Evolution

I fell into the exact trap I said I wouldn’t.

I knew I was vulnerable and set up guardrails to prevent myself from falling in.

It still happened.

My goal to write one Substack post per week in 2024 won’t come to fruition unless I go on multiple amphetamine-fueled writing benders, and even then it would be a long shot.

The intention behind writing once a week wasn’t to build an audience, although that would be a nice byproduct. An audience is leverage, and leverage is what I seek.

But that wasn’t the main purpose; rather, the point was to push out so much volume that my writing skills would double and my clarity of thought would triple.

I witnessed the fragmented ideas I had in my mind magnetically cement together when I’d write about them and it felt like the best way to capture that feeling time and time again would be to focus on quantity rather than quality. Sheer volume.

But nope. Once I ran out of low-hanging fruit ideas, instead of writing for the sake of writing, I would only publish something if it was a fully baked out thought, which somewhat defeated the purpose of writing to begin with.

I fell into this trap with producing music as well — if I couldn’t come up with something that was subjectively amazing, I would shut Ableton down and doomscroll instead. Then one day I decided to stop giving a fuck about making good music. Suddenly my music got better. Funny how that works.

Now I’m going to write for the sake of writing and don’t feel the need to wait until an idea is fully fleshed out before releasing it into the universe. This is merely an external journal where I have like thirty followers — why not just send it? So from here on out, this Substack will be a medium-form Twitter. I’ll be writing about whatever mini-topic or half-baked idea forces its way into my mind, and if it deserves more attention, I’ll allow it to evolve into a full post.

Speaking of evolution, that brings me to my first mini-topic of the day.

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In the greatest Tweetstorm in history, Naval Ravikant said, “Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.”

This goes beyond financial wealth.

The guy who can’t go on dates with women starts to hate women… and then struggles even more to get dates.

The loser who once tweeted, “each large muscle on a bodybuilder represents a language he didn't learn, a poem he didn't read, a fun fact he never memorized,” will never be fit.

It’s easy to turn your distaste for something into your identity, but few things are more destructive to your growth. If you convince yourself that you’re not “one of those people,” you’ll never be one, even if you should be. You’re supposed to evolve and the way you see yourself is the foundation of your behavior. If you build your identity around not being someone, you’re neutering yourself. You’re creating an incredibly disappointing life where you end up in a vicious cycle of despising what you secretly desire.

I’m not saying you should optimize for avoiding disappointment, though. That’s a dangerous game to play, which leads me to my next topic.

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The best way to avoid disappointment isn’t to try to avoid disappointment. In theory it makes sense to keep your expectations low so you won’t be disappointed when things don’t work out in your favor. We all know that life doesn’t always give us what we want — can’t be let down if you never had any hope to begin with right?

But this flavor of pessimism is self-perpetuating. It’ll prevent you from stepping into the arena because you don’t expect to win. It stops you from shooting shots that, despite a low chance of success, could transform your life if they work out.

On the rare occasion where you finally do bet on yourself, you inevitably lose because you don’t set yourself up for success, and then you say, “I knew that wouldn’t work out,” and exit the arena once again so you can escape the pain of failure.

Disappointment doesn’t suddenly vanish from your life if you try to avoid it — it simply becomes your default state. You start holding back, which is a perfect transition into my final topic of the day.

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I used to be really loud and talkative.

I still am, but compared to my younger self who was subjected to countless detentions and citations for being disruptive, I’m mellow as fuck.

I don’t know exactly when the switch flipped, but one day I started holding myself back. I withdrew and avoided attention at all costs. It wasn’t intentional, but it felt as if I had to overcompensate for how I used to be. Any time I’d think of an embarrassing moment in the past where I was loud and obnoxious, I’d physically recoil and tense up, which pushed me further and further into the shadow; it wasn’t until I started DJing that I pulled my old self back out from the locker I shoved him in.

To this day, even though I’ve mostly stopped holding back out of fear of being “too much,” I still have trouble taking up space and unleashing my true self. This might be a surprise to some people who have only seen that side of me, and I’m grateful for those people because they make it easy to bring it out.

It’s not always easy to decide who I want to be, but it’s easy to decide who I don’t want to be, and I don’t want to be someone who holds myself back.

*

I’m experiencing one of those transition periods that, when I look back on my life, I’m going to cherish as a turning point that helped me become the man I’m supposed to be. I’m balancing getting ready for my impending move to New York, taking care of my mom who’s about to start chemotherapy, and a working on a handful of other potentially transformative projects that I’ll write about shortly. It’ll be fun to look back on these posts a year from now because I know I’ll be a different person, and there’s a good chance that these ideas will continue to marinate enough to deserve their own post one day.

I just hope that I don’t hold anything back.