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Ma20: Dreams and Delusions

Margin by Retraice^1

Life is at the mercy of imagination.

Air date: Thursday, 13th Oct. 2022, 10:00 PM Eastern/US.

Shoulders

Note to self:

"YOUR GOOD FUTURE JUST ISN'T GOING TO HAPPEN IF YOU DON'T DO ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING YOU CAN."

You should go where your shoulders want you to go.

Lesser concerns

It's valid to give time and energy to the less significant, more day-to-day needs in life. In our case, currently it's the big gap between being able to produce a good segment (which we can do) and being able to produce quickly and at scale (which we can't yet). But....

Dream size

The bigger the dreams the bigger the delusions.

The delusion lifecycle

After a delusion, it seems obvious, and non-threatening.

A delusion is like: You don't think there is a fog.^2

Some delusions, though, never die--the delusions we never escape.

The threat to dreams

Dreams can be mortally threatened by delusions.

I am probably massively deluded

This is because my dreams are similarly massive.

I fantasize about great success, but time is running out. I'm in the attention economy, which is hypercompetitive. This is going to be very, very hard. Maybe I should just do ads, to have a chance, to not tie one hand behind my back.

We need to go fast.

We need to go wide.

Being tough vs. being deluded

The best content comes from people being very tough in the production process.^3

Delusions can come from commitment and devotion to tough rules. I was a musician once. Nothing ever satisfied me, which was delusional.

The better approach is the Van Halen brothers' approach: put the love before the tough. It's the same with children: we first love them, then try to steer them.

Is that what delusion is? Putting the tough first, before the love? You don't want to bound a thing that you love. You want it to be unbounded. But then you see that, without constraints, something becomes nothing.^4 A thing that has everything, that is unconstrained, is noise, is nothing.

It could also be that delusion comes before putting the tough first, that delusion is the cause, not the effect.

Shedding delusions

I'm going to have to untie my hands. That might mean giving up the subscription model, and the website control. And we need to distribute more widely.

But it's more than that. It's a mentality. That's what needs to change.

Note to self: Shed delusions.

_

References

Standish, R. (2006). Theory of Nothing. BookSurge Australia. ISBN: 1921019638. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=1921019638 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+1921019638

Yong, E. (2022). An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Random House, Kindle ed. ISBN: 978-0593133248. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780593133248 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780593133248 https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046048

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/margin

^2 See Yong (2022) on how different the sensory environments of animals and humans can be.

^3 Ira Glass on Storytelling 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx2cI-2FJRs

^4 Standish (2006).