Big one, boisss.
This post is about how all of us with intellectual abilities and some level of leverage need to be moving fucking fast towards becoming the best versions of ourselves.
The reason why I keep saying this and it's on top of the website is not because we actually need to be in a better life position. Reading this blog, you are probably fine and you will survive.
You need to be moving fucking fast, violently, and radically pursuing your goals and radically being effective and not tolerating any bullshit to establish yourself at a place from where you can be leveraging exponential progress towards a better global position.
All of us are going to be doing different things. Improving global position is not only helping kids in Africa. You don't need to be volunteering or donating money really. There is a better global position in medicine, arts, computing, psychoanalysis, literature, anything.
Whatever makes a current human condition better and thus benefiting other people.
It is a feedback loop of where the drive to help makes you become better and becoming better makes you help others in a more impactful way.
Anything that we do touches other people's lives.
Why do you need to have this mindset?
A lot of people will want to just live their lives peacefully, without worrying about helping others. A lot of them indirectly happen to be doing great things. A lot of them too happen to actually not do anything useful.
So I just think it is a great motivation that cannot be left.
An actual desire to make this world a little better in a very tangible way is the greatest motivation for some of us. It is for me so I am writing about it. Also, I realize that I am in a beneficial position to be able to be driven by it and not by other more stressful motives.
But doing things beyond yourself, beyond your current needs today, beyond your needs is the ultimate human driver.
Some might call it legacy or transcending mortality. We can be very basic too: it is simply having an impact and seeing it within your lifetime to improve the deep quality of your life.
The way to benefit others is to be obsessively selfish about improving yourself and putting yourself in your best position to reach the highest possible surface area of influence and impact.
This is a major realization that I had.
I don't have anything against volunteering but I was like, "Huh....Bill Gates could have never volunteered and spent all his energy becoming who he is to then be able to affect literally millions of people."
If you are in a position currently doing some small actions that are detracting you from the pursuit of your personal best, drop it ruthlessly. Society will try to convince us to do small actions but we need to see beyond that.
It might sound radical but just think about it. Increasing your surface area of influence and impact, you are nonlinearly making a way bigger change.
If you are helping one person for 1 hour, you are directly trading an hour of your time to help that person. It is like doing manual labor: directly trading of your strength and health for some work.
Sometimes it is needed but also there are millions of suffering people in the world right now.
We need to become really effective, bois. So we need to be affecting a lot of people in less time, meaning using the leverage of other people's time and capital.
Also, we have a responsibility. Living the beautiful life I am living right now, I have a responsibility to help others get closer to their beautiful lives too. Being in America, I have a responsibility to help those back in my good old Uzbekistan get closer to better lives. I cannot sit and be comfortable without thinking about making others comfortable too. Not only do I have a responsibility, but it is also very urgent because so many people are right now, as I am writing this, do not possess the tools and resources for realizing their potentials and in their turn improving the world.
This thing will need to be purely internal. Nobody will be coming by my door to remind me of how I need to help others, the same as how the world will not try to make me feel nice. The world doesn't care and operates on its own harsh rules.
So we talked about urgency. It doesn't last long. Like stress, it works the night before the test.
Now, gratitude helps out. Jeremiah and I came up with two ways to do it:
Stop and think about the current reality of things you already have.
Immerse yourself into a distressing situation of other people. (through videos, conversations, observations of other people)
Lastly, I will talk about what got us thinking about this.
Movies. Two amazing movies. Korean Parasite and Lebanese Capernaum. Absolute masterpieces about very poor kids and people living their lives in a completely different reality with different than "normal" values and givens.
Movies so far are the most accessible public tool for immersion into other people's lives.
How else do we get transported away from our paradise house reality of Florida into the real suffering world? The reality we witness around us is idyllic American families riding jetskis with their beautiful blond kids on a private lake. That is not giving us any urgency and any reality of most of the world.
These movies give you a lot of reality. Real people, just like you and me having a very different life right now. They are also very well made giving you the well-packaged reality that is digestible and doesn't crush you.
No need to feel bad or guilty. No need to go and donate right now. These would be cheap, ineffective, and small actions. It is not actually changing the world. Like just writing a test for your friend doesn't make him smarter.
The emotional drive I feel from the movie is going to die tomorrow. Sleep will reset everything I feel right now. We absolutely cannot rely on this.
That's why we need a beautiful system here.
⭐️[Daily exercise of gratitude for what you have giving you the urgency to act] + [Occasional immersive experiences into other people's lives to feel even more grateful and want to act .]
Design it however you want (paper, journal, calendar) but try to feel it. You feel like a parent of a little family that is not doing so well and you are the person to get them some dinner. You can leave and nothing will happen.
Again, this is an emotional skew that can be used very intelligently. At the end of the day, you are making yourself feel "nice" about trying to be bigger than just the needs of your own life.
Some say the world is doomed, nobody needs anyone's help and we are going to die and devolve anyway.
Although maybe true, we can choose to care about it to improve our own lives.
This can help out literally thousands of people out there. Out there is closer than we think when we remove the veil of oblivion and constant comfort.
mariyam
🤙Shoutout to Ayaz for very intelligent comments giving extra perspectives and dimensions to original posts.
Let' s keep those comments coming!
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