I've teased this a few times recently, but after a complete shit show of a day I'm loaded with some energy and want to cook up some words that can let thoughts settle... hopefully. --- I've been trying to get at this problem for a couple weeks and it's like jumping in on some double dutch, which is funny because I don't think I've actually ever done that. *Building Depth!* I don't even know where to begin. I am surrounded by people that are remarkably better than me at all of the things I love and I'm tired of it. I'd like to join them. To be fair, this is *exactly* the reason I moved to New York. I knew that this would happen and now it's finally happening enough such that I have a visceral response to it. Let's define a goal for this lil session. *I am writing to clarify my aim and the path I intend to take to get there.* Perhaps we can start with my job. JOB TITLE: Research Analyst - Infrastructure COMPANY: {REDACTED} - It's a top tier crypto venture capital fund The research partner that I work the closest with has a PhD in cryptography from one of the best mathematics programs in the world. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't extremely envious of his depth and how he gets to leverage it. I'm inspired by it. A central problem here is that I've never really been good at "studying" or rigor. There are myriad reasons for this, but you can summarize them quite easily: >I have never needed to or have felt a strong enough desire to be rigorous. Basically, didn't need it, didn't care to get it anyway. I float on intuition and innate ability. It has served me quite well. I get pretty much everything I want, and I really feel limited only by the scope of my desire and my self-identity. But that is changing, and I can feel it. My job is not easy. I have to read and quickly interpret deep technical information virtually all day. Furthermore, I have synthesize it well enough and align it with market information to make predictions that sometimes lead to multi-million dollar investments. I want to be great at this for a few reasons. The first of which is that there are few things more electrifying to me than understanding something that was once a complete black box of complexity. It simply feels fuckin nice and I want that to happen more often with even more convoluted black boxes. The second reason is that being good at this directly impacts my earnings. The better I get at my job, the more money I make. I want to make more money and attract better opportunities. Simple. The third reason is newer to me. I'm not exactly sure how to articulate it so bear with me... It feels fundamentally *disrespectful* to not be rigorous and consistent in trying to understand things on deeper and deeper levels. The world is beautiful. The technology we create is a strange extension of this beautiful world, and to glance over everything at a cursory level feels like a sin. Everything just feels so flimsy and thin without true depth. I think there is another reason actually that is only coming to me now. I really like working hard. This may feel like it's add odds with the whole "I don't study and build rigor" but that's not actually true. All of the hard work I've done in the past has been... how to put this... Well, it's been *sexy*. When I was a musician last year, the "hard work" was not practicing the fundamentals and grinding on learning new techniques. In essence, the work was to get at the question "How do I learn how to align my mind, body, and spirit to receive good music from God and have enough ability to transcribe it?" So sexy and interesting! To be fair, I did actually work hard at this and the details weren't necessarily sexy, but the vision was and that was inspiring. Man honestly what the fuck here's the truth. I think that people who go really fuckin deep on everything from a place of love, with discipline, and do it towards unique and strange ends are *actually* better people than those who don't. Yes, I mean that. They are better people. I do not subscribe to the "everyone is equal" shit. There is some multidimensional spectrum with axes like "ignorance" | "love" | "connection (ability to see it and create it)" | "power" and being further along in the positive direction in enough of them genuinely means you're better than other people in meaningful ways. I define better here as "better for the health of our species and for the transmission of the divine". I'll go even further. I think being like this not only impacts your intelligence but also literally makes you more attractive. These people look different. Their eyes light up in an uncommon and unique way. The way they move through space, while idiosyncratic, is somehow more divine. I know people like this and truthfully I often shrink away when I'm in their presence because I can feel that their force is amplified by truth in a way that mine is not. The difference is quite easy to articulate and I can explain with an anecdote. I make a lot of music and I send it to people. Some people listen and tell me they like it, some people say they're gonna listen and don't, but SOME people actually listen. They make time to sit with it. These people usually listen to my work a few times before coming back to me. They turn it over, listen to it in different settings, they replay certain parts, they go listen to similar artists to build the context and then they come back to me and tell me the truth about what they felt. This is the stuff that moves mountains. It is true that I have been this person and that it is not permanent. We are human and we oscillate along all of these dimensions. Right now I feel firmly in the middle of the bell curve for me personally, which luckily is still pretty high compared to the aggregate curve of all people. Ultimately, like all things, this boils down to the quality of attention. The only difference is that certain people *pay attention* and in doing so they see things and are moved to do things that are powerful. I think it's clear what I'm aiming at. There are a million "practical" things that I want to do this with very literally but how boring it would be to list them all. What I will instead do, to conclude, is still list them all but via a dramatic rant. I love chess. I love math. I love music. I love movies. I love meditating and seeking the divine. I love learning myself. I love reading. I love visual art in all forms. I love writing. I love a well-written essay. I love real things that require real time, like furniture built by skilled hands. I love doing the technical work that I get to do every day. I love learning how my body works and what its capable of. I love long walks. I love learning new ways to be expressive. I love being honest. These are all possible rabbit holes to go down and avenues to go deeper. How could I ever not know what to do in a given moment? I've just listed so many things with infinite ways of doing this exact thing that I want. There is no plan. Plans suck mostly. But I know what is required and I hope that I find the strength to build this depth that is calling to me. I want to be consistent but not necessarily structured. I'm done now. I ordered chinese food and it just got here. q