85 · Death of the Defender

Everything that you want is on the other side of the ego. To be able to put the ego to the side clears your headspace and removes your emotional reactions, which are the key bottleneck for anyone trying to build anything meaningful. Find a way to do this — daily practices that humble you. Working out is one, towering imperial nature and big things is another, prayer is the biggest. Putting something bigger than life itself in your awareness gives you clarity about what really matters.

The core philosophy: everything you can earn is on the other side of ego and pride. Ask kids, ask strangers, ask people where asking feels like a radical downgrade — ask everybody for help, advice, tips. I don't care if it's your employees or someone with normatively low external achievement. The premise is that everybody is better than you at something, so they always have insight in that endeavour.

I guess being defensive when the ego is threatened is an evolutionary survival mechanism instilled in us — but resist the despondent tendency when confronted with your errors. Know the universal law: everybody's thinking and philosophy is dense with errors. Yours too. Especially yours, if you're doing anything new.

Don't be pissed off that someone works five hours a day and builds multi-million-dollar businesses online from scratch. Learn it. Being open-minded also means killing that initial flare of ego and envy.

Volatility smile and smirk — these days I'm getting ready to fall deep down the Dunning-Kruger curve again. Way down we go. If you model life's growth as exponential at the 10,000-foot macro, linear in the micro, and as small Dunning-Kruger cycles at the atomic scale, then you have to sacrifice pride. Allowing your pride to die is what lets you trust-fall.

The highest level beyond metacognition is coming back to grassroots and playing with it. Bending time — choosing what to use, when. Sometimes you are in phases of visualisation that should make you fearful and exhilarated at once. And when it's time to zoom into the concrete now, you must forget the ambitions entirely. The latter is hard for me; some people struggle with the former. Integration means doing both. This might be the end and the beginning of an era: swinging the entire pendulum toward action, living life in the Markov HFT style. You need to know when to use which mathematical model for what. Discernment in selecting the right model is a skill beyond merely owning the tools.

If serving is below you, leading is above you. You put things on pedestals because your ego takes pride in the opposite juxtaposition.

Just like Howard — kill the ego. There is no hierarchy in building something of scale. Don't be scared to go back to door-to-door sales. Don't be scared to flip burgers between funding rounds. The ego is the only thing in the building that doesn't pay rent.