You could also have lost because of your genetics or not actually working as hard as the others or both. This whole "wanting it hard enough" schtick feels like an invented reason. I want things, I don't get things, therefore I must have not really wanted them.
Exit the Cave
91–100 of 114 posts
Re: Exit the Cave
#92A couple weeks ago I went by myself for a hike through an old lava tunnel cave. I needed a flashlight because it was pitch black. I found a small nook in the wall about a mile in that I could wedge myself in to. I sat down, turned off my light, and let myself feel the enveloping darkness for a long time. I cried. The only sounds were of small droplets of cold water hitting the floor and my body. I let myself settle i…
What happens if your flashlight craps out?
Take two.
Re: Exit the Cave
#93Re: Exit the Cave
#94The bar for what is worth bringing out of the cave gets higher every day. Unless you have a huge network of fans or a small network of foolhardy VCs, screaming into the market, with two million other voices, may as well be the void. It's getting hard to even get a shrug.
> It's getting hard to even get a shrug. I've slowly gotten more comfortable with the void, you put something out, allegedly 50 clicks received and not a single comment or conversion. 700 views of a video, no comments and 3 likes. You don't get told if it's good or bad you'll just get indifferent silence. So now I don't wait until it's perfect because I know likely nobody will say anything. I do wonder if people are…
Reading this and having had the same feelings/experiences, my knee-jerk reaction was to say that it's the sheer volume of folks doing exactly the same that you and I are doing.
The internet/social media is designed to give us the feeling that we're the focus, yet everyone, every single person (and now AI too) is given this very same feeling so everyone is expecting everyone else to be amazed by them and just them - alone.
That's simple not the case and also not possible - by design and by sheer volume of amazing and talented individuals out there. We're living in a magical time where content producers outnumber and outproduce the content consumers.
But I don't actually think that's the issue here.
The issue is perhaps the failed distribution systems. The slightly better than random way that content is distributed to the consumers. Search algorithms pretend to get it right but if they did that, would folks search less and see less advertising?
If we as a society improved the content distribution (and I mean search, notifications, comments, etc etc - the whole gamut of content distribution) and the placement of that content, then perhaps it would be more than 50 clicks, perhaps 75! ;)
Keep on doing what you're doing and don't think that 50 clicks is a judgement on your work, it's a symptom of a broken system.
Re: Exit the Cave
#95A couple weeks ago I went by myself for a hike through an old lava tunnel cave. I needed a flashlight because it was pitch black. I found a small nook in the wall about a mile in that I could wedge myself in to. I sat down, turned off my light, and let myself feel the enveloping darkness for a long time. I cried. The only sounds were of small droplets of cold water hitting the floor and my body. I let myself settle i…
Jesus and Mohammed supposedly did this for 40 days. They figured it was where an outcast should die. They got sent back. The "Celestial Mechanics" art was a similar era but instead of a new religion, that era was a Renaissance. We're at a similar point in history where an industrial revolution quietly changed a way of life between living generations
Plenty of people been done climbed up that mountain and come back changed
Re: Exit the Cave
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The mat is the objective (or at least distinct from your own personal judgement) measure of your goal. If your goal is important to you, an objective measure of your progress towards it is more valuable than your own flawed and biased opinion. The mat for the diary might be the times you consulted back to it for useful introspection and came out better for it, the mat for your health goal could be your blood test fro…
So, one thing I do that might be directly relevant to this analogy is to lift weights. My goal when I started was to get stronger. I measure that by whether I can lift more weight today than I did yesterday. The barbell doesn't lie. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I even regress a bit. But over time, I have gotten stronger. Some people at my gym urge me to "compete" but I can't see a reason to do this.…
Even for this, I still need outside perspective, especially when I (currently) fail at it badly. Do I fail to increase my barbell by 1 kg because I haven't tried enough, or because it's what only 0.001% people managed to do and I'm likely not one of them? I guess this may make me solve one or two unsolved math problem that I don't know is unsolved, but I don't want to count on it.
Re: Exit the Cave
#97> A writer needs readers. An entrepreneur needs customers. An athlete needs competition. A lover needs someone free to reject him. Any worthy pursuit needs a mat. Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others. Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir? Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to co…
What activities are you engaging in where you can make progress with no interaction with other people?
Learning a language not spoken around you is very solitary experience.
Also, jogging and swimming, drawing, playing musical instrument.
Re: Exit the Cave
#98I don't think it's one or the other. You need to spend some time in the cave to find your bearings and prepare a bit, otherwise you'll be clueless and have skill issues. The mistake is in spending forever doing that - at some point you have exhausted what you can get from the cave, and you need to put it to the test in order to find grounding, and you can do that by going out there and showing what you've been brewing. Finding that balance is a nice thing to pursue in itself, and from what I have seen it seems to be completely different for everyone.
Re: Exit the Cave
#99[deleted]
Re: Exit the Cave
#100> A writer needs readers. An entrepreneur needs customers. An athlete needs competition. A lover needs someone free to reject him. Any worthy pursuit needs a mat. Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others. Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir? Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to co…
Thank you! The author makes one large assumption about why people do what they do. If I'm doing something for the fun of it, I don't think I need anyone else to see my results in order for me to get exactly what I wanted out of it.
I told my mum about all sorts of projects I'm working on. She stared at me with pity then said, "but who knows about it?"