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when i look at the young people I admire who are ambitious, the bottleneck keeping them from doing more rarely seems to be that their aspirations aren't high enough – the bigger issue tends to be that their thinking is muddled, often by social contagion
encouraging people to dream bigger is easy encouraging them to be *appropriately* critical of themselves is hard young people especially often tend to oscillate in grandiose extremes from "i'm the best" to "i'm worthless", they haven't yet learned to be measured and nuanced
it could be maybe that "raise your aspirations" is generally good for the wider population – but amongst those who already have real ambitions, "you should dream even bigger" can actually kinda be counter-productive, like piling on more weight when you should fix your form first
the more rigorous question is something like, "what's the next step to toppling your next domino, and what's stopping you from doing that?" and you can spend hours discussing that with someone because the erroneous assumptions can be really subtle, and costly
and there's a chance that the next domino they have in mind is wrongheaded, so then you focus on that – if you're not careful you "waste" the conversation or the domino is correct but the approach is wrong, then you focus on that
I wrote @introspectVV to help people with this – I had a young friend who read it, loved it, said it really helped, but then a few months later, a conversation we had, he was muddled again, lol. its tricksy stuff. i'm muddled all the time too, ofc. being muddled is v natural
even at its best, a book cannot be a substitute for a thoughtful supportive context the interesting thing about life and people is that while everyone is some degree of muddled in at least some domains and contexts, we can somehow sometimes help un-muddle each other
but ok lets try and point at something specific and useful in this thread while i'm here. what exactly are ambitious young people muddled *about*? well, every person is different, etc etc... but a big recurring one is what i've called the Spray Tan fallacy
the Spray Tan fallacy goes like this: 1. you want to be a successful bodybuilder 2. you notice that all the successful bodybuilders onstage at Mr Olympia all have spray tans 3. you spend hours researching spray tans and become a master of spray tanning https://t.co/OslAa67kdM
this is a variation of cargo culting, yea yea. that phrase gets thrown around so much people stop understanding what it even means lol https://t.co/HGxxuV483I
the thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. but that can be excruciatingly boring in a world where the secondary things are more interesting. unmuddling your thinking can be as simple a matter of asking yourself n each other, 1. what is the main thing 2. are you doing it
there's more to it but it's v tricky to lay out a general case bc every person who is muddled in their own way. maybe there are a few general archetypes of muddles. i think ppl on twitter are likely to overthink, overcomplicate, overextend. and on that note i got stuff to do gtg
@visakanv indeed ambition (in the sense of dreaming big) is cheap and on its own doesn't do anything https://t.co/81QO1PSxjc