I was listening to the “Infinite Loops” podcast by one of my favorite people on Twitter ever, Jim O’Shaughnessy, on the episode he had with David Perell.
Jim was just telling us about how he had a bad experience with a school teacher who got angry at him for reading an entire book without being told to do so. He mentioned that in consolation his father gave him the Encyclopedia Britannica and told him to start reading it, I’m assuming to satiate his hunger for reading and knowledge.
I just had that flash of memory when my mom got me as a gift the Encyclopedia Britannica CDs to enjoy on my very first desktop computer with a CD player. I rummaged through the whole thing in record time as I remember. Such a fun memory. But…
You keep listening to everyone giving you their version of what worked for them in life, and after enough time has passed, you really understand that the tactics and the exact steps never really work if you try to follow in their footsteps to the letter.
Imitation has its limits. Originality is the only thing that counts.
Connecting the dots only works in hindsight, but moving forward no one knows what the next step is going to be, where it will lead, and there are no guarantees your decisions will always be right.
Sometimes the world seems to be overwhelming, everything is hard, and nothing seems to work out to your benefit. The only thing I can think of at these moments is the Churchill quote: If you’re going through hell, keep going.
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