It’s only in the past couple of years that I’ve started to understand what I believe in. Before I had all these ideas and aspirations that I just absorbed from the culture around me. But culture, as Terrence McKenna says, is not your friend. To say that I was liberal or conservative or capitalist or critical of capitalism or whatever—I look back and find it so funny that I could be so earnest about those views because my understanding of them was so shallow.
Note: sincere and intense conviction.
defer
Note: put off to a later time.
It’s obviously true that you can think about something your whole life and still be substantively wrong.
Here’s what I’ve come to see as the guiding light of my life: simple ideas, explained very clearly. You only really need, like, one or two compelling ideas that you deeply understand. And then you have to be able to make other people understand them, which is the hard part. You have to distill, and in a way distillation is harder than creation. Simplicity is usually only achieved after extensive labor because you have to really understand something inside and out to be able to identify the most essential components.
Note: Simplicity is actually complexity, identified. That’s why Ryan Holiday has written so many books on a single word: stoicism. That’s why The Minimalists have produced so many materials on yet another single word: minimalism. I want to ask myself, what am I willing to distill and distribute through simplification?
shorthand
Note: a short and simple way of referring to something.
This became a lifelong preoccupation of mine: how do you make people believe what you believe? How do you make people feel what you feel? In recent years I’ve gradually been overtaken by the idea that I can be most useful by being clear. This is the driving force behind many of my choices. For instance, I’ve always wanted to write in a colloquial voice—there’s something about making language unnecessarily obscure that feels wrong to me. And I’ve always disliked credentialism because it promotes the idea that certain people’s opinions should be valued because of their background, when really opinions should only be valued if they’re good. And I’ve always valued reach, because I’m obsessed with distribution. I guess what I want most is to be a good tool or vessel for the few things I do understand and believe in. Something about that feels both urgent and meaningful.