🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (10 tweets)
A thing that my ex-boss tried to teach me (and he was very skilful about it, over 100s of conversations over 5+ years) was the idea that you should focus on whatever is best, whatever is most important, and not worry about what “most people” think
I resisted this for a long time. As a writer, shouldn’t I care about the bulk of my audience? But I slowly flipped even on this. You should make your writing clear and accessible, yes, but then you should focus on persuading the smartest, most thoughtful people there are
you’d particularly want to persuade people who think very clearly for themselves. not by being ~persuasive~ with rhetoric (it wouldn’t work much on them anyway) but by being *correct*, and rigorously so https://t.co/4wcxtOSD2t
I rewatched The Big Short last night. I know it's dramatized, but it's really sobering to contemplate how people will think you're insane (literally – they'll think you're mentally unsound) for doing what you think is right, based on your rigorous assessment of reality https://t.co/ZHFhCW1kOg
Basically “most people” is a chaotic entity in a kind of recursive loop. it doesn’t even really know itself, or what it wants. it flits and fluctuates and you can’t depend on it. you can only do what you think is right, and brace yourself when the megamind comes for you
”most companies wouldn’t... most women are like this... most men are like that...” you’re not going to work for most companies. you not going to marry most people. find the most exceptional fit for you that you can find. most people (ha!) search too little & give up too easily
You can never get “most people”’s attention at random. But you can get a very specific person’s attention if you have a very specific solution to his very specific problem. Once you have one person’s attention, you can get another’s. Sic parvis magna.
Yes. Raise your standards. Aspire to greatness. Don’t just try to impress the average of your friends, strive to impress God himself. Seek the company of immortals (This isn’t for everyone, but again, I’m not tweeting for everyone.) https://t.co/UdZE5dzkAC
ha wrote about this 6 years ago when nobody cared what I had to say. (These days I want to be careful not to complain on main too much, because complaining can become a comforting, homeostasis-inducing habit, and it’s infectious) https://t.co/GIZSuvU4KX https://t.co/HRuGuBe057
Most people will never know who you are. The correct response to “most people”, in aggregate, as a concept, is to face them with the same indifference they give you- and then focus hard on serving the minority of excellent people that you want in your life
If you’re John Lennon, you don’t want to impress most people. You want to impress Paul McCartney https://t.co/J0GWGcDiNW
one of my recurring talking points to anybody who's willing to listen: any small group of people loosely-but-truly aligned on something can create powerful vectors by producing public-facing work that's directed at each other talking about the creation of scenes, basically