Life is a rollercoaster:

Life is a rollercoaster. One day you think you’re super smart and have life all figured out. The next day you’re questioning your own sanity and judgement on if you’re somehow going to get caught for being a fraud. Both of those things can exist at the same time, and you can be all the better for it. It depends on how you think about it and what you’re willing to do about it.

Imposter syndrome is too real. There are so many stories of some of the most famous people who talk about how imposter syndrome always exists. The difference is if you do things long enough in a specific industry, eventually you won’t be an imposter. At the beginning, you have to prove yourself. Even if other people look at you and think you have everything figured out, you still have to show up to work every day to live up to that expectation of yourself. It pushes you to work harder to validate that you’re not an imposter.

But it’s all in your head. No one cares and no one when they started had any idea what they were doing. Elon didn’t know how to build rocket ships, Bill didn’t know how to build computers, Buffet didn’t know how to invest and Kanye didn’t know how to rap at the beginning. They all felt like imposters when they started. But eventually if you work hard enough at something, you can become less of an imposter.

Joe Rogan still talks about it and he still feels it to this day. He knows objectively that he’s one of the biggest podcast hosts in the world, but he knows he has to keep working at it and challenging himself. He’s only great because of the amount of time he’s put in. I’m sure at the beginning he had no idea what it would turn into and probably thought it wouldn’t work. After sticking with it for a long time and doing it for fun, it became something.

This is why creativity is so hard as a career pursuit. People are creative when they have inspiration, but the professionals understand the war every day. Doing the work for a set amount of hours no matter the circumstances. The best in the world work at their craft over and over again, even when they don’t want to or know what to create. They just do it. Eventually they’ll be good but they know that in order to sustain a career in that domain, they have to keep putting in the work.

You want freedom. Freedom from the rat race of chasing money and status. You want to get to a place where you can live life on your terms doing whatever you want. It takes time to get there, a lot of work, and patience. It also comes from taking asymmetric upside bets where the upside is infinitely greater than the downside. If you want to do anything great with your life, you have to take those bets every day and can’t be scared of anything. Everyone’s in their own head anyway so no one cares what you’re doing. Just do you. If you really want to live the life of an authentic you, you have to put in the work. Not just at your job but also on yourself. Working on yourself. Understanding yourself. Figuring out why you think the way you think. No one else will give you an answer.

Everyone can tell you what you should do like lose weight or stop smoking, but until you see the reasons for doing those things in yourself and why you really turned to those habits, you’re never going to fix it. Society loves coming up with new solutions to old problems. If you want to lose weight, eat less. Pretty simple. Yet we have billion dollar industries talking about different food groups and the best meals and new fasting techniques. Yes, it’s good to know about that stuff because it makes you better informed. But at the end of it all, eat less than you burn and you’ll lose weight. It takes discipline because you have to completely change your habits and who you thought you were.

You’ve associated yourself with that particular identity for so long that you don’t want to break it. It’s scary. To be someone different. To change yourself. But what I’ve realized is that by changing who you are, you discover you have the power to do more than you originally thought. You have ideas that are different and see the world in a different way than the rest of the world. That’s valuable. Use that. You are the only person who is ever going to understand you. No one can explain that as hard as they want to try.

To understand yourself, you have to sit on your own with your own thoughts. You can’t dull out your own mind. You can distract it with Netflix or a phone or your dog or your friends or your family. You have to sit and look at yourself in the darkness behind your eyes. It’s scary because people don’t want to hear what they have in their own heads. They don’t want to confront the demons within. The things they’re ashamed of. The most embarrassing moments of their lives. The poor decisions they’ve made. The regrets they have.

In order to grow, you have to reflect on those moments and experiences. You have to understand them and learn from them. Use them as a way to motivate yourself to be a better person. To do things differently. To live life on your terms. Once you look at your mind, you realize it's just thoughts. Your thoughts are not you, they’re just thoughts.

Feelings you have in your body are only feelings you perceive. When you get butterflies in your stomach when you experience a certain thing, there’s a reason that’s happening. By looking at that feeling and just that, a feeling created by your brain because of your circumstances, you can use it to your advantage. You realize that the things that you feel don’t have to be you. They don’t have to get you down and make you feel bad about yourself.

You can leverage them into creating something with your life. Doing things for you. People also end up in the circumstances because of things outside of their control like where they were born or how they grew up and how present their parents were in their lives. Those early childhood experiences really shape people and we don’t want to let those experiences go. It’s hard to unlearn. Really really hard.

It challenges our identity. It challenges who we are as a person. Because of ego and insecurity, we don’t want to think we’re wrong. We are. Everyone is wrong about a lot of things. Most people are so sure of certain things, but those beliefs sometimes don’t hold true. When they’re told they’re not true, they double down and believe it. Look at conspiracy theories. People love stories that fit a narrative they have in their head even when the evidence shows the opposite. Flat earthers, anti-vaxxers. People aren’t rational. They don’t want to look at the evidence.

They also haven’t been educated enough to understand the difference between fact and opinion. Just because one person said something was true does not make it true. Is it rooted in science? Is it rooted in theories and ideas that have been validated by multiple parties? Do you understand the counter evidence? Does the counter evidence make sense? Where is my information coming from? Who’s the source? What’s their incentive? Most people aren’t asking themselves these questions, yet they all matter.

Sometimes I think this reading and learning and writing is overrated because I think too much about everything. Everyone tbh thinks a lot about everything but they just don’t record it on paper. Man I wish more people would write. Particularly people from disadvantaged and underprivileged backgrounds. Just to understand how they think and see the world. What they’re upset about, what drives them, why they work the job they do, what they do with their time, etc. All of these things would be so interesting to understand from people across the spectrum.

We think that other people think in a similar way we think, but they don’t. Drugs really show you that in some ways. Even alcohol. When your brain is inundated with chemical imbalance and external substances, it can completely alter how you see the world. Psychedelics do this to you as well because they take you outside of your own experience and realize that everyone sees the world differently. What looks blue to you may not be blue to someone else. Like listening to colour blind people talk about the colours they can’t see.

People can’t see what they don’t know. They can’t understand it. I remember hearing this experiment of a philosopher ask someone how they would describe red to someone who's never seen colour. How would you do it? I have no idea. Because our idea of what red is based on seeing things over and over again and telling our brain a specific colour was red. If you don’t have any experience seeing that colour or any other colours, how are you supposed to describe it? I don’t know.

Those words are so liberating. I don’t know. To me it shows strength. It shows your ability to understand your own competence and boundary. To show people you’re not something that you’re not. To show people you don’t have to know everything. It’s ok to say I don’t know because then you learn. Hopefully then someone will teach you so next time you’ll know. How are we supposed to grow without learning by saying I don’t know. You can’t learn something you already know.

You have to be willing to look like a fool. Willing to understand what you do and don’t know. People then look at you more favourably because they know you’re honest. They can get a sense you’re not trying to be something you’re not. I know in this investor culture and status environment that we always want to show people we’re more than we are. We want to signal our wealth or intelligence or how great our life is. But I ask myself, “Who am I doing it for? For other people?” That game never stops, and also no one cares about you just like no one cares about me. We’re all in our own heads more than other people think. Humans are selfish.

So just be you. Do your thing.

Enjoy the rollercoaster.