oxbquant retweeted
peter thiel’s greatest gift to humanity is his elucidation of verticalstriving and horizontalstriving
every young smart bright ambitious kid gets oneshotted by the interplay between the vertical and the horizontal. perpetual exclamations of “oh the grass must be greener over there” have made otherwise very capital young people into legging into twenty different types of careers/directions/competencymaxxing paths without having made meaningful progress in any one of them.
to take risk isn’t to try a lot of things, it’s to be able to commit to one. the grass will never be greener
verticalstriving, going from zero to one, loyaltymaxxing, locking into one direction and giving it everything is the only way to compete in this hypercompetitive world where your competition is looking at every single crack at the hyperspace of your essence to try to find a way to destroy you.
this is something that seems simple but is insanely important to always keep in your head so you don’t fall prey into the greenermaxxing cycle and you wake up at age 30 with no core competency or experience
as a nice point of synthesis, was discussing w a dear friend @SolanaLegend that generalists are slopmaxxed - if your main sell is that you are a generalist, it is a simple way of expressing you have no core competency and were apart of the normiemaxxed population who got oneshotted by the challenge to be courageous and commit.
oxbquant retweeted
good will hunting captures one of the rawest human conditions, the conflict between logic and emotion. nietzsche spoke about this in the birth of tragedy.
it's one of my favourites. it so poetically captures the juxtaposition of this genius kid who can oneshot any logical endeavour yet is deeply troubled and conflicted by his childhood and relationships. over the past few days i've been visiting boston going around the film spots.
one of my favourite scenes is him and his friend on a construction site - 160IQ will says he wants to stay w/ his friend and work construction for 40 yrs; brothermaxxing. his normie friend looks to him and replies "if you're still working here in 10 yrs from now, i'll kill ya" explaining he owes the maximization of his unbounded potential not to himself, but to the world.
however tortured he may find himself that he ought to venture outside of his safe space and scalp convexity for the people around him who cannot. that he, while maybe having a non-trivial differential in intensity, must also make the universal choice of taking risk...embracing pain, disorientation, love, and stochasticity. the ability and courage to take risk is disjoint from IQ, if not empirically negatively correlated.
the scene made me realize that while talent may not be evenly spread, courage is. we all get dragged into the same fight; to suffer, to love, to leave safety behind and choose life anyway.
