Say yes. Show up. Do the work. +- Nerd in chief, My Pet Hooligan. Mutant alien creator. Sometimes wears a wizard hat. -+
Los Angeles, CA
Joined March 2009
- Tweets1.4K
- Following1.6K
- Followers617
- Likes3.8K
A motorcycle instructor once told me - “The bike is going to go where you look, so look at the road not the ditch.” This isn’t just true on a motorcycle. Your life goes where you put your attention.
It’s when you want to quit that the work starts. Just like working out - the reps that make you stronger are the ones you don’t want to do because they’re forcing you past what’s comfortable. This is why most people fail. They stop when it stops being fun or easy.
Anger feels like power but that’s its illusion. At its core it’s an expression of perceived weakness.
Attention is creative. Motorcycle riders are taught about target fixation. The bike will go where you look, so if you look at the tree on the side of the road you’re going to hit it. Focusing attention on things you’re afraid of works like this too.
The “I am” story that shapes my perception of the world is probably a product of a lot of factors. Things that were said to me when I was still at the early stages of shaping it, by teachers, parents, and people I was primed to believe.
🧵
But maybe the greatest of these are the characters and experiences we adopt vicariously through the stories we’re told and shown.
A mythic character becomes a template for self-conception. It changes the shape of the person encountering it in a way that trivial characters don’t.
So now I want to play with this idea that the world we believe we move through isn’t the real world at all, but rather an umwelt. That sphere of perception is really a product of belief. 🧵
The most important story we can tell, then, is the one that begins with “I am.'“ We’re going to wind up embodying whatever that story is, and when we change that story, the umwelt changes too, and we with it.
So we live in an umwelt - a perceptual world centered around ourselves that consists entirely of what we perceive and what we remember and believe about what we’ve perceived. We then make this make sense through story.
🧵