“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.” — Isaac Newton
There’s a vast ocean of knowledge out there, about everything. It can be overwhelming to take it all in and figure out what to focus on knowing. This is normal, we’ve all been there.
If you look closer, you see that reality is an infinite fractal with a lot of detail. To win, you need to pay attention to the details, since that’s where the value accrues. But diving into every detail isn’t feasible. You have resource constraints and limited attention. You need to pare reality down and choose where to pay that attention. Here’s one approach.
A lot of time is spent using reality as a substrate to fully realize your potential, i.e. to self-actualize. To reason about self-actualization, it’s useful to notice that people vary quite a bit and each has some unique outlier ability (their “edge”). Some are gifted writers, others are great at public speaking or inspiring a team.
Your edge is the basis for:
The opposite of an “edge” is a “glitch”. It’s a handicap making some tasks much harder for you than others. Glitches are why you’re always putting something off. It’s why you flinch and where the Ugh Fields are. Powerful edges & glitches are likely just manifestations of the same brain wiring.
“What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature.” — Abraham Maslow
Realizing your potential is about finding a profession or life path where success depends entirely on your edges and isn’t handicapped by your glitches. Great copywriters might be attracted to marketing, outlier public speakers might gravitate towards political office. Self-actualization is about finding this ideal domain and maximally expressing your edge in it.
“Maximal expression” here isn’t necessarily about getting the most money or status. A teacher or a monk might realize their potential via service to others or spiritual fulfillment. But their self-actualization is still bound by some edge-domain fit.
The path in each domain is a set of milestones or dominos you need to topple. The dominoes are dynamic. They can morph because the environment changed in a way you can’t control. The rise of A.I. copywriting might change the shape of the next skill a copywriter needs to learn.
You also don’t know for sure how the dominos in a domain will respond to your unique combination of edges and glitches before you start. You don’t know beforehand which domino your worst glitch is going to block. A writer who’s terrified of keeping schedules is going to struggle with managing a team. This writer has a few options when she discovers this:
This setup can be dynamic. Before the Internet came around, our writer wouldn’t be able to connect with a global audience and might struggle with finding clients as a freelancer. Just because someone’s ideal domain doesn’t exist today doesn’t mean it never will. New domains will appear at a faster rate as the pace of tech innovation speeds up.
It’s also important to recognize that all three options are viable paths. Often people will assume that your only duty is to fix your glitches to topple the next domino in front of you; that switching domains is giving up. It can seem that way because it’ll look like you’re regressing. If you change domains, you’ll need to get down the current hill and start from scratch as you climb up a new one. But that’s what might be needed for you to get at your personal highest-order bit. It might be how you self-actualize.
“I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.” — Sharon Olds
With this frame, it’s easier to reason about which parts of reality to pay attention to. If you’re trying to self-actualize, the details to dig into are:
All this is what you need to know, but where to start first? The parts of reality that will take the most time to understand, and a good place to start, are the details about you. Those are the only details you’ll always need, won’t change and the ones you can’t really learn about from others.