Do It For The Plot
A while back I saw a video on TikTok where the person in the video was debating between two options, where one was high-risk high-reward, and the other was more of a low-risk low-reward. Though I don’t remember all the details of the video (I think it had something to do with dating) the conclusion of it was “do it for the plot” and for some reason that stuck with me and prompted me to write this blog post.
I’ve noticed that I talk a lot about the importance of stories in people’s lives. My dad often discuss the role of personal narratives and how those influence people’s decision-making.
Stories are mentioned as a key element in Game of Thrones and in Westworld. They are the ficions that unite people in kingdoms, and they serve as the foundation for the identities of the AI hosts that “live” in amusument park:
Stories permeate our culture and history through mythologies, religions, fables and so on. Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell talk about them in terms of archetypes and the collective unconscious.
They are embedded so deeply in our psyche that they seem to be inextricably tied to what makes us human.
We use stories as a way to convey information, lessons, values and wisdom throughout time in a condensed way. They allow us to glimpse into the future and predict how certain actions will play out because of their similarity to past events. Think of “the moral of the story” in fairty tales and parables.
They seem to take on a life of their own that transcends any individual human lifetime. They are self-perpetuating almost like life itself. They are strange loops that persiste and which are substrate independent since they can hop from parchment, to paper, to hard drive to brain.
And if you look at them through the lens of Neurolinguistic Programming, they make up the deepest levels of our beliefs, identity and vision.
I’d even go as far as to say that what most people consider a soul is just the act of performing the role we create for ourselves in our personal narratives.
I mention all of this because the power of stories is the deepest reason why I create content in the first place. And that “why” seems like a good place to kick of this new series of posts because I think it captures the essence of what I’ve learned over the past few years, where things stand for me currently and sets the tone for what’s yet to come.
So with that in mind, lets’ start with the story of how I go to today.
Past
So much has changed for me over the past couple years. Covid came and went and I don’t need to reiterate everything that happened with it. But I do think everyone had a very different story during that time and something I’ve enjoyed doing is asking people where they were when the lockdowns started. Some people were traveling, or they had just moved to somewhere new (I fall into both of those categories). Some people had just started a new job, or gotten into a relationship, or broken up. It seems rare to have not run into someone who wasn’t in the middle of something big.
Covid aside, some big things for me were a 1 year relationship with a beginning and middle and end. I gave up alcohol for over a year and experienced what sober life was like. My half sister was born and I turned 30 two weeks later. The remote work thing seems to have run its course, though I think this hybrid thing is here to stay. But the change in working style also meant I traveled a ton in that time, probably moreso than even pre-covid times.
And finally, but perhaps most importantly, the promise of AGI has taken the world by storm, first with Chat GPT but now with endless competitors, variations, plugins, usecases and so on.
It was in that context where I really started to flesh out the idea of the tomorrow people properly and giving it a name. It started with some mastermind virtual meetups, blog posts, a podcast and a couple trips. It was a nice way to spend the time at home since most of us didn’t have that much going on outside of lockdown.
But looking back on the timing of my posts, I got stuck on the last one in a series for a couple years and couldn’t seem to finish it. And I was just reflecting on why that was. I mean the timing seemed to line up with when I had bought my first place, the lockdowns were sort of easing up, and life was returning to normal.
I think part of the reason that last post took so long to finally get out was my perfectionism was getting in the way. A mix of writers block and endless scope creep. The feeling that there is always more to say about a subject and the desire to be exhaustive while also not feeling remotely qualified to talk about what makes a Great Work.
But in a deeper sense I was starting to feel profoundly conflicted about the direction of things. Both in terms of how I was spending my time on things with the group and outside of it, but also on a more philosophical level of not really having a strong why.
Part of, if not all of, the change in perspective came from how much I’ve changed as a person. Over the past few years I learned just how hard creativity can be in a world of distractions and what it really means to be distracted by your own thoughts and lose focus. I’m literally on my phone, getting distracted as I’m writing about this.
Distractions aside though, creativity is hard. I wrote a whole blog post about the topic a while ago. Looking at the date, this was now like 6 years ago, and having lived a lot of creativity in that time I can tell you its true.
Building systems helps a ton. But building systems is hard. It takes a lot of trial and error and testing most importantly. I think what I did a lot of in college that didn’t really work was creating a rigid system and trying to stick with it. The reality for me is that some days I have more energy, or commitments or whatever, and flexibility becomes important. Like how can I build a thing that supports me and makes up for my deficiencies, while also being flexible enough to accomodate the reality of my life.
Buying a place helped tremendously because it became almost an extension of myself. It became a means of self-expression and a source of creative energy. But it also came with a lot of responsibilities that I had to learn from.
I also learned a ton about creating boundaries, learning how to care less about what people think about me. It’s one of those cliches that people always quote, but it has a lot of depth when you really start to think about it and try to live it. Some people take it to mean doing crazy stunts in public, or facing social fears and I think there’s something to be said about those, but there’s a point that I think you’re really trying to get to after that where it’s not performative, where you’re able to be yourself, by yourself and around others. Meditation helps with this a ton.
All of this is a practice, but doing it makes me feel really good about myself and my direction.
The last thing I’ll add, and this is the main source of wildcard energy in my life, is that I joined CreatorNow back in 2021. And I’ve participated to greater or lesser degrees, but it really elevated my understanding of what it means to be a content creator and YouTuber. I’ll say more about that in the future but for now I’ll leave it at that.
Present
Right now I’m in a great headspace, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I’m in a strong financial position, I’ve got good people around me and I have a lot of momentum. Kind of like a wheel that has been wound up a ton but hasn’t been set in any particular direction. A rocket that is ready for liftoff.
A lot of that is that I’ve cultivated a lot of good habits. I’ve cut out drinking, I’ve also gotten a lot better at planning, and I’ve made systems to fall back on for when things start to go sideways as they inevitably do. And I’ve also started to look at myself as a 4D being, a creature that is evolving through time and space.
My theme for the Fall has been “Completion” meaning I’ve been focusing on just wrapping up lingering projects and things that have been on my back burner for a long time. And I guess without even realizing it I’ve been checking off a lot of things from my checklist both personally and at work. And not just trivial things, but important projects that take days, weeks or months of work. And that’s something that I, probably like most people, struggle with. How do I break projects down into smaller and more manageable parts, and plan for an outcome that I envision.
Practice makes perfect.
I’ve also been imagining and re-imagining what the Tomorrow People can and should be. And not just imagining, but also living it, and living by the values that I’ve talked about. It’s been a lot of fun, in a challenging kind of way.
It’s interesting having this blank canvas and realizing that the Tomorrow People can be and mean whatever I want it to.
But the challenge with something that has a lot of potential is just that. It becomes difficult to chart a direction. I have SO many interests and hobbies and skills and interesting, talented people all around me that it’s hard to know what to do with all of it sometimes.
The answer seems to be though finding ways to serve. Whether that’s myself, others, higher ideals. Finding ways to be useful and good.
I’m reminded of this really powerful line from the God of War: Ragnarok game.
“It is the nature of a thing that matters. Not it’s form.”
Finding a flow, a Tao or a “way” of approaching things might matter more than the thing itself that’s being done. Maybe it’s really about finding the right lens to look at the world through. And that lens can be a community, a philosophy, a set of practices, like the practice of creating Great Works.
Future
When I started writing and planning again I was worried about it was going to be this unfocused mess where nothing could get done, and I was reminded of kanye’s donda map that he made.
But then just last week he came out with this absolute banger of a song:
And it got me thinking, maybe being like Kanye (in some ways 😂) isn’t the worst thing in the world. Planning is messy, and just because I’m doing it publicly through my posts doesn’t mean it needs to be perfect. In fact, it never will be and it’s probably better that it comes out this way rather than in some super manicured and edited way. No one cares, nor should they.
I’ve got a lot of stories to tell, and this whole post was a long winded way of saying all that.
I’m working on ways to tell those stories more efficiently and in the way that I want to tell them.
Expect more collaborations with other creators and creatives in the coming weeks and months as my network continues to expand.
This post was also meant as a kickoff post to say that I’m going to start writing and posting daily short blogs again. It’ll be good practice for writing and thinking (which Jordan Peterson says are actually just one in the same).
My hope is that it will also help me with my scripting for videos, which I’ll be uploading weekly in long form format. I’ll talk more about what that looks like but 1 a week should be challenging but sustainable if I do it correctly.
And that’s the main thing, I want to take on things that I can sustain, knowing that I also need to try things that I know won’t scale. I need to solve the 0 to 1 problem before solving the 1 to N problem. That N is just a series of 1s at the end of the day, and not getting ahead of myself is a skill I am developing.
Some of it’s just building up that habit, writing in the mornings or evenings, or whatever rituals like coffee or tea support it and make the most sense given my work life balance.
And I also want to make use of and get better at using all the modern tools like Chat GPT and all the generative AI stuff that’s out there now.
Most of all I want these to feel natural and not super high pressure. What ended up happening with a lot of these posts is they became super planned and for this to feel better and be more sustainable I think they need to be shorter and more spur of the moment. Really more like me laying out my thinking and working through a problem or playing with an interesting idea out in the open.
These posts should be a tool that serve me and some greater purpose, not some abstract thing or metric I’m beholden to. It’s a relationship, in a weird kind of way.
Plus knowing myself, I think I do better when the stakes are a little lower. Smaller more consistent work seems to yield better results. Seems to be the direction things are moving in anyways with all the short form content, so why fight the current.
I guess I do want them to fit together though like pieces of a puzzle or a mosaic. Something that I can iterate quickly on and make improvements on the fly.
Because lord knows I got a lot of awesome events coming up. Not even as a flex, it’s just the reality of how I live my life. And when you’re busy living it, it’s hard to also document it meaningfully.
But I’ve been capturing content and organizing it. The vision is coming together slowly. Trying to balance living intentionally with taking time to create and document intentionally. Living in the moment, while also taking time to reflect on the past and plan for the future. Creating no lose scenarios so that that when all else fails…
Do it for the plot.
Stay frosty my friends.
