Parent: Becoming a good Man
The Optimizier
I’ve never viewed myself as one with talent, but if I had any it would be my mind. Not in a genius, intellectual, or tactical manner, but in the way that the cogwheels of comprehension turn slowly but constantly. It was my nature as a child to understand things deeply and other things shallowly. I am not satisfied by surface clues, but rather deep and general truths. It is why designing the optimal system is always my prefered first step of any endeavor, it is my vice and my boon.
But this is the program that I came pre-installed with, one that I am most comfortable, and has gotten a lot of value from. My college thesis, my trained body, my honed mind, my patience, my relationships, my prodigious life-decision making. All came from my habit of viewing things as an unending process instead of a sprint. Nothing is always trully bad nor good, every situation is always evolving into shapes that it wasn’t, and I am the potter that never takes my hands off the clay.
A lot of wisdom supports this programming, the following expressions serves as an example:
- Nothing is as unchanging, as change itself
- We are what we continuously do, excellence therefore, is a habit.
It suprises even me that the wisdom I’ve encountered so far were a realization of my own methods, instead of the discovery of new ones. That the wisdom encountered me, as I have always lived it without having heard it. Great modern men lives by this creed, Huberman, Williamson, Goggins. The greatness they seek is not a defined number, but a vague direction in which they optimize their lives for. They believe that to achieve the goal, one must be worthy of it.
The weakness of this program is that it has no urgency, it can slow to a crawl, because nothing is certain, and all you need to do is adapt.
The Goal-seeker
At the later ages in my life I’ve started seeing the weaknesses of my path, as all things have drawbacks. I lack follow through, I relax before the finish line, and I haven’t yet obtained a glory of a sizeable scale. My old boss dissected this fact and showed me its guts. I saw a man who is like a spear, tough, foccussed, dirrected, intelligent, cruel, and I was confused. I was once the potter, and then I was clay. He showed me another way.
This is the way of the pursuer, one who pushes his mind to find a clear goal, to design a clear path, and bulldoze his way through the path until the goal is held in hand. I see this in other people around me, and they hold a different type of success, Russ, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs. These are the men who pave the path of innovation, they are the pioneers, the explorers, the adventurers. Peaks, trenches, and oceans have been scoured by these men. And they too hold some wisdom.
I see the teachings of the ubermensch, the glory taught by western philosophy. This programming contains components that are missing from my original one, all written in the book Self Driving. The passage is
“A driver cannot be asleep, nor sleepy. He always needs to be alert, he knows the destination and how to get there. If the road is blocked then he takes a detour, but never does he veer from his destination. He may rest, but not for long, for the journey awaits.”
This is the tale of the ideal modern man, focussed, driven, goal-oriented. He brings home value to his company, and I say company because the family does not require this from the father or husband, in my opinion this is the ideal employee archetype. Yet a father must work, and he must bring home food for his family, so the purpose coincides.
The weakness of this program is that it is by design self-destructive. It requires unbelievable sacrifice to achieve your goal at all costs, and sometimes this sacrifice is bad enough to summon vices. We see it, successful men fall to depression, addiction, and even suicide. Families are broken by busy fathers, and men are broken by decisions with no right answers.
The Unity - a work in progress
The unity of these two programmings will define the rest of my life, I belive that if achieved, I will reach a new level of quality, I will become a better man. And the great men I’ve mentioned all has some combination of both. Williamson has a goal, but that goal is tempered in the wisdom that everything is a process, that the goal serves as a direction and not much more. Once the goal is set, we all come back to the systems. 100% is achieved through 1% a day.
The healthy middle ground I imagine, would be along the lines of the optimizer returning to its position as my default operating system, while the goal-seeker becomes my subsystem. In this scenario, I will operate daily within the framework of flexible, fluid, and pressureless optimization. And then in some situations where prudence is required, I will activate my goal-seeker, self driving mentality and pursue it. This is of course easier said than done, the goal-seeker will need frequent training and study, and the optimizer will need constant reaffirmation.