Live a Ruthless Via Negativa
Cut, Cut, Cut
“What do I need to succeed?”
People starting out in life, or starting out on a new path ask themselves this question. At Exosphere I get asked this question a lot.
My answer is different now than it would have been a few years ago. Life’s hard lessons and an encounter with Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile have helped me understand the question is based on a false premise. There is nothing magical that you need to succeed. The things you need that you don’t have are pretty simple to figure out one step at a time.
The real question you should ask yourself is “what do I need to get rid of in order to succeed?”
The short answer is “anything that causes you to fail.”
The detailed answer is much longer.
You have to strip away your fears. That one is obvious enough.
You have to cut out all of the things that distract you from your mission. Whether that’s people, hobbies, food, sports, news, Facebook (it’s probably Facebook), cut it if it’s distracting you.
You have to get rid of every false assumption driving your decisions.
You have to eliminate every untruth, half truth, white lie, black lie, anything that is preventing you from seeing reality exactly as it is, no matter how important that belief may be to you and your identity.
Then, when you are so radically dedicated to reality that you see how likely you are to fail, you have to cut away the temptation to give up. You have to quit on quitting.
You have to examine your personality and scrape off the plaque covering up your ability to grow. We all have a winner inside of us, but we all have a big loser covering him up.
Then when you’ve finished all of that cutting, you’ll have to make sure to keep it all away. You have to keep scraping every day to make sure the negative things you’ve eliminated don’t creep back, because they’ll definitely try.
It helps to have trusted respected friends who you know will be honest with you and tell you when they see more that you need to cut. I’m glad to have Antonio Manno and Andy Ellwood to play that role for me. Indeed, the right people are the one thing you should go and urgently find and add to your life. They are indispensable at every turn.
Now, get to cutting, and don’t ever stop.
