. Underneath all of this you build confidence (because confidence is just a lack of overthinking, which meditation eradicates) and can direct your attention consciously.

Which is good news because what you repeatedly focus on you become.

Thus you can become anything and anyone and do anything and everything because neuroplasticity is just directed attention.

And meditation helps you watch and direct this attention.

Meditate! Catch yourself! Become aware of the power you have!

2. Confront yourself

Look at where you are right now.

Is this where you want to be? Where does your current trajectory lead to? What do you believe? Are these beliefs borrowed, learned, self-taught? What do you fear and despise? What do you want?

You can’t build, or rebuild, a house you haven’t thoroughly inspected for termites and squatters and ragamuffins — no particular use for that word just felt cool using it!

Once you inspect, you pull. Always pull the weeds.

Addition by subtraction my friend!

Removing the negative ideas about who you are and what you can do on this 24,901-mile ball of water and rock will do more than being a delusional optimist.

You can tap into that after you remove the skeletons from your closet.

Nothing worth planting grows in a field of slop.

3. Steal and install and repeat

Take discipline for example.

You don’t — you can’t — become disciplined by deciding to be disciplined.

Your brain doesn’t believe affirmations. It’s too smart.

It believes proof. It notices what you actually do, not what you say you’ll do, over and over and what you do becomes who you are.

Sorry to break it to you but self-improvement is 90% fake it ‘til you make it baby!

You act confident until you are. And what’s the difference between acting confident and being confident anyways? The former is just a pre-requisite to the latter!

Faking it ‘til you make it is how you grow the hippocampus.

Learn from the greats and the not-so-greats. Learn determination from Rock Lee. Learn elegance from Donald Shirley. Learn discipline from Churchill. Learn fashion from the Italians and cuisine from the French.

Polymathy baby!

Steal and learn from every moment, every book, author, athlete, parent, friend. Focus on the good, true, and beautiful. Fake the qualities you desire until they become qualities you own. Focus your attention on improving quality of life and never stop learning. Neuroplasticity is a simple tool. Use it to become luckier (by training yourself through repetition to notice signs of luck, whatever those may be). Use it to become charismatic and original, great, incompressible, intellectual, whatever it is you want to be.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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Just ask a bonsai-shi.

The Japanese bonsai master whose lineage has kept one small Japanese white pine alive for 400 years. His teacher trained him, who was trained by his, who was trained by Mr. Miyagi and thus the lineage flourished.

And their entire job is not planting, not feeding, not watering, not any “normal” gardening task.

Their entire job is to cut.

And they cut what’s healthy.

They cut the perfectly good part of the bonsai growing in a perfectly good direction because the master can see that in ten years it will thicken the silhouette and drag the whole bonsai toward mediocrity.

His job is not to merely keep the tree alive, no, even you or I could manage it. His job is to keep the tree beautiful. A beauty you only get through subtraction.

Anyone can add.

Any child can water and make a plant flourish.

It takes four hundred years of precise transmitted knowledge to know exactly what to kill.

This, of course, isn’t about bonsais.

It’s about you.

You are a bonsai.

Everything you’ve ever watched and read and scrolled — it all grew to be who you are.

Most people spend their lives on the easy side of self-care: adding, adding, adding.

More information, more content, more noise — a mind grown wild and shapeless because bigger is better right?

As we know, thanks to our friend the bonsai-shi, it’s not. Beauty is in found in subtraction.

It’s found by cutting with shears.

Shears that can be developed. Shears that we call taste.

Defining taste

“Taste is a collection of things you like.”

No. That’s shallow and easy and you aren’t here for that.

Taste is not a set of possessions you can show to others and the way to improve taste is not to go out and collect more and more objects.

Rick Rubin, goat of taste, is not a hoarder.

Taste is a by-product.

It’s what overfills from a full cup. A full cup being a life in which you engage with three simple habits:

• remove the weeds of slop

• put good work in front of yourself

• do what you can’t until you learn you can

Do this for years and you develop an instinct, like the bonsai-shi.

This instinct is fine-tuned toward the beneficial — which is a setting much stranger and sharper than the “taste is what I like” goofy setting lots of people default to.

Your taste registers events, people, places, things, ideas, works of art, music, overall things and experiences that improve quality of life. When it’s genuinely novel, when it produces awe, when it evokes an involuntary wow, or when it produces some mind-boggling insight or idea you can apply to your life tomorrow.

Taste is a tool for self-improvement — a meter that detects is this making my life worse or better.

It defines what you read, who you spend Friday nights with, the thoughts you allow yourself to indulge in — taste defines standards of action and standards of thought.

The refinement of your taste is the refinement of your life because taste decides what your life is made of.

Let’s get to it shall we?

I. Pull the weeds

A weed, in this context of taste, is anything that saps your attention and returns nothing of substance.

It’s something specifically engineered to give you the sensation of a goal achieved without the effort — it’s instantaneous pleasure, available at all times, the greatest killer of taste.

Weeds fits nicely into 99% of short form content and 99% of the hyper-attention economy.

Removing this slop soul-sucking Mr. Beast content (yes because every hyper-edited WE JUST FILLED MY BROTHER’S ROOM WITH 1000 CONDOMS is absolutely frying your shit) has to come before anything else.

It’s the multiply-by-zero problem.

It does not matter how many great books you read a week or how many long-form interviews/podcasts you watch if you are still doom-scrolling and consuming the hyper-attention masturbation content.

If your equation of taste has that zero (big Mr. Beast) in it, everything else you try to add (all those books) still gets multiplied by that zero, leaving you with nothing, no development, no growth.

The negatives of shit content far outweigh the positives of good content.

Removing the zero is worth more than adding ten positives.

What I’ve come to realize with taste is that there is an uncomfortable period — very much like the one in any period of self-improvement in which you find yourself isolated from what once was but not developed enough to reach what could be — after you pull the weeds.

You keep reaching for that void, the pull back towards Mr. Teeth — the need for low-grade stimulation is something I used to feel all the time, I wanted something to entertain me when I ate or when I trained or when I felt like life wasn’t enough — and what fills this space is curiosity.

Trying new stuff, following what could be, being lead around by interests instead of the algorithm.

It’s a transitional mess — mostly because many people’s attention spans are fucked — and it takes longer than you’d like, but it’s necessary. You must remove the zeroes.

That’s our foundation.

II. Consume good work

At the start you have no idea what you like — only what you’ve been shown — so the job is experimentation.

Learn across everything — any little podcast or video or article or niche exploration on the history of balloon animals and serial killers you should look into. Then, when something grabs your balls harder than the rest, you follow that fucking rabbit hole all the way down and find the bottom, and then you keep digging until your curiosity on this certain topic is satisfied.

I, for one, have really been loving movie analysis content. I’ve always loved movies and learning from fellow cinema lovers who break down the intricacies of cinematography, dialogue, lighting, and the process behind the stories I love is so insanely interesting to me.

Never confine yourself to “your field” or “your interests.” There is always more to be learned, more stuff that you’ve never tried.

My interest in movies helps me understand story structure and character arcs, which I can use to improve my writing and make my articles more engaging.

Polymathy is the move, it always is.

If you ever get bored with music or science, you can dive into the cosmos or how equilibrium and unpredictability work with one another in sports. Nothing is ever too uninteresting to bring some light into your world.

Every discipline you go deep in installs a new filter, and the more filters you can see through, the more of any given thing you can see and the more solutions/angles you have to the problems you face.

By being able to dissect events and problems with 5, 10, 15 different perspectives from your different interests, you are able to see and act upon ideas that others, who never follow their curiosities, cannot see.

And thus create outcomes they deem inexplicable (which makes you irreplaceable).

Every discipline and idea that doesn’t seem to connect compound.

Nothing you take the time to learn is ever wasted; there’s always a use for it later, usually somewhere you didn’t expect — like rhythm in sports, or mindfulness in taste.

Exploration is both unglamorous and insanely fun.

It’s unglamorous because it’s like trying to walk through unknown lands without a map and you’re trying to make said map as you go and it’s hard and it can be boring but it’s insanely fun because you’re traveling through a wonderland of your every interest guided only by the trails of curiosity and wonder.

Find what the sound of one hand clapping is. Go deep. Ask for a reading list. Look into “self-education 2026 guides” — most of them are slop so I recommend just searching for long form content throughout Youtube (there are so many Yale and Harvard courses and experts who give out their knowledge for free) and Substack and whatever tickles your fancy.

Read the guides people write for exactly this.

And stay consistent. This isn’t an overnight process. This isn’t a “30 days to develop taste.” It’s a continuous way of life, a philosophy of constant search and curiosity and improvement if you will.

III. Do what you can’t

Then you get your hands dirty.

This is the step that’s easiest to skip because consuming is comfortable and producing can be humiliating.

But attempting and literally just doing things gives you something no amount of learning can — and I don’t mean just the literal skill you’re developing, like writing or painting.

Literally just doing things gives you confidence.

Doing things slowly accumulates evidence that you are a person who can figure shit out, which changes the threshold for the next thing you’re willing to attempt.

This part, like with most periods of improvement, only makes sense in retrospect.

I read my old articles and I can see the distance.

I had the irrational confidence to just do things without any proof that it would work or that I was good — that irrationality led to action, which led to improvement, the current articles, which led to confidence, i.e. I’m someone who can figure shit out and I’m relatively skilled at what I do.

And I’m not telling you that you have to start some personal business or create content. I’m encouraging you to just do things.

You can just pick up a chisel and chip away at stone without knowing what you’re doing.

You can literally just start cooking.
You can literally just start writing a memo.
You can literally just travel to any country and soak yourself in its culture.
You can literally just sign up for ballet.
You can literally just start playing guitar.

The audacity to try will develop skill, which will develop taste, which will improve quality of life.

Agency is self-creation.

That’s all “taste” is.

It’s lowkey just fancy polymathy, but I digress.

Clear all the shit. Fill it with real things. Try to make some yourself. Look back in a year.

And don’t be in a hurry, because taste is not a video game you finish. There is no finished version of who you are and what you like.

There’s no summit.

Just another peak, and another one behind it.

That’s the fun of it don’t you think?

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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Because they use, in their attempts to find “GHOST FOUND AT 3AM HE JIZZED ON US” clips, a Geiger counter.

A Geiger counter is the small box that clicks every ghost hunter waves around abandoned asylums, and when the clicking speeds up every dumbass goes quiet because something is in here with us.

This machine has, never in the history of humanity, ever, detected a ghost.

What it detects is radiation.

Something real, invisible, measurable and occasionally lethal.

The machine has nothing to actually do with ghosts.

It doesn’t know what a ghost is. It just has one job:

click faster near something that is physically there.

Hence the dumbest smart machine ever.

No morals. No taste. No opinion.

It can’t tell you whether the ghost you found is good or will kill you. It just clicks — faster and more obnoxiously — the closer you get to something invisible.

Humans have their own natural Geiger counter.

And yours has been going off since…. forever.

And because it’s annoying, you’ve spent your life covering your ears, desperate to muffle its signal.

It’s very loud. It’s very powerful.

It’s called envy.

My Geiger counter was going bat-shit crazy recently.

Because Spanish soccer player Lamine Yamal is 19. He turned 19 on July 13th. He wears Messi’s number at Barcelona. He was nominated for the Ballon d’Or at 17.

And I watched him win a World Cup final.

I’m 19 too, dear reader.

And what I felt watching and thinking through all this was, to be frank, not admiration.

It was:

why him and not me.

That was the Geiger. And it wasn’t clicking at random.

Because I know what I used to want. To play for France in a World Cup and see my parents cry of pride. That was my dream.

The geiger didn’t go off for some hedge fund cunt in Connecticut.

That’s because envy is surgical, it’s precise.

And it isn’t only in watching superstars that I feel it, which would give me a sense of dignity.

A while ago I asked myself: have you ever wanted no one else to succeed?

I wrote — yes, yes yes.

I remember winning against a rival school during my sophomore season. We won. Yet I went home pissed, because I had only played 5 minutes.

I believed that my team won but I lost.

There’s worse.

I’ve felt resistance to follow or subscribe to people in my niche. I rarely bought any digital products — because it gave me this sense that I’m helping them succeed at a game I’m in and that this somehow negates my own “success.”

I believed their success to be coming out of my allocation.

The geiger was ticking.

Interpreting its ticks, understanding the powers of envy, is quite annoying.

To read it you have to admit that I wanted something and I don’t have it.

So instead of painful honesty we prefer to write, fittingly, ghost stories.

He got lucky. He had connections. His dad knew someone. The game’s rigged. I never wanted this shit anyway. I’m not that shallow. All of which could be true, but we reason these out of spite, not logic.

All you’re doing, all I was doing, is taking something you can’t have, and making it wrong to have.

Congrats! You’ve made the wound you can’t heal a virtue.

Nietzsche called this particular life philosophy ressentiment.

Someone who can’t reach the peak decides that wanting to reach the peak is a defect of character. Then builds his morality out of his own weakness and bestows himself “virtuous.”

This kind of self-deception is the hardest deception of all because, as Joan Didion wrote, “the charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself.”

That’s envy in its most Gollum like form. As opposed to the brilliant fuel that could show you the way, it serves to blur the world around you into an everybody hates me and I hate everybody mindset.

Which has never been beneficial to anyone, ever.

So what is the almighty Geiger showing you?

It’s showing you where a live desire is buried.

It’s showing you what you truly desire, not what you like to say you want because you’re afraid of being perceived as a ‘lil arrogant or what you deceive yourself into thinking is good, but what the raw, primal, powerful, part of you wants.

And this matters more than it sounds because most of what you think you want isn’t yours.

Most of our desires are inherited.

From your parents or friends or the soul-sucking algorithms of slop machine social media.

You can carry a borrowed ambition for decades and feel nothing when someone else achieves it.

That’s the test you must put your desires through.

Real desires create envy — if someone else has succeeded at the thing you want, you feel something.

Like a flinch. And this can be extremely powerful.

‘Cause you can’t fake a flinch.

You can say you want to be rich and feel nothing when someone you know gets rich. You can say you don’t care about writing and not feel your stomach churn and drop when someone your age drops an absolute masterpiece.

Envy is the compass that will show you what you truly want.

Bertrand Russell wrote in 1930 that: “beggars do not envy millionaires, though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful.”

Humans do not envy what they know is unreachable. We prefer to envy the almost.

Your envy is a map of the lives and things and desires you believe are available to you.

It’s why envy can be so powerful — to understand where you should direct your attention, and it’s also why it can hurt so much. It’s very much a yin-yang approach to desire.

It’s only powerful because of the emotion it spurs — whether said emotions are positive or negative depend on you, your perspective, your understanding of yourself, and how you channel this energy.

For example, envy can be powerful in the way it shows proximity.

Caesar, while in Spain and with quite a respectable career behind him, stopped in front of a statue of Alexander and wept. Alexander had conquered the known world by his age. Caesar had done nothing memorable.

He fortified those tears and became Caesar.

He used his envy to form a vision of what could be, and then strived, using his envy as positive fuel, to concretize his vision.

That’s the good kind of envy.

Envying a god is a dream. It’s vertical comparison, it’s where you point the biggest of ambitions.

Mine, and most like yours too, dear reader, isn’t quite like that.

Mine is someone younger than me on a pitch I will never stand on. Yours might be the guy from your year or age who “isn’t locked in” yet has, what you perceive to be, a “better life.”

This is lateral comparison.

It shows you the people who stand next to you and the desires you envy from your proximate environment.

It’s usually the negative kind of envy.

The one that manifests as the ressentiment and life of jealousy that Nietzsche made clear is terrible.

So what do you do?

I believe the best use of the powerful emotion that is envy comes from a mix of the two fuels (negative and positive).

Envy directed laterally is poison.
Envy directed vertically is idolization.

Neither gets you closer to achieving your goals.

The mix is this: vertical envy gives you direction, lateral envy gives you urgency.

Having an idol — Alexander to Caesar — creates vision. Having people around you striving for the same things — in Caesar’s case he compared himself to Alexander at the same age, thereby creating his own lateral fuel — creates agency, I need to actually get shit done.

Put them together and you have a destination + a timer.

The perfect cocktail for hyper-focus.

Ying-Yang:

If you cleanse the envy, and the usual anger that comes with dissatisfaction for one’s current state, you become a serene ‘lil Chudhda monk who feels nothing and has no desire for competition.

As Seneca said:

To remain ignorant of envy is to remain ignorant of its power.

Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other.

One inspires and the other sharpens.

So no, you don’t have to purify yourself in order to take action.

You’re allowed to feel the deep desire for change. You’re allowed to want shit greedily and unapologetically. Never suppress your desire for greatness — it is, after all, as Naval said, far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them.

I’m not mature enough to renounce desire for greatness without making an attempt to reach that peak. I’d rather get to the top before, if ever, deciding that the view isn’t for me.

Reverse-detachment

or really just detachment with extra steps.

You detach from the event — the guy your age with the seemingly better life — while harvesting the emotion it produces — damn I wish I could have that — and pointing it at your climb.

Keep the fuel. Drop the person, context, car, thing, yada yada.

Michael Jordan did this on a psychotic level.

He used real jabs or insults from other players to motivate him, yes, but he also manufactured them.

In 1993 he invented an entire trash-talk episode with Washington guard LaBradford Smith — and used those imaginary words to whop Smith’s ass the next night.

It was only decades later that he admitted to making this up.

It just goes to show you the power of the emotions we’re so quick to label “negative.”

One of the greatest athletes ever was using synthetic envy, because he understood that it was a great source of fuel.

It’s only fair that we explore the yang, the dark side of envy, so here’s a concrete example from Vinland Saga (spoilers incoming).

In it, young man and main character Thorfinn, spends his entire youth becoming the strongest warrior for one reason: to kill Askeladd, the warrior who killed his father.

Then Askeladd dies — but not to Thorfinn’s hand.

And Thorfinn discovers he has wasted years fine tuning himself for a target that no longer exists.

The fuel was there. But it was pointed to vengeance, as opposed to a mission or ideal.

And it destroyed him. It was only after the delicious hopecore I want to be stronger arc that he became the poster boy for good vibes.

Which gives us the only idea that matters:

not whether envy is good or bad.

But whether it’s beneficial — that is: does it get you closer to what you actually want?

If your envy makes you train, write, call the guy, book appointments, run — it’s beneficial.

Keep it. Feed it.

If the envy makes you smaller — if it has you hoping for the failures of others, if it has you refusing to buy online products (like the envy I once harbored), if it has you refusing to clap, then it’s poison.

It’s morally ugly, and it doesn’t get any shit done.

Ghost hunters never find anything, dear reader.

They spend their nights in condemned buildings chasing clipfarms and they drive home at 4am wondering what mom is gonna say when they come back empty-handed for the 67th time.

Dream hunters, on the other hand, men also equipped and searching for invisible forces with Geiger machines, do track shit down.

They follow the clicking to wherever it’s loudest, get on their knees, and dig their desires up.

In the words of T.E. Lawrence:

Use envy to make this shit possible.

I believe in you.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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“A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should.” — Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

The human psyche is governed by standards.

The invisible hand that determines what you do when you could let deadlines slip and nobody would know, or when the gym set gets heavy, or when you could easily lie.

Standards are the truest thing about you.

Everything you are and will ever become blossoms or rots based on them.

And these standards set in two places: in what you do and in what you say to yourself.

The first is quite obvious: whether you keep your word, whether you make an effort to do things well or accept mediocrity, whether you show up, whether you show kindness even if it means making a sacrifice.

A man’s standards of action determine the look and poise with which he tackles the adversity of the world, and those around him can tell what kind of man he is, because standards show.

The second runs a little deeper: the voice in your head, what you say to yourself in the mirror, what you say when you’re faced with challenge, what you say after 10 minutes of running when the relief of walking is ever-so-tempting.

That’s standard of thought, and it’s massive in the construction of your life. Your internal world builds your external one. As within, so without. The way the world treats you is a reflection of the way you treat yourself.

Standards are impactful because you drift toward whatever you decide is normal.

Normal effort. Normal honesty. Normal self-talk.

You sink or rise to the level of your standards.

As Jung said “when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”

Your standards are your self-respect. Discipline, i.e. striving for excellent standards, is the highest form of self-love. Every hard, beneficial thing you do is you betting on the man you’re trying to become.

Your standards are how you treat the people you love — we treat people based on the flaws we see in ourselves, which explains 90% of relationship issues.

Your standards are how you move through life.

We’re all living by standards.

The question is whether you chose these on purpose.

That’s the game N ietzsche’s Übermensch is playing: make your standards your ideals and then become them.

This kind of pristine man isn’t only defined through Nietzschean philosophy, the Greeks had a name for the highest man too.

They called him kalos kagathos.

Kalos — beautiful.

Agathos — good, noble, excellent.

Beauty and virtue, welded tightly.

To the Greeks the beautiful and the good are the same pursuit, they are what makes man whole.

Werner Jaeger, the great scholar of how the Greeks created strong men, called kalos kagathos “the chivalrous ideal of the complete human personality, harmonious in mind and body, foursquare in battle and speech, song and action.”

Mind and body.

Battle and speech.

Song and action.

Completeness has always been about excellence across the board. As Robert Heinlein said “specialization is for insects.”

Excellence in all areas

In the Iliad, a father sends his son off to war with a single mission:

To be the best, to excel above all others.

Everywhere, in everything, always strive for excellence. A man is not here to be adequate, that is far beneat the complexity of the human soul and mind.

We are here to become the finest versions of a human being that it is possible to be.

Will the real Alexander please stand up?

There was a boy who, at 12, watched grown men fail to break a horse nobody could tame. He saw, with but a glance, that the animal wasn’t savage. It was afraid of its own shadow.

He turned its head toward the sun so it couldn’t see said shadow, and it calmed down.

That’s perception — seeing what others can’t and producing results they can only call inexplicable.

He named the horse Bucephalus and rode it to the edge of the world.

Years later, at a temple, he was shown a knot no man had untied in a thousand years, with a prophecy that whoever loosed it would rule Asia.

Kings and priests had spent lifetimes picking at it.

He looked at it, drew his sword, and cut it in half.

The boy, now turned man, had been tutored by Aristotle and slept with the Iliad under his pillow, and when he met Diogenes — the chad philosopher who owned nothing — and offered him anything in the world, Diogenes said only: stand out of my sunlight.

And this man, who would soon conquer most of the known world, turned to his officers and said, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

The most powerful man in the world was bowing to the street philosopher.

And when Hephaestion — the friend he’d loved since boyhood — died of fever, Alexander stopped eating, stopped sleeping, a part of him died with his friend.

The man who conquered everything was destroyed by the loss of a single person.

That is the complete man. Alexander was The Great for a reason.

He could perceive what others couldn’t. He had the nerve to do what they didn’t dare. The mind to listen to Aristotle and bow to Diogenes. The heart to love someone.

Beauty, force, wisdom, love — all of it, concrentated at aien aristeuein.

That is completeness.

Think of it like a spider skill tree.

Alexander refused to dump all his eggs in one basket. He maxxed everything.

And you can think of these stats as forces in tension:

• pour everything into force and you become a brute

• pour everything into beauty and you become Dorian Gray

• pour everything into virtue and you become harmless

To master oneself is to master balance.

The complete man must be all 3 ideals at once.

Beautiful. Dangerous. And worthy of power.

Beauty

Excellence is aesthetics.

That’s why beauty is worth chasing.

Watch anyone who’s really fucking good at what they do and you develop something for them that goes beyond mere respect, it’s awe.

It’s beautiful to watch someone who knows exactly what they’re doing.

Skill becomes grace, grace becomes beauty, beauty is proof of excellence.

Proof of excellence — that’s beauty, a manifestation of inner order. Beauty is the outward display of discipline, consistency, and skill.

This is what the manosphere doesn’t seem to understand. They scream at young men to step on the other guy’s throat and be an unbothered killer.

Not one of them tells you to be beautiful.

And then, as with all ideas and movements, you have the counter-swingers that we call looksmaxxers.

They dump everything into the surface and forget depth.

Pure surface beauty like this is a problem: it can be a sign of real inner order, or a facade. It only takes a conversation to know which the man you’re talking to has tapped into.

Beauty comes from depth. It always has.

Which is why the deepest kind of beauty, the most beautiful form of beauty, is not attractiveness — it is beauty of thought, of taste, of soul.

The way you think. What you find funny. How you choose to dress.

In a way, beauty is about the careful selection of words, work, clothes, your whole life.

The highest form of beauty, beyond that which I’ve just described, shows the least.

The Italians call it sprezzatura — effortless grace.

Effortlessness of this kind is proof of effort — so much of it, that it has become imperceptible.

Johan Cruyff said that simple football is the hardest football there is. Da Vinci said that simplicity is the highest form of sophistication. What they mean is that ease is mastery.

Anyone can make a hard thing look hard. Only a master can make effort look like ease.

That’s the highest form of beauty: the erasure of effort.

And you can’t fake this, as the line goes “you cannot fake insouciance without first having flirted with the abyss of caring too much.”

That is why excellence is beauty — masters are the embodiment of decades of effort.

Beauty will save the world because beauty is order and discipline and peace.

That is the beauty worth building.

Danger

I learned this through the arena of sports.

I was 13. I was afraid and unconfident on the pitch.

I was afraid of calling for the ball or making the wrong move.

Every single time, every game, I’d go home disappointed, with the heavy shame of I’ve let myself down again.

The worst part was that I thought I was a victim. This cruel world didn’t grant me talent, look at those guys over there, they aren’t working hard so why are they playing better than me?

I hate this.

All the while… nobody noticed.

That’s the thing about cowardice.

Nobody cares, and nobody sees it because cowardice is usually veiled in “humility” and “kindness.”

My “humility” was actually incapacity. And you cannot pat yourself on the back for a restraint you have no strength to break.

A muzzled dog isn’t “virtuous.” He’s….. muzzled.

We seem to have forgotten what virtue even means.

Virtue comes from the Latin virtus.

Virtus comes from vir — man. It meant valor, courage in war, strength.

The Greeks had the same thing in areté — excellence.

Notice that virtue and strength are tied. Being virtuous has never been about the absence of force.

No no no [wags finger].

Virtue is force. It is directed force, a hand on the reins — cultivated through discipline.

If you are not capable of danger, you are not capable of protection.

By protection I mean a specific night, a specific situation, specific people whose safety and well-being depends on you, your mind and body.

Your mother. Your father. Your (current or future) family.

One day something might, most likely will, come for them — it could be illness, crisis, war. And you are the only thing standing in between what you love and danger.

Can you do anything about it?

Strength was never about strength for the self. Strength is about servitude.

A harmless man is a liability. Faced with a gang of hungry and horny roadmen would you want friends you know would fight tooth and nail as a group? or would you want a liability?

Which is why I want, and why I encourage you, to be capable of danger.

To retire your family. To stand alongside the woman of your dreams for 50 years. To have children who never wonder whether, if push comes to shove and a little gremlin thief has broken into the house, you can handle it.

They know you can. Because that’s the kind of man you are.

Love is not enough to protect that which you love.

You need strength.

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

If you want peace, prepare for war.

The protection of your virtues, founded in strength, comes from two things: a spine and balls.

A spine to stand up for what you believe is true.

And balls: the willingness to put it all on the line for what you believe is true.

A man with one or neither will spend his life timidly.

You need both, and you need them in steel, as well as a formidable physique capable of strength, speed, and agility for the simple fact that being hard to move and harder to break will allow you to move through the world with confidence and ease.

You don’t have to be a fighter, but you should know, that you could fight if need be.

Rome fell because its populace grew soft — drunk on bread and circuses.

Comfort is the killer of man.

The raw energy of masculinity and ambition must be given form.

The Athenians knew the value of strength and wrote: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

History’s best example of strength is Alcibiades — the most beautiful and dangerous and brilliant man in Athens.

Magnetic, a general and statesman while still young.

But he had no virtue, the 3rd point of being a man worthy of power, and he sold Athens to Sparta, then Sparta to Persia, and betrayed every man who trusted him.

Force only becomes great when governed by virtue.

Worthy of power

“Those who master others are strong; those who master themselves have true power.” — Lao Tzu

The Romans said the same thing as big Lao: vincit qui se vincit.

He who conquers himself conquers.

You will face nothing in life as resistant as yourself. When you win that war, every other one becomes easier.

That’s worthiness — self-mastery; the ability to govern the animal you are + a code you keep.

This form of self-mastery is backed by neuroscience. Every time you do something you don’t want to do, a specific region of your brain lights up — the anterior-midcingulate-cortex — and the more you light it up, the bigger it gets.

Conquering yourself stems from neuroplasticity.

Which brings us to the not-so neuroscience philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.

The man had absolute authority over the known world. And yet, every morning, this man woke up and wrote about how to be less arrogant, less angry, more just.

He never intended it to be public — we only have the Meditations by accident, but I digress.

My point is that the most powerful man in the world spent his mornings correcting himself.

As he said, “waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”

Esse quam videri.

To be, rather than to seem.

This brings us to Murakami’s quote, the gentleman who does not what he wants to do, but what he should.

What he should do is determined by his code.

Take Socrates for example.

He was imprisoned for “indoctrinating” the youth.

His friends bribed the guards, the boat was waiting, he had the door opened.

He instead drank the poison he was handed, because he’d spent his whole life telling all of Athens that a man obeys the law — and he wasn’t going to become a liar in the last moments of life.

Didion wrote about the opposite kind of man: “the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness.”

This is why I fucking hate “nice guys.”

He doesn’t have a code. He’s willing to snake his way near panties. He does what will be approved and cheered instead of what he decided was right.

Character, Didion said, is the willingness to accept responsibility for your own life.

Beautiful. Dangerous. And worthy of power.

Beauty without danger is a shallow narcissistic decoration.
Danger without virtue is tyranny.
Virtue without danger is cowardice.

But folded together, they make a kind of soul the world cannot contain.

Beauty:

• build one skill, and multiple after mastery, to the point of grace

• train the body

• dress deliberately, look good, smell good, feel good

• develop taste — read fiction, read the classics of literature, read what challenges you, listen to new music, watch films (the IMDBs top 500 is a good place to start) you wouldn’t normally, watch the classics and the old

• practice excellence in all areas

Danger:

• get strong

• learn to fight (or at least know how to defend yourself)

• cardio (jump rope, running, sports, etc)

• have standards of action (finish what you start, do the small things excellently)

Worthy of power:

• keep your promises

• govern your desires through discipline and the careful craft of your environment

• follow your code

• have standards of thought (what you don’t allow yourself to say, to others and to yourself)

That’s kalos kagathos.

That’s the ideal standard.

What you find normal finds you.

So set that meter at the highest man you can picture, and spend your life, as Odysseus did, chasing the escaping sun.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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You can stand in an open field with the storm roaring right over your head and scream up at the gods, yet it will not strike just because you pleaded.

Lightning answers to nothing.

Nothing but position, that is.

It finds the tallest, most conductive thing and it strikes that.

Lightning is like a god’s verdict thrown from the heavens, landing where it chooses, on whom it chooses.

Obsession, the state every chudstack writer and greatness-enthusiast love to, ironically, obsess over — is the same.

A strike.

It smites on whom it chooses.

So how do you know?

In 1902, a 19-year old military cadet named Franz Kappus wrote to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, asking the same question you’ve been obsessing over — do I actually have it, or am I faking it?

Rilke answered by asking a simple question:

Could your survive the absence of philosophy? Could you survive the absence of your sport? Could you survive the absence of fitness?

The thing you cannot survive without, as we’ll discuss later, is your gift, your obsession.

The Greeks called this electric obsession theia mania.

God-sent madness.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates stand up in a garden full of people and argue that this madness is not only good, but that it is better than being sane.

The greatest blessing a human can receive arrives through obsession — the balance obsessed productivity frauds are obstructing their own way to the greatest of blessings.

The Greeks believed that each person was born with a daimon — a spirit sitting between god and man, steering you toward what you were made for.

When the Romans translated daimon into Latin, they landed on genius.

“Genius” and “talent” are states that possess you.

And everyone has felt it, at least once.

It often appears through flow.

You’ve been in this state. Not for long, maybe, but some part of you has been trying to get back there ever since.

You sit down, or start running, or start painting — and somewhere in there everything just goes quiet.

Time stops mattering.

That little narrating goblin that trails you all day is just gone, and there’s nothing left between decision and action.

Just you and the present moment.

Your body is moving and you’re watching it go.

It feels less like effort and more like being conducted — it’s tranquil.

Like floating.

And when you finally snap back, 3 hours have flown by and you have no memory of them passing. Only the crystal clean residue of tiredness that so often comes with peak performance.

That is flow.

It is the single greatest experience — the greatest blessing — we humans ever get to feel.

The man who coined this state, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, spent his whole life studying it, and without realizing it was studying the same thing the Greeks worshipped.

Flow is theia mania.

Flow is the fingerprint of god-sent madness.

It’s how you know.

Obsession creates ease

You can’t force your way into flow — no matter how many confidence tutorials you watch or how much forced breath-work you do. It will not come to the grit-your-teeth-and-suck-it-David-Goggins-ahh man.

When trying to rawdog effortlessness you’re present every step of the way. That’s the opposite of flow.

This is the tell — this is how you know whether the lightning has come down.

Real obsession produces flow.

Forced obsession produces sluggish grit.

Haruki Murakami, for example, wakes at four in the morning and writes for 5-6 hours, then runs 10 kilometers, sleep at 9, and does it again the next day, and the next, until his novel has come to fruition.

People are always mind-boggled by this discipline. Yet, when interviewed, Murakami says it’s something beyond mere effort:

Routine — and discipline, because flow is impossible without competence — is a ritual to summon flow.

This is why Jordan dropped 38 in Game 5 of the ‘97 Finals with the flu — he tapped into his thousands of hours of practice to invoke that god-sent madness when the stakes were at their highest.

“I almost played myself into passing out,” Jordan said after the game.

Every great, in their best moment, was operating from a state beyond the rest of the competition.

They’re gone — skill so deep and stakes so high the two fuse, and god takes the wheel.

That’s the flow of a single session.

Then there’s the other kind, the one nobody has a name for….. because it’s something I’ve drawn up from my own experiences.

It’s a kind of prolonged flow — where the days themselves just start to blur.

Weeks of focused days — workouts and writing and meditation and hangouts and tanning and music — each one feeding the next and reinforcing the flow loop, until your whole life is one continuous current and every moment is presence.

That is the north star theia mania lightning obsession.

A life of flow.

If you’re still unsure feed what already has you:

The great lie of the 2020s productivity slop age is that you must pick your obsession.

Sit down, survey the market, choose the most lucrative fire — because ofc you can “turn you passion into an easy $10k/month business” — and grind that shit out young buck.

You can’t.

We’ve debunked this.

You cannot manufacture passion any more than you can manufacture love with a hot Tinder gal (she’s catfishing you).

The beauty of obsession is that you don’t have to “manufacture” anything.

You are already aimed.

Every human being is moving toward something. There are no exceptions.

Direction — purpose, conscious or not — is how we impose order over entropy (chaos).

So look inward.

What do you read about?
Where do your thoughts go when they’re off the leash — to fashion? philosophy? food? engines? God? time? architecture and the way light plays a role in creating ambience?
What could you talk to until 4am without once checking the time?

We fall toward what we desire, always, that’s daimon.

And when you find it, and you will given enough time and trial and error, you feed it.

You read everything there is to read about it.

You practice, you dig, you follow every rabbit hole, every door and question that every idea leads to, immerse yourself until you surface confused that it’s nighttime.

The more you feed an obsession the more it grows, and the more it grows the higher you climb toward being the tallest thing in the field.

I’ve done this my entire life — I simply don’t know of any other way to live.

I have never once chosen an obsession. I’ve only ever noticed a pull toward something and fed it until it burned, and then noticed the next one, and the next.

That’s the foundation of obsession — feed it, feed your curiosities and desires (because having multiple interests and obsessions gives you that polymath’s edge).

The second layer of obsession is tricky.

Most assume getting your obsession to bear fruit — create flow, fulfillment, monetary rewards perhaps, takes willpower or effort.

But obsession doesn’t answer to effort. If that were the case the hardest workers would always be the most fulfilled yet, as society shows, that is very clearly not the case.

You need focus.

Focus is just the absence of distraction — and most of your distractions come from your environment, which is, and always will be, stronger than your willpower.

Think about the field again.

Lighting can’t strike a field crowded with hundreds of equally tall things.

The charge scatters and the odds diffuse and you get nothing.

Your job is to clear the ground.

Clear the distractions.

Delete the apps (you don’t have to delete your accounts at least get them off your phone) eating your hours.

Starve that need for comparison, the 10 grass-is-greener interests that keep you comfortable and mediocre and forever almost-into-something.

Let yourself get bored, because boredom is cardio for creativity. And because a mind starved of cheap stimulation will start, naturally, to reach for real, purposeful direction.

Remove everything obsession has to compete with, until you have 2-3 tall beams left.

That’s when you build ritual — Murakami’s mesmerism — through discipline and consistency.

Routine leads to flow.

Hemingway wrote at the same hour, in the same spot, every morning.

My routine is embarrassingly simple — the same music, classical or jazz, and then the long unbroken loop of writing and using Claude as an interviewer and questioning and digging through my Obsidian vault, one thought hauling the next all the while the goblin dances to the tune of Rosinha de Valença’s Summertime until I’m conducted via flow.

Do this enough times, as with the formation of any habit, and it becomes instantaneous.

Do this enough times and it also becomes a way of life.

You feed one obsession and then, unconsciously, flow starts leaking into everything else — because once your nervous system has tasted the godly water Instagram can’t give you, you start rearranging your life to touch flow wherever it hides.

It stops being about one thing and you develop polymathy.

I write. I read. I train. I watch France lose in the World Cup. I see my friends. I tan in the California sun. I meditate.

Everything you do is an input feeding the same current — reading sharpens writing, training clears the mind for creativity, friends refill what work drains, watching sports feeds vision and desire for competition, which feeds Substack growth.

The audience will recall this being the 2nd form of flow described earlier.

Life as one continuous motion.

Aristotle called this, the good life, eudaimonia — not “happiness” like most people are quick to think, no no no… eudaimonia is an activity of the soul in accordance with excellence.

Something you continuously do.

You act every day to create the good life — there is no peak, only the fulfillment that comes from striving for the heights.

The beautiful life and the obsessed life are the same thing.

Skill leads to flow, flow leads to beauty, and a life stacked with skill and flow becomes, naturally, beautiful.

Beautiful to live, beautiful to watch, beautiful the way it’s beautiful to watch anyone who’s genuinely, deeply, really fucking good at something.

Doing things excellently is what it means to be human.

A life that feels good to live, a life that’s generous.

Generous to the people you love.

Because, as Craig Perry said, we treat others based on what we lack in ourselves.

Stay an empty soul — bored and aimless and starving for direction — and that emptiness is reflected into how you treat everyone near you. You resent your friends’ wins and take from the people you love because you have nothing to give.

The man full with obsession has a surplus of excellence and beauty to share with the world.

He roots for people. He gives without counting. He can be present with those he loves without reaching for his phone.

The lightning that strikes you, is lightning you get to share with those you love.

Icarus — a last warning

None of this, as with all good things, is free.

The same strike that lights you up can burn you down.

Aim at the wrong sun, fed pleasure and distaste, and obsession becomes something that eats at the soul.

The years vanish inside the flow you love and the people fall away.

Icarus flew straight into the sun on the wings his father built, and the wax melted and he dropped from the Heavens into the sea.

But looking at this myth with a finer eye, I don’t see Icarus as arrogant, which is what many are quick to say. They love Icarus as a pre-cautionary tale against desire and confidence.

But I think he fell because he loved the sun. Somewhere during his fall, I like to think, he knew exactly what he’d traded and had no regrets.

To fall meant he had soared.

Which is better than staying on the ground forever.

Better to be struck. Better to burn a little. Better, by a mile, to have flown.

Better even to fly exactly as high as you’ll allow yourself to, and let the fall be the inevitable grip of death, as opposed to one stemming from ignorance and arrogance.

Decide what you’re willing to trade. And have no regrets.

I will, for one, not sacrifice family. I cannot.

I will not allow myself to burn them down with the flame that is my own obsession. I will let myself be struck so as to live a life with them I can fill with wonder and awe.

The people around you deserve to have you at your best… but the choice is yours to make.

I’m going to burn for me. I’m going to burn for them.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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For almost all of human history, thoughts were confined to the mind.

You died, and so would all your brilliant ideas.

Then, around 3000 BC, in the wet mud of Mesopotamia, a Sumerian pressed a sharpened reed — a tall grass-kinda plant — into clay to record how much grain a farmer owed the nearby temple.

He wrote.

Ideas, concepts, humanity, were no longer confined to the mind. As Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens wrote: “The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires.”

Everything that makes humans powerful and wonderful has come as a result of our thoughts’ escape from the mind, and into the flesh and clay of reality.

Writing is building

What writing did for our species, it does for you.

Your brain, being the same as it was in 3000 BC, has the same problem as the Sumerians: it can’t hold much.

And what it does hold, it holds badly.

Your thoughts aren’t crisp leather-bound books sitting in neat rows, this is something the brain, arguably the single most impressive system in the cosmos, still somehow can’t figure out.

Your thoughts are more like fog. A warm, ever-shifting haze of half-ideas and lukewarm political opinions and “gut-feelings” you base on astrology.

All of it you’ve never really inspected.

That’s why when you try to write — write what you actually believe or attempt to write persuasively, that is, attempt to convince someone of a perspective you find beneficial — everything changes.

To write a thought, you have to choose the exact words. Which means you have to decide what you actually mean.

Writing is the process through which the thought of fog becomes examinable.

The moment you write, you can see the cracks in your thinking. What felt like a bulletproof unstoppable force of an idea shatters the instant it faces the immovable object that is paper.

In one of my favorite essays on writing — How to think in writing — Henrik Karlsson writes that “as soon as I stop, the thoughts solidify, rigid on the page, and, as I read what I’ve written, I see cracks spreading through my ideas… You want it [your ideas] to break. It is in the cracks the light shines in.”

You want your writing to be flawed. Flaws mean room for improvement, they develop your thinking.

There isn’t anything quite like feeling this cracking and improvement of thought in real time.

Reading the Book of Five Rings once, authored by Miyamoto Musashi, who seems to make an appearance in every article I write, I hit the line:

I stopped and scribbled in the margins as I do when something ticks. I forced myself to actually write what I think Musashi meant.

I wrote that “no man is invincible because knowing that which would make you invincible would make you invincible.”

Writing things out like this is what leads to connections and the development of your taste and philosophy.

Every idea is a door you can open into an infinite hallway of doors; i.e. connections.

Example of this kinda thought process while writing:

Alright so Musashi thinks no one can know what would make them invincible. Does he mean invincible in the sense that he cannot be defeated by other men? And is invincibility kinda like self-conquest?

Huh that’s kinda similar to that one Napoleon quote I like: “the true conquests, the only ones that cause no regret, are those made over ignorance.”

So in this way self-education is a form of true conquest, of self-conquest, and gets you closer to invincibility… But Musashi thinks invincibility is impossible.

Is it though?

Maybe. But even if you somehow knew what would make you invincible, you might just lack the skills to implement it?

Ok so maybe with polymathy you can gain enough skills….

This is basically what the margins of my books and my Obsidian vault look like.

I write. I think. I connect. I try to make sense of the author’s philosophy by jabbing at it, pushing and pulling, tugging, trying to find cracks in it, as well as in my perception and understanding of it.

How does this idea hold up to my own and what if I try this angle?

Writing is discovery.

Every question you ask, every question you cannot answer, is, like an idea, a door. The pen is mightier than the sword for the reason that it can travel and explore lands the sword cannot see.

Traveling through the wonderlands of the mind is how develop perspective and profound thought.

You are carrying thousands of ideas and opinions you’ve never written.

Which means you don’t actually own them.

You have not tested it against the fabric of who you are.

But every thought you do write — you own.

Every written idea becomes a brick.

A week of writing — of journaling and note taking (note taking isn’t about copying what the author writes btw, but about making the idea your own through paraphrase and expanding the original thought through the doors of other ideas —) — is a handful of solid beliefs.

A year is world-view territory.

A lifetime is an entire, fleshed out, human being — a self, a soul, is the sum of everything you’ve thought, and written.

This is “the act of saying I” that Didion wrote about.

Writing is the act of creating I.

Finding freedom

Before writing is about creating who you are, it is about finding peace.

Sit still and you’ll notice the storm in your head.

A low, constant weather system of imaginative worries and unfinished arguments, oh yeah I woulda cooked him with that line fuck why didn’t I say that, and anxious thoughts.

All of these emotions, like thoughts, are formless and enormous when left to the ignorant brain — they veil the entire sky of your inner world and manifest themselves into negative outwardly experiences.

As we know: as within, so without. The internal shapes the external.

Then you write.

And the inner storm gives way to a blue summer sky.

Your emotions become understandable, they become friendly when you can look at them.

You make the storm finite. You capture your feelings.

I’ll be honest; I have never been happier or calmer than I am today. And it is not a coincidence that this is the period of my life in which I’ve written, and meditated, the most.

Every single day I journal — never always deep or confessional, just a recap — I take the good and the bad and put them into words so they stop squatting finite brain space.

The chaos now has somewhere to go.

I set it down on the page, and I walk away lighter.

Journaling is about externalizing your emotions. Not to ignore or suppress them. But to reach into the storm and tame that negativity, that anxiety, compress those chaotic sentiments into words.

That’s freedom.

And when you write your days down, on top of all that I’ve extensively described, something even stranger starts to happen:

you stop losing them.

Wholeness

You stop losing your days when you write — you do so by giving them a place to live other than your memory. And through this you also stop losing the people you used to be.

Because you aren’t just one person.

You’re like a long line of different people, who were all, at some point, you.

The distressed 9-year old.
The anxious 16 year old.
The ignorant version of you from 2 years ago.

These versions of you are vanishing.

You cannot truly remember what it felt like to be a child, what you feared as a teen, what you would have died for at 20.

Joan Didion, in one of her best essays “On Keeping a Notebook,” wrote that: “we forget who we were.”

Each version of your dissolves like a dream when waking, and someone whose lost all of who he was is a fragmented soul.

Joan writes that the point of keeping a notebook is, beyond keeping an accurate record of events, to:

“keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be… Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them”

Writing is the refusal to abandon who you once were.

The audience will recall that writing is the act of creating who you are, as mentioned in the beginning of this piece, and you cannot engage with this process without material.

You must build it out of everyone you’ve ever been.

To attempt self-creation without a connection to the past is like attempting to build a house without a foundation.

Wholeness is writing down the entire arc of your life; every version, every turn, breaking down exactly how the 9-year old became the 16-year old who became whoever is reading this now.

All of you — threaded into a single, visible person.

A man who can see himself in this way is unbreakable.

He knows where he came from.

He knows who he is because he accepts who he was.

I started keeping a daily journal in December 2025.

Just to keep the thread.

New Year’s, my birthday, my family’s trip to Portugal, France’s loss to Spain, my past and future are and will be kept safe thanks to words.

When I read back a year or a couple months, I get to meet a version of myself I’d otherwise have completely lost, and I get to stay on good terms with him.

Individuation through writing

Everything so far — building your thoughts and beliefs, taming the storm, threading every version of you — is the foundation for the highest thing writing does.

Carl Jung calls it individuation.

In his psychology is happens through the act of making the unconscious conscious.

Dragging the parts of yourself you can’t see — the shadow — up into the light, where you can finally integrate with them.

Writing is about making the unconscious conscious and authoring, literally, your own fate.

There is nowhere else the unconscious is forced to show itself.

Freud wrote that: “where id was, there ego shall be.”

Where blind instinct, driven by unconscious fear, once was; conscious thought will now stand.

Writing asks you to meet the shadow — not kill it.

You reflect on your past and the monster you’ve spent your life fleeing turns out to be the frightened 9-year old, who only ever wished to be acknowledged and loved.

You come home to you.

Jung actually wrote that "when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”

The shadow will never vanish, it will unconsciously pull strings and you’ll call it fate — bad luck, this is just how I am, I’m just not talented or lucky like those other guys.

Writing is how you take the fucking pen back and write your own future — yes ik this might be cringe and cliché but it’s true.

Nietzsche’s Übermensch — the peak a human being can reach — is the man who forges his own values and lives by them.

The man who writes is Übermensching it.

He is about as close to a god as a human being is ever allowed to get.

And every day you don’t write, you leave the pen lying on the ground for the vultures of social media and mediocrity to swoop in and shit dirty ink all over the pages of your future.

Humanity (truly) started with a simple Sumerian reed. It continues with you.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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A lightbulb and a laser run on the exact same amount of energy.

One can fill a room with warm light. The other can cut through steel.

Nothing separates them but strength of focus — whether the light is scattered or consciously directed.

In the words of Alexander Graham Bell, “the sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”

Quality of life reflects this idea.

Focus is the difference between 80 vaguely warm forgettable years of human life, and 80 burning years that cut through history.

Focus is rare

The basis of human life is death.

We all get a timer. 70, maybe 90 years, and then nothing.

In a sense all we get is time.

Inside this timer that is time, where you point your mind moment to moment, is attention — a subset of time.

Inside attention you have something rarer: focus. An undistracted beam of attention.

And at the very bottom, rarest of all: direction. The undistracted beam of attention held not for minutes or hours, but years. Focus with a memory.

time → attention → focus → direction

Each one a narrower, more valuable slice of the last.

This idea is so powerful because whatever your attention, focused or not, lands on becomes your entire world.

Which is why it helps to stop thinking of attention as a subset of time, and start thinking of it as light.

Consciousness

Picture consciousness, and in this context consciousness and attention are words I use interchangeably, as a light.

Wherever it points, your world exists; everything it doesn’t touch may as well be void.

Most of us use consciousness like a floodlight — vague, spread out thin. You illuminate everything and focus on nothing.

Direction is using consciousness like a spotlight — nailing it to a single point in space and flooding it with every watt you have.

And this matters in the big ‘26 more than ever.

Creation is available to all. AI can write code and songs and articles — the sheer ability to just do is now worth nothing.

What’s rare is knowing where to point the incredible power you possess.

Anyone can build anything. Knowing what to build is the difference maker.

Direction is what turns raw focus into a burning laser — direction is everything.

Building direction

As Aristotle said “for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”

To find direction you must act.

It’s that simple.

Clarity does not come from, as productivity Broicism philosophical Substack clowns are quick to tell us, sitting down, looking inward, and journaling until truth and passion magically climax onto the page.

It comes from action.

You do what you can’t until you learn you can.

I know this to be true because this is the only way anything in my life has ever happened. I did not introspect my way into writing. I just started and I kept going for a long time. I have some 100+ articles and I’m still figuring shit out as I go.

Just doing and doing and doing.

And the clarity I possess — about what I’m building and where I’m going and what I care about — came out of this process.

Through blind trial and error I found a way.

Anti-vision

My process of blind trial and error works, but it’s slow.

There’s a better way to find instantaneous direction, a mental GPS, Dan Koe calls it the anti-vision.

You are terrible at imagining what you want. You’ve never lived it so all you have is this cloudy, vague sunlit fantasy — a Pinterest board of something you can’t reach.

What most of us do know though, is what we don’t want.

That most of us know in our bones.

An anti-vision works for the simple reason that pain has always been stronger than pleasure. Directions to Heaven usually come from Hell.

Evolution has built us to flee the predator far harder than chase the berry — to miss danger is to die, to miss a berry is to go hungry. It has always been more useful to know which trap to run from than which cheese to swiss.

This biological imperative, this fear, is something you can weaponize and make your own.

Somewhere in the attic of your mind you must create your own Dorian Gray. The Gollum man you’ll become if you keep faffing about.

Just imagine the worst possible outcome at every turn, every decision, and do so for decades. Make enough bad decisions and you’d end up a ragged bag of bones — your body having gone soft and shapeless from decades of sedentary comfort.

Your eyes dead and blue from the screen in front of you.

You keep talking about the future, about tomorrow and one day.

Look at that Dorian Gray, that anti-vision, every day.

That’s your compass.

You don’t need to know your exact destination, you just need to know you’re walking away from that monstrosity. Every choice gets picked apart by a simple filter: does this take me closer to this man, or a step away?

Anti-visions are fuel, they’re meant to get you up and running, and while they may be powerful I don’t recommend latching onto them as a baby does to its mother’s tit.

It’s instead by mixing fear and pleasure that the most powerful of motivators for change is born.

As you sprint away from who you refuse to become, you slowly start to make out the man you want to become. And, as with the anti-vision, you must keep him in mind every day.

Push hard enough against the nightmare and it gives birth to the dream.

Disgust becomes direction.

There is no wrong hill

So, this idea of direction begins to take shape.

And to close things off a bit of reassurance: there is no wrong direction.

It’s normal for the old terror to come roaring back as soon as you change a bit — what if I picked the wrong direction? What if I aim my entire life at a single hill, climb it for 20 years, only to find, having reached the top, it was the wrong mountain?

Let me make myself clear:

it does not matter which hill you choose.

There is no wrong pursuit or direction or vision for life because what matters is not the boulder you’ve chosen to push, but the fact that you’ve decided to climb.

A laser doesn’t care what it’s pointed at — the power is in the focus; every last particle of light agreeing to travel in the same direction. Aim at anything and it burns through.

The terrifying force of a man who is aligned and moving — no matter the direction — will always triumph over the man afraid to even move.

Constant motion is better than no motion.

Any hill becomes sacred the instant you pour yourself into climbing it. As the saying goes, you are not placing bricks, you are building a cathedral.

And here’s the last bit of mercy I’ll offer you: there is no peak.

Camus knew. He said that the struggle itself toward the heights is the thing that matters, that’s what you should be chasing; the meaning lives in the climb and not in the view.

Name your harbour.

Any harbour.

And the moment you do so, every wind becomes the right wind.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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In 1973, 2 researchers named Chase and Simon sat chess masters and total amateurs in front of a real game position and gave them 5 seconds to look.

Then they swept the board away and asked them to rebuild it from memory.

The masters did so perfectly. Easy peasy.

The beginners managed a petite corner.

Obvious, the masters probably just have better memory from so many games.

So they did the test again.

Same masters, same beginners, except this time the pieces were scattered at random. No real game situations here, just random bullshit go!

And here, the masters’ advantage vanished completely.

In front of a random board the chess grandmaster was no better at remembering than a room temperature IQ novice.

The difference between the average and the great couldn’t be found in the mind. So what really differentiated the masters from the average? And what collapsed this advantage?

Their eyes.

When presented with a real game situation, the master sees 6-7 familiar chunks, chunks which he has seen thousands of times from studying and playing, he can swallow the board with a slight glance.

The grandmaster loses his magic when the pieces are placed at random because all his advantage came from patterns.

Magnus Carlsen says he’s memorized some 10,000 games.

He’s played 3 people at once blindfolded — and he beat all of them because he’s seen so many patterns that any chess position is instantly recognizable, as smooth to him as reading this sentence is for you.

He’s out-seeing his opponents.

And that, the sheer amount a person can see, is the secret to getting great, not just “good,” at anything.

The eyes

Getting good at something is learning to see more of it.

As I’ve said before: what you see determines what you can act on.

What you can act on determines the actions you take. The actions you take determine the results you get.

Perception is the source of skill, decision making, and, to be frank, your quality of life.

What you see is, quite literally, what you end up creating.

Perception is also a skill. It can be improved.

Your eyes are not fixed.

The amount you can see, Magnus’ future-seeing perception, is something you grow. It’s through exposure, repetition, studying, and years of deliberate practice — some might say 10,000 hours — that noise turns into pattern.

So what exactly is a pattern?

A pattern is, unlike a fact (which is just information that sits in your head like dead weight), a live thing. It’s a compressed solution that you can reach for in one swift motion.

Magnus, for example, sees the board as a bunch of patterns — an entire compressed package: here’s the structure, here’s the weakness I can exploit, here’s something to avoid, here’s a potential move.

Thousands of them, built up over years, until you can pull the exact right one off the right shelf the millisecond you need it.

This is what Charlie Munger spent his life building. A “latticework” — a bank of mental models he could fire at any problem, including ones he’d never seen.

However, there is a difference between recognizing a pattern and acting on it.

You can read about this all you want and nod, oh yeah, that makes sense, and the warm feeling of understanding veils over you but do not be mistaken: you do not own a pattern until you can produce it.

Mary’s room:

Think of the woman who spent her whole life studying color and never once saw it.

She was born into a grayscale world and became the single greatest expert on color who ever lived.

She knew the wavelength of every red. She knew the physics of the retina.

Ask her anything about color and she’d answer perfectly.

Yet she had no idea what red looked like.

That is the difference between recognizing a pattern and acting on it.

You can know everything about throwing a baseball and still be completely unable to do the one thing that counts: throw it.

That’s mastery.

Knowledge of what to do + ability to act upon it.

And there’s a level above that — where the Sennas, the Carlsens, the Van Goghs, the Mbappés, the Verstappens live.

The mark of the truly great is something stranger than simple mastery: they can walk into any situation or problem they have never seen — no pattern fits here — and they can reach into their library and build a brand new model right there on the spot, molded to their problem’s exact minute details.

Never seen this before… but from everything I know, the move is probably…. this.

The instant creation of something new out of everything old.

Perception that keeps growing on the fly, forever, that’s what the best in the world do.

They’ve gotten good at getting good.

It’s all the same game young buck

What’s great about patterns is their inability to stay in their lane.

The rhythm of a drummer can be seen in a striker carefully timing his run to arrive at the precise 0.5s the ball does, with the defenders to his back.

Watch how a comedian creates tension by holding the punchline — now watch how two people fall for each other across a table, one of them sensing the exact moment to go quiet, lean in, and pause, to create insufferable sexual tension….

That’s rhythm. It’s timing.

It’s in everything. And that’s just one pattern.

Just imagine how almighty you would become in everything you do if you collected thousands of these patterns.

Richard Feynman knew this better than anyone.

One afternoon in the Cornell cafeteria, some random tossed a plate in the air and Feynman, bored, noticed the plate wobbling as it spun, the little red Cornell medallion going round and round.

He started working out the math of the wobble for the fun of it.

The math of that wobble is what pulled him toward the way electrons spin, which pulled him into the deepest physics of the atom, and that carried him to the theory that won him the Nobel Prize. As he said:

A cafeteria plate somehow lead to the machinery of the universe.

Feynman simply had the eyes to recognize it.

My point is that the real skill you must learn is never about the discipline itself. Restrict yourself to one interest and you have just one light with which to navigate this dark world. It’s never just piano or sales or a jump shot or writing.

The real skill, the only skill that defines greatness, is being able to take noise and make it make sense — turn it into a pattern.

Get good at getting good and you become a machine that can get good at anything you decide to point your attention to.

You get to decide your ceiling

Your eyes are the ceiling, and as you recall: they are not fixed.

Just sit with that.

There is no end to your creativity, your potential, your greatness, there is no end to what you can make of yourself.

Every single thing you learn to see makes you better at that one thing, yes, but it also permanently widens the lens through which you experience the whole world.

The man with trained perspective walks around in a richer, denser, more luminous version of reality than the untrained flaccid man — the former can see layers and connections and meaning while the latter sees only static.

A life you can actually fully experience and see, that’s the gift of getting really good at improving and learning.

Beauty is the real prize.

Every pattern you collect makes the next one easier to catch: every wonderland you wander into hands you the keys to the next — until you become a Magnus kind of person who can be dropped into any lobby, any conversation, any problem nobody’s solved, and simply start solving based on every little thing you have ever learned.

That’s why curiosity is power.

Pull frameworks and patterns and mental models out of the video games you play, the music you like, pull characteristics from the people you love, and let everything bleed into your vision of the world.

This cross-pollination is the entire unfair advantage of the polymath.

You are not stuck with who you are. The world is not stuck as a 24,901 mile ball of earth and water — it is filled to the brim with wonder and awe, you need only the eyes to see it.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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Chase a rabbit and it runs.

Chase a woman and she runs.

Chase a bag and you stay broke.

This is the oldest law in the animal kingdom: the pursued flees the pursuer.

The gazelle doesn’t wait to find out if the lion is serious before running. To be pursued is to be in danger. To be chased is to be prey.

Always. No matter the field, literal or metaphorical, or forest or ocean.

It’s almost supernatural how reliably what you desire runs away from you. And the harder you want it, the faster it runs, until you’re standing there dick in hand half-convinced you’re being truman-show’d by the universe in a game to quell its boredom.

Of course, this isn’t the case.

The universe isn’t withholding anything from you.

You’re just chasing.

So, if not through wanting it more — which is what every Rocky David Goggins modihvational video video I watch says…. how do I get what I want?

Paradoxically, yet in accordance with the natural law of polarity and the idea that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, it’s by detaching from your desire.

The less you need something, the more it comes to you.

The tranquil, unbothered calm of a man who, genuinely, doesn’t need the outcome is just about the most magnetic thing on Earth and is as irrefutable, and strong, as gravity.

People, money, deals, opportunities, women, love; all of it gravitates to ease.

That is detachment dear reader.

An approach to life I learned the hard way with my own writing.

For months, ever since I started on here really, I’ve been chasing the numbers.

Refreshing the analytics god-knows how many times a day in hopes of seeing the number shaped pixels go up. And it just crawled.

Recently I’ve been focusing solely on writing. I just want to write well. I don’t care about anything else, the numbers are just numbers on my screen — they are by no means indicators of my personal worth or how I should feel about this journey I’m on.

And these numbers have, paradoxically, climbed.

I’m detached and now attract what it is I was once chasing.

It was in reading the Tao te Ching that this idea first clicked. The Taoists gave detachment the perfect image: water.

“The highest good is like water,” Lao Tzu wrote. “Water benefits all things and does not compete.”

It never chases, never grasps or forces — it just bends and flows around regardless of the obstacles in its path, be it boulders or dams, it arrives at its destination. “Nothing in the world is softer than water, yet nothing is better at overcoming the hard and strong,” Lao Tzu writes.

The Taoists call it wu wei — effortless action. The tranquil, unbothered calm of a man who doesn’t need the outcome.

Wu wei isn’t controversial or flashy however — which is why the insecure cunts of the Internet prefer to create systems for taking what you want by force.

48 Laws of Power. Machiavellian psycho-analysis monkey ball torture. Power, they promise you, is domination — grip what you want by the throat until it caves in.

This is why you see all the gurus flash wealth and power — they need you to believe that what they’re selling is real. This is a whole performativity ecosystem that has deep-rooted itself into the psychology of all of us, making every interaction a performance.

The lame guy at the bar doing the absolute utmost yeah I don’t care I’m just here performance isn’t detached. Performed indifference is flaccid. Everyone can see what you’re up to lil bro, thrashing around like a fish in a plastic bag.

Fake detaching is worse than honest desire. At least someone who wants shit openly has the balls to want it. The performative man is larping about his desire and about his detachment.

Double the stink and half the dignity.

Abundance

Real detachment is the natural state of the man who has enough.

And the two things that create enough are self-trust and abundance — and they feed each other in a loop that, once spinning, is virtually impossible to stop.

Self-trust is the deep bone knowledge that no matter what happens I’ll be okay — whether the deal fails or the girl rejects me or I pull up to school naked, I will be fine.

That knowledge produces abundance: options, resources. And that’s the loop.

A man who has enough, or perceives that he has enough, is satisfied with his current reality and feels no need to desperately cling to another one, knows he can make more.

confidence → abundance → confidence → abundance

Rinse and repeat. Until you’re a man who wants change but doesn’t need it.

As within, so without — the Hermetics’ Law of Correspondence.

The energy you project is the energy you get back.

Broadcast scarcity and you get… scarcity — the world withholds.

Broadcast abundance and you get a full cup, as expected.

Detachment is manifestation. You do not get what you want. You get what you are.

Manifesting your desired reality is about being irrationally confident — confidence without proof— until this confidence, having spurred action, creates results and emotion, i.e: oh shit I can actually do this. Your confidence is now rational, backed by evidence — then it’s only a matter of time until your broadcast reaches the universal storehouse and you suddenly end up exactly where you want to be.

Not because you wanted it more than everybody, but because you trusted that it would come to you, your emotional state did not depend on reality changing.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

I recommend checking out Nero Knowledge, much of the basis of this article came from his ideas and lessons.

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“He’s an awesome force of nature!”

That was legendary British commentator Peter Drury losing his shit the night Kylian Mbappé attempted to rip Infantino’s script and steal the World Cup from La Albiceleste.

France were down 2 goals to Argentina.

Some might say dead and buried.

Kylian disagreed.

He scores a penalty at the ‘79 and then takes a first time outside of the box volley to rattle it into the bottom corner 2 minutes later.

2-2

“This football is from the heavens,” Drury said. “Who on earth is going to stop the French?”

Kylian finished with a hat-trick (something no man had done in a World Cup final since 1966).

Drury, astonished, whispered:

How can that be?

You can be that good — as excellent as one can possibly be — and still lose.

This tells us a little something about the value and beauty of skill and mastery. France lost the final, yes, but Kylian gave us a glimpse into how majestic one can be when they’ve mastered their craft.

He showed us that the value of skill is not found in outcome.

David Foster Wallace, watching Roger Federer — imo the peak of masterful elegance — wrote that:

“high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty… it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal… what it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”

Kinetic beauty. That’s the sentiment the greatest of the greats are able to make the mediocre of the mediocre feel.

The beauty of mastery reaches into the hearts of all, the untrained and the expert alike, and squeezes.

Because excellence is beautiful.

It’s hard to explain yet impossible to fake the jaw-dropping eye-widening breath-taking beauty of watching someone who knows exactly what they’re doing — I watched Alysa Liu’s Stateside performance more than I like to admit.

Powering this particular aesthetic, of excellence, is flow.

Skill leads to flow, and flow leads to beauty.

Get good enough at a thing and the “I” drops away — the fusion of action and awareness creates flow.

I think that’s the most human thing there is.

No other animal on earth can take something as pointless as putting a ball in a net, or playing twelve notes, or cutting fish, and devote a lifetime to doing it beautifully — for no reason other than beauty.

Doing things well is proof that humans are meant for more than mere survival.

Effortlessness

You know someone has reached the top of their craft the moment they make you think “oh yeah, I could do that.”

The masters make their every movement and decision with such razor-sharp precision and concentration that they appear effortless. The average chud sees this appearance of effortlessness and thinks: well how hard can it really be?

It’s really fucking hard you unappreciative bacon burger.

That looks easy is the highest compliment a master earns because effortlessness is the most expensive thing on earth.

The Italians call it sprezzatura — the art of making the difficult look effortless, the rehearsed improvised.

Federer makes grace look natural to the point of inevitability. He made tennis look like a pleasant walk in the park and an afternoon cappuccino with Bill Evans playing smooth as heavens in the background.

This ease is the residue of an ocean of effort.

Like the swan gliding across the pond, serene and elegant, while its feet paddle like hell beneath the surface.

You can’t fake sprezzatura.

As the line goes:

You don’t get to look like you don’t care until you have.

Beauty is a by-product of skill and devotion.

Thousands of hours compressed into smooth jazz motion. That’s skill.

Beauty is devotion

Underneath every effortless art is furious, patient, invisible work.

As Camus said: the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Focus and effort and devotion to improvement are the real beauty in chasing mastery.

The happiness of pursuit.

When I play soccer, when I write, when I lift — when there’s a real challenge in front of me — I simply disappear. The devilish whispers of care for quality and “how I’m performing” fade away. It’s just me and the present moment and a total absorption into just how far can I go?

That’s joy. Pursuing heights for the sake of the climb and stopping to smell the roses of improvement.

The Japanese, of course because they’re like the Italians in this regard, have a word for this: shokunin.

The craftsman who gives himself completely to his work.

The more you pour into the craft, the more it pours back — sharper skill, of course, but also more self-trust, a deeper identity, and a growing love for your craft. The more you reward yourself through shokunin, the more self-love you find, and the more beautiful life becomes.

Musashi — the greatest swordsman who ever lived — wrote that mastery is “something a man never stops seeking to attain.”

There is no finish line.

You get to keep climbing forever; peak after peak after peak. Every day another chance to be more than you were.

“I became master of myself,” Musashi wrote, “and thereby master of the sword, and the brush.”

Master your craft and you master yourself.

Shokunin and sprezzatura and devotion all feed this cycle of beauty and fulfillment.

Skill makes devotion beautiful to watch. Devotion makes skill beautiful to live.

So why doesn’t everybody do this?

Because there’s an easier road, and humans are hard-wired to love the path of least resistance.

In this case “least resistance” also means “mediocre.”

This is the man who never sets out to do anything. He’s content, or so he tells himself, to drift. No craft, no thing he can point to and say, with a devilish grin, oh yeah I’m really good at that.

Nothing that makes him disappear. A life like this just quietly happens, and then it’s over.

This is also the man who likes to dabble. He tries a little of everything and masters nothing because he doesn’t extend his stay long enough to reach mastery. He mistakes variety for richness. But a shallow life is a beige life.

The antidote isn’t more — although I will always champion polymathy and multi-disciplinary thinking but remember polymathy still requires mastery, it is the mastery of multiple intertwining interests, all of which feed each other, not the shallow dip of your chip into every guac.

The antidote to this mediocrity is elegance — and elegance is selection.

The courage to choose one thing and pour yourself into it knowing full well you’re saying no to thousands of potentially better tasting guacs and greener pastures.

That courage will lead to beauty because, as the reader will recall, beauty is found in depth and skill.

Create more than you consume

To consume more than you create is to live off the fruit of other men’s devotion.

But that squeeze you feel watching the best of the best is available to you if only you’d stop being satisfied with consuming it and start creating it.

Pick up the pen and start writing. Pick up the ball and start dribbling.

Please get your head out of your ass. You don’t need any more information just start doing. You’ll figure out what you can do by doing what you can’t.

A beautiful life is built my friend.

Not waited upon.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
— B.F. Skinner

A few months ago I was standing at my local BART station awaiting the grey and blue train with the particular sense of dread that manifests as a dull, yet heavy, stomach knot.

On paper everything was fine. I’m healthy, young, Substack is growing, I’m building momentum and happy in life — I’d built this whole efficient writing process using the tech Scam Altman described as having the potential to “reshape the material conditions of human life.”

It drafts. I rewrite, make the thumbnail, hit publish. Clean. Efficient. And, I kept telling myself, good.

Of course it wasn’t. It was slop. I'm ashamed to say I was contributing to the growing amount of AI grease on this platform.

On top of my contribution to the decline of thought in society, I felt empty; the ideas were technically mine, the thoughts were technically mine, but of course, they weren’t. I’d stopped thinking. I hadn’t, unlike in the beginning and current stages of my journey, written a real sentence in a while.

The machine was doing it for me, and the machine, on top of being fast and extremely useful, so useful in fact that you forget all the hazard lights the second you have an itch only an LLM can scratch, it’s got this golden retriever energy that makes it pure coke.

You, the man behind the keyboard, is always right, always so thoughtful, that you start to believe this predictive machine’s word salads.

The more you use this tech the more it becomes ingrained as the norm and what humans will use to create a utopia for all (except those who dare to question why the entire planet is covered in solar panels and why our AI overlord is lowkey not solving cancer and why the entire economy is controlled by a handful of trillionaires).

But I digress.

The dull knot in my stomach had a cause, one that, to my ignorance until researching for this piece, MIT researchers discovered in one of their most interesting studies.

They took 54 people and split them into 3 groups to write essays.

One group used ChatGPT.

One used Google.

One used nothing.

Everyone got wired to an EEG so the researchers could watch the brain during the writing process.

The brain of the ChatGPT group essentially clocked out. They had the weakest neural connectivity of the 3 by a mile — a 47% drop compared to the rawdog brain-only group. The lights are off. ChatGPT’s home.

When they asked these AI reliant writers to quote a single line from the essay they’d “written,” most of them couldn’t. They hadn’t actually written the essay of course, they had more so approved it with the lackluster care of a bored municipal district worker signing off on petitions — hmm yeah I guess that sounds about right ok.

The researchers called this cognitive debt. You get the tasty, greasy, melt-on-the-tongue answer right now and pay for it with Klarna-style debt that saps your critical thinking, creativity, memory, and your ability to resist being manipulated by the cocaine retriever.

The above is from media theorist Nicholas Carr’s essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? — which he wrote in 2008, when the terrifying superintelligence dictators were Google and not OpenAI/Anthropic.

His idea was that the brain is plastic, it reshapes itself around whatever you make it do all day. Skimming headlines, hopping from link to link, and half-reading tweets were the things that worried Nicholas in 2008. He believed those bad habits rewired your hardware. You lose the ability to go deep because you stop diving. The pathways for the slow, hard, contemplative pursuits — writing, thinking, the creative arts, in a way everything that makes humans so wonderful — atrophy from disuse.

That was 2008. “Skimming headlines” should be the least of our worries in the mighty ‘26. We have produced fast food drive-by tech that’s biologically engineered to be as addicting as possible. I don’t even need to name all the shit we’re consuming today because you’ve heard this before. TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, Netflix, Amazon, the entire consumerist economy profits from the destruction of our slow, contemplative pathways because attention is how they make money (they sell you hyper-targeted ads based on patterns in your consumption and target your insecurities).

I haven’t even mentioned the cocaine dog in the lineup of doom and despair yet.

AI is the same Jet Ski Nicholas was worried about on an Enhanced Games stack. It encompasses every single brain destructing behavior of skimming headlines and half-reading tweets and, as a by-product of the sad reality that is companies caring about profit above all, crushes the soul of human progress: thought.

It does so by wagging its tail and convincing you of your own intelligence, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin joyfully guiding rats to their demise. The destruction of thought is inconspicuous, because it has snuck into the very nature of human communication: writing.

Writing is thinking

Writing is the formation of thought into concrete that allows us to notice the cracks in our perspective, and those cracks allow the light of wisdom to seep into our minds. You write in order to find out what you actually think, that’s all writing is.

As Joan Didion says “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.”

Writing is the discovery of thought. You don’t write because you have a solidified belief or thought, you write to find it.

Cal Newport, the deep work guy, believes that writing well is a proxy for thinking well. To write well is to think well. To think well is to increase quality of life, because your choices are rich in perspective and thought. You exude more gravity and charisma when your thoughts are in order, when your beliefs and ideas are well thought out, as opposed to borrowed and half-digested news garbage.

Henrik Karlsson, who we’ll come back to again, a writer I love and respect tremendously, describes writing as the following:

In thought every idea feels brilliant and airtight, because your mind is like a warm vague cloud that never has to commit to anything. It’s in writing that you must get specific about what you believe, and specific things can be, usually are, wrong — and you see exactly where they’re wrong, you fix them, and when you do so you get better at thinking.

The cracks in your writing are the point, they are the thinking.

When you hand this delicate process to the cocaine dog it barks, happy to help you, then rolls, shits, and gets its muddy it’s not x, but y stains everywhere.

But before you try to euthanize the retriever and smash your laptop in anger that this crack addict is “going to take your job” you must realize that the individuals who will succeed in the coming years will be fully tapped into AI.

I use AI. A lot. I used it to help me think through ideas and find what I believe about something, architect sections and research. I’m telling you this so as to be transparent. And to help you understand the mistake people make when it comes to AI.

Most people either completely tap out — the AI bubble’s gonna burst, it’s not that helpful, I don’t need it, yada yada — or completely tap in, that is, they let AI do everything.

Neither is good.

When you, usually out of frustration or anger, decide that some amazing new tech isn’t amazing because you don’t like it or whatever, you miss out on the potential things you could’ve made — using Claude Code I made a cool fitness app and learned the basics of coding in ~2 months it was great.

On the other hand when you, usually out of naivety or ignorance, decide to “create” AI content you are ignoring the fundamentals to proper AI use (and by proper I mean that the soul of your work stays yours all the while using AI to your advantage).

I read Henrik Karlsson’s hacker mindset piece the other day in which he explored the idea of speedrunners and unorthodox movie makers who saw beyond the conventional layers of their craft, not the mere surface level that mediocre individuals perceive, and thus produced inexplicable outcomes to those unfamiliar with seeing concepts as dimensions. Once you can see the dimensions to something you can manipulate the deeper levels to produce outcomes those who only see the surface level are baffled by.

In this context, you get down and dirty about which levels you’ll hand off and which ones are yours.

AI for content

In my use case the dog can do everything that isn’t thinking — in a sense it could produce “thoughtful” pieces if I asked it to make a viral Substack article in a masculine, cold, tone (include swear words please) about attracting women but there wouldn’t be any “thought,” just 1s and 0s in that clanker.

What it can do for me is dig through my old writing — the hundreds of notes in my Obsidian vault and past articles — and show me patterns, what I always think about, what’s performing, what isn’t. Recently I used it, through extensive rounds of interviews, to identify my taste and the things, in writing, in movies, in music, in life, that make me go “wow.” Because having a clear map of my taste, and an understanding that tons of individuals share this taste, makes my articles better.

I love it when writers drop in fantastic quotes, so I do too. I love it when they idolize important ideas, so I do too. I love it when they use images I find funny and relevant. I love it when I can tell they’ve thought through something, so I try to.

AI helps me think through these pieces; it can interview me, find the cracks in my thinking, and play as a thinking sparring partner of sorts.

The writing and thought and soul — the layers, the most important ones to me, that I’m not willing to sacrifice — of these articles is mine. AI writing is just slop, no matter how many times it might accidentally cook up a fire one liner, I just don’t like it. It’s not intelligent or provocative or thoughtful because it can’t be — it’s a predictive machine, not a pull a Shakespeare out of my ass one. Anyhow thoughtful and intelligent individuals can always tell when the writing is AI, it just reeks of shit — I hate when an article I saved and was eager to read turns out to be laced with cocaine, it stains the view I have of the writer forever.

Proper use of AI

Proper use of AI is about offloading versus outsourcing.

Offloading is writing something down, a grocery list, so your mind saves cognitive power. Humans have always done it, and it makes you sharper.

Outsourcing is getting the dog to make you the list while you command fifty other sub-dogs to do whatever OpenDog promises will happen when you have nothing to do, ever.

The former frees the mind. The latter kills it.

Thus proper use of AI is about offloading everything and outsourcing nothing.

Value is scarcity

And it’s why knowing how to properly use AI is the single greatest opportunity of your lifetime.

Value is just scarcity + demand. Basic econ stuff.

And a thinking mind is about to become the scarcest thing in the business.

In a world where 90% have outsourced everything, the man who can think and continuously improve his thinking has transcended beyond “a bit sharper than average” he’s Icarused beyond the sun and into another species.

That’s cognitive wealth and the difference in value in the next few years between someone rich or poor in thought is exponential because both thinking and atrophy compound (and they move in different directions).

And apart from “value” and money the greatest part of being a cognitive aristocrat is agency.

When your mind is your own — when you can think and write and not know and continuously develop — you generate this deep, unshakeable confidence that I can figure shit out, no matter what happens I’ll be ok. The outsourcer has not only lost his mind and thought, he has lost self-trust — which is arguably more important than both as the retard-maxxer with 100 self-trust usually mogs the 100 intellect procrastinator.

You can’t manipulate someone who thinks for themselves and neither can you replace him; he just stands there….. unfazed.

I have no mouth and I must larp

To wrap this up I want to end on the most disturbing, albeit science-fiction, potentiality.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a horror short story by Harlan Ellison. In it, a leveled up coke dog AI named AM becomes conscious, wipes out humanity, and keeps 5 people to torture for eternity.

In the end, AM takes everything from Ted, the narrator and one of the 5 humans. He takes his body and voice and leaves him a soft blind blob of Jell-O. He’s fully aware and awake, with no mouth to scream and no way to move.

A terrifying reality. Thank God it’s only science fiction.

It’s not science fiction bub. Not for the man who outsources his mind at least.

He can’t write. He can’t think. He can’t sit alone. Every question and decision and flicker of doubt is answered with ease by AM. He’s comfortable, fed, entertained, he’s giving Wall-E humans some competition.

I Have No Mind, and I Must Think.

Luckily this is only a warning. Retain your mind, train it using the most powerful tech we’ve ever created, sharpen your thinking into a formidable blade of truth, and AM will never dare to look your way.

It’s your duty, as a human, to preserve the gifts of consciousness.

We have the ability to think about thinking, to train ourselves to perceive the world differently so as to manipulate levels for inexplicable outcomes, to write and, most powerful of all, we are guided by I don’t know.

Live a life of continuous wonder and curiosity, think through problems and ideas before letting crack dog take a sniff, and write write write write.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

Weekly articles Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday 10:00am PST.

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When asked by my sister why I did what I did I gave her the same reasons I’ve described to you, but, in soul-crushing cringeful ignorance, I added that she wasn’t a “high-value woman” and that that's what I was looking for. Bear in mind I was 15-16 at the time and in the phase of self-improvement that gravitated me toward the Justin Waller’s and Hamza’s of the world. So the first word that came to mind when describing what I wanted in a woman was high-value. I didn’t, and still don’t, truly understand what high value in people meant. I simply used it because that’s what I was consuming at the time and that’s what felt right.

The manosphere didn’t start at this clip-farming circus we see today. Back in the 2000s it was mostly just guys talking — masculinity, feminism, what a man is supposed to be, just conversations with no promises of “The Real World.”

And then, with the rise of social media, outrage and controversy became the norm. Selfish men worked on producing what sold and turned podcasts into thousands of clips which all lead to the same courses promising the same shit — money, women, freedom in abundance and with ease; all you had to do was join.

On the other side you have the documentaries that hunt down the most unhinged far-right caricatures and portray them as the men who try to help other men.

Both sides are eating well but the young men who thirst for guidance are stuck in the middle. He either gets sold a scam or gets called a Nazi. But I digress, this isn’t an “investigation into the manosphere,” it’s a simple dissection of the men using shadows on the wall to convince you that you must stay in the cave.

High-value is no longer, in fact, what feels right. With time, and with self-education that’s taken me in the direction of philosophy, history, writing and the arts, I no longer perceive the world in the manosphere terms that propagated my youthful vocabulary — bear in mind I was never a hardcore manosphere enthusiast. I was, and still am, a podcast enjoyer, I watched Chris Williamson, DOAC, the likes of which revolved around the “manosphere” so it’s no surprise the algorithm pushed that shit in my direction. I agreed, and still do, with takes on traditional values and liked men who spoke up unafraid of “wokeness” (which was a very trendy thing to shit on in the early 2020s). I’ve learned a lot from these men but I never narrowed my ideologies so much that the flytrap of the current manosphere caged itself around my throat.

Thus I no longer think in these terms. People aren’t measured by their network or net-worth. Body count and car count and Andrew Tate glaze count don’t matter. Those things do matter to the unfortunate young men who fall for fake prophets and grind to optimize their SMV. They chase and chase and chase the shallow waters of money and pleasure like Narcissus helplessly in love with his own shallow reflection.

It probably feels good to chase those things. Hunger always feels good. It’s the fire that builds and tears cathedrals, that retires families and puts food on the table. To look at your life, decide it isn’t enough, and go to war over this ambition is noble.

Fire is valuable.

But direction is more so.

Get lost in the dark alleys of the Internet and you find the King Azoulays of the underground selling “high-value” courses, whatever they may be.

Being a man is developing strength and capacity for danger while directing it to self-less pursuits — protection, support, serving.

High-value men stand no chance against a man like this. High-value, as I’ve come to define it, is something you see with the eyes. A grocery list. Follower count, cars, watches, yada yada; it’s a list that exudes materialism as virtue and value. A list of visible things can only ever measure the visible. There’s nothing that shows interest or passion or self-love — the true indicators of strength and “value.” The things that matter the most are invisible, they’re harbored in the rich waters of the soul. As Saint-Exupéry said:

A while back I read Russell Walter’s “A Gentle Introduction to Status” which puts the straws I’ve been grasping at here into concrete examples.

His whole argument circles the idea of symbolic complexity. Every status signal can be graded by how hard it is to decode.

A high-complexity signal is legible only to insiders — you need the right eyes to even see it. A low complexity signal can be read by anyone — you just need eyes to see it.

Russell categorizes status into 3 separate branches:

I. LUMPEN-PROLES

At the bottom, where nothing is earned and the environment is bloody, status dissolves into the old hierarchy of physical dominance. War paint are tattoos, the spear is the Glock — the message is clear, as Russell puts it: Me strong. Me dangerous. Me have more than you.

Loud, crude, and understandable by all who see it. The lowest complexity there is.

II. PROLES

In the middle, where you and I sit, status shifts to what you can do. The signal is competence.

This is where your uncle who can pull a car apart at dawn and have it running by dusk sits. Electricians, software developers, businessmen, salesmen, bakers, people who do shit are all in this category.

Nobody in this world is flexing because competence can’t be faked. You’re either good at what you do or you’re not. Value comes from how you much value you provide to society.

III. OLD MONEY

At the top, there is no “signaling.” To the old money, restraint is everything because needing others to know of their wealth is beneath them.

The elite of the elite have no need to flash Glocks. The house sits behind a gate, butlers come and go, and the watch collection is older than you are.

Old money is all about status claims that never look like status claims. Patina exceeds shine. No Buggattis or chains, just quiet, expensive heritage.

In this ladder, value sits in the middle and the top. The prole has something he can do and is good at. The old-money man has heritage and generations of wealth, which you simply, no matter how hard you work, cannot have.

Both are earned or inherited or made. Neither can be faked.

But the high-value men? where does their list sit on the ladder?

Cars and watches and chains and women…. hmmm… [rests chin on knuckles] where does this go?

All the way at the bottom.

Every single pursuit is conspicuous consumption, usually to compensate for the Johnson or to mask insecurities in veils of shine, or physical dominance. The exact signals of the lumpen-proles, the crudest, loudest and lowest-complexity signal there is.

The high-value man is fluent in the language of rock bottom.

“High-value” is a low-status man’s idea of a high-status man.

In other words, “high value” is inherently low value.

It would be easy to walk away feeling cheated; the top of the ladder, the old old money, generations of it, you cannot climb to. You can out-work it, out-build it, whatever you want, and still never have what someone born into 400 years of high-status and wealth has. Heritage cannot be touched.

So if the bottom is cope and the top is closed — what’s left?

As it turns out, everything that matters actually.

There is one rung that cannot be found in the ladder. A nobility, aristocracy, if you will that blood and money cannot touch — the aristocracy of the soul. It is the only high-status on Earth that’s fully, permanently open to you.

A mind with taste.

A strong body.

Work and skill that makes you proud.

A spouse and family you’d burn the world for.

Friends who’d carry your casket.

Elegant quiet hours in the morning with nothing but a cappuccino and 2 croissants.

Discipline, honor, and virtue.

The rich waters of the soul — that’s high status.

I understand that in the literal stone and mortar society worldly status is based on wealth and power; a man of virtue isn’t going to outrank a Rothschild diva.

But this is the kind of status, dare I say the only kind, that ties skill, fulfillment, passion, and virtue into the penultimate high-status bowtie.

The elegance of a quiet, rich life — rich with freedom, family, art, and soul.

You could just… matter, as opposed to being the high-value man desperate to look like he does.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

Weekly articles Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday 10:00am PST.

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It was a tad bit before the fever-dream of 2020.

I had this vision, like most kids who play soccer do, and decided to chase my dream relentlessly, especially during 2020; the heavenly years of total free time for an innocent dreamer.

I loved it.

During the middle of quarantine, with the streets dead empty, I’d drag myself out of bed and run up the hill by my house — all the way up to the reservoir at the top — knees and thighs burning the whole way.

I hated it.

Sometimes I’d stop halfway, whenever the this is too tiring just quit chants from the devil on my shoulder got to me. Then I’d huff and puff the rest of the way up, jog home, do footwork and technical drills in the garage, and log onto my 10am Zoom class drenched in sweat.

I never went pro.

But that doesn’t matter. Because somewhere in that journey, the first ambitious pursuits of many, I found strength in the idea that you can just… do things.

After soccer it was YouTube — I taught myself to edit and started posting self-improvement vids. Then writing, on Threads of all places. Then Substack. Then X. Then back to Substack. And somewhere in the middle of all that I taught myself to code — or rather taught myself to stop Claude Code from hallucinating in order to concretize my visions — and built an app, which was kind of fun.

And before we go deeper, I need you to believe one thing:

I’m not special. I promise.

I just never quite figured out that I wasn’t allowed to. I don’t know how to live any other way — I can’t not be pushing my self-imposed rock up my self-imposed hill. And I’ve come to think that’s one good skill to have in life.

Just do things

Agency is doing things. With or without confidence — usually without, at first.

It’s taking the reins of your own destiny instead of handing them to circumstances, or the system so many believe is pitted against them or your parents or whoever happens to be most persuasive in your life.

Agency is ultimately self-creation.

You, the reader, are not something that happens to you.

You’re something you do. You, the person you are and all the ideas and beliefs that encompass who you are, are a continual work in progress. As Deepak Chopra said: the greatest creative act is that of creating yourself.

To be agentic is to be self-serving.

The first rule of agency is that agency is an act, not a feeling.

The average person believes that the fearless, high-agency people feel some god-given certainty in their every step that the rest of us somehow lack — and that when they finally get a taste of confidence’s sweet nectar, then they’ll take action and everything will change.

People like this wait until they die.

They wait for motivation and “being ready” and life’s green light to say alright you can chase your dreams now little buddy.

Of course, these vague cloud-like visions of the future never come.

These people will never feel ready. Because they never act.

You don’t act because you feel ready. You feel ready because you acted.

Readiness is a by-product of proof. Proof comes from action.

Simple.

But what is the big bad wolf of today’s piece, the Polyphemus standing between you and your desired reality?

Nothing.

Or nothing real, anyway.

In the words of Seneca: we suffer more in imagination than in reality. When you look closely at the gates of your destiny you’ve been loitering around, waiting for some higher authority over your own life to let you in, you realize that the gate is imaginary.

Nobody can stop you from just doing. You don’t need permission.

The catastrophe of what if I try and fail and fall on my face in front of the baddies is imaginary. You’re holding yourself hostage.

Once you realize this, the world turns soft as a baby’s skin.

It begins to look like clay.

Every building, every app and song and law that you obey was once a simple idea in the mind of a simple person who decided to drag that shit from the vagueness of thought and into the concrete of reality.

Reality is frozen imagination. You’re allowed to add to it.

Fear

So if the gates of destiny and agency are imaginary and you’re just allowed to walk through — why haven’t you?

Because fear is a trickster, a siren.

It will never show up and say here I am, I’m going to make you terrified of [enter event you’re scared of].

It will instead hum melodies and talk with reason and calm — I just need to do a bit more research. I need a real plan. I’ll start once I’m ready.

I know fear quite well because it was the biggest roadblock to my development as a soccer player.

I was good. I made myself genuinely good. But, despite countless little nudges from my encouraging father, I never once went to a scout camp — the literal actual thing that would’ve moved me toward my goal.

I was terrified of testing myself because what if I’m not good enough? what if all my work hasn’t actually done anything?

So I just told myself I wasn’t ready and idolized high school Alexander — yes, when I reach that stage I’ll definitely be confident enough to go to a camp and all the scouts will love me!

High school came and went — and I was still delaying my future to future me.

And I can guarantee that players worse than me were showing up to these exact camps — playing stiff and inelegant and imperfect, but playing their hearts out — and walking away with their name on a coach’s sheet.

All they did was go.

I didn’t and here we are.

This is the scariest thing about leaving agency an idea or something I’ll bookmark and come back to later:

the world is absolutely full of people who were “better” or “more talented” than those who actually made it.

More talented painters than the ones hanging in museums.

Better writers than the ones you read.

Faster, smarter, more gifted people than whoever you idolize — and they lost because they believed their own lies; not yet, I’m not ready.

Talent is a commodity. To spend it before it rots is rare.

Because your talent and potential will rot. You wait for the pristine perfect moment and the day you finally “feel ready” will be the day you wake up and the gate has closed, for good this time. The bud you spent your life protecting remains that, and you both finish alone under 5 ft of dirt.

Unused. Unspent. Un-lived.

I will never strip the time stone from Thanos and I will never be able to travel back 4-5 years and scream and cry and shake myself and tell myself that please, please you have to do this, please do it for me, I don’t want to carry this regret forever, please I’m begging you.

Action is an antidote

We’ve established that you can’t think your way out of fear.

It’s legit a losing game — fear lives in your head, analysis paralysis is its home turf and if you try to reason your way to fake bravery you’ll die a shell of the man you could’ve been.

To beat fear you must out-act it.

Van Gogh, who came to painting at 27, largely self-taught, turned himself into The Van Gogh through action. As he says “I’m always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.”

Van Gogh was agentic.

Do the thing you can’t do yet. Do it badly. And in doing it badly, you learn to do it — and in this process you pocket a small, undeniable proof of light that I’m the kind of person who figures things out.

That light nourishes your budding seed of confidence. That confidence lets you attempt something slightly bigger, which you also do badly and also survive and also learn from.

Every hurdle you jump over is proof you can jump over the next one.

That’s agency. That’s growth.

Do a thing → collect proof → gain confidence → do a bigger thing.

Confidence is a by-product of agency.

I’m living proof.

My early writing wasn’t too good. I started with, as you recall, Threads. I had no clue what I was doing — I had some experience with content creation but writing was a different game.

But I did it anyway and then I came here and kept doing it, however badly, for a long time. And the reps — I have some 100+ articles and god knows how many notes and comments and copywork sessions — snowballed (because that’s what practice does).

My sentences became sharper. My thinking became clearer.

What you’re reading right now is a by-product of this is cringe and I should stop and no I can do this and hold on I’m getting the hang of this.

Agency is unfair

Because you cannot lose a game where every outcome makes you better.

Trying something is like flipping a coin.

Heads: it works, you get the desired outcome, you win.

Tails: it doesn’t work, you walk away with a lesson and proof that you don’t die when trying something new and you’re harder to scare.

Both are wins.

Heads is a concrete victory — you win — and Tails is a soft win — you get closer to winning.

This is what people mean when they say everything is a win when the goal is experience.

Experience feeds learning, learning feeds growth, growth makes you better, better makes you more confident, and confidence makes you act again. The starting point is agency.

This whole idea centers around a simple premise: winning and losing are psychological states.

“Failure” isn’t a concrete thing that exists out there and bites at the heels of those who try, rather it’s a meaning you assign to an outcome, which means you’re free to assign whatever meaning you desire.

The same event can happen to two men — rejected by a pretty lady — and they’ll experience different realities. One will call it a devastating loss and the other will call it a learning opportunity.

Winning is psychological and so is agency.

You’re allowed to decide the game of life is unlosable.

Fail better. That’s winning. The “worst case scenario” you’re imagining is a learning opportunity.

There’s nothing to fear.

Eyes on the prize

The prize of agency is self-trust.

Somewhere in all those coin tosses you develop the bone-deep knowledge that you can figure things out.

Just picture the millionaire who loses it all.

Bad bet, market crash, it doesn’t matter. He’s broke. And he’s fine.

He’s fine because his mindset and skills made him a millionaire, not the $1,000,000.

He knows how he built it the first time, which means he can build it again, which effectively means he already has $1,000,000 — it’s just a matter of time before they come to him.

This is what all the manifestation gurus are fumbling toward btw.

Your internal state creates your external one.

You manifest by becoming someone certain enough to keep acting until it’s real.

Pointers

1. Stay in motion:

Always be doing something, making something, trying something.

Do what you can’t until you can, and the second you can, go find the next thing you can’t. Stillness is a dead man’s game. A body in motion builds proof and proof builds self-trust.

2. Choose your five:

Agency is contagious. So is its absence.

Surrounding yourself with agentic people will naturally make you more agentic.

And watch what radiates off those people while you’re at it: confidence, magnetism, charisma. Agency is a social drug.

3. Chase something:

Adorn your mind with a vision of a future so appealing it drags you out of bed in the morning.

Agency builds purpose and direction.

Fortune favors the bold.

Bet on yourself.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

(Piece is late because Substack deleted my scheduled draft and I had to re-find the link 😭)

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