Ambition
Hey beautiful people,
I finally got caught up on Stoa administrativa and uploaded a backlog of videos, which you can enjoy here.
James Carse (Finite and Infinite Games) came to the Stoa today, and it was wonderful. You can watch that one on the YouTube channel. Jessica said it was one of the best attendee experiences she had.
Now its time to get ambitious. Lots of creative projects on the go. Come to the Stoic Hustle tomorrow (RSVP here) to help us steal the culture and solve this meta-crisis.
Tomorrow’s events:
The Stoic Hustle w/ Peter Limberg. Every Tues, Wed, and Thurs @ 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Relational Exegesis w/ Freyja. Every Thursday @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.* 60 mins.
Shame Breakthrough Bootcamp w/ A.J. Bond. Every Thursday @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Live Players w/ Samo Burja. Every Thursday @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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June 17, 2020
Ambition. Noun.
“An earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment: Too much ambition caused him to be disliked by his colleagues.”
I recall the following passage from the book Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life By Telling the Truth, from Brad Blanton, who visited The Stoa last month:
I am writing this book because I want to become famous. I want a lot of people to know my name, now and after I die. I want to be known as a great intellect, and perceiver, and I want to be smarter than everyone else. The pleasure of imagining other people imagining me smarter is an experience of warmth, a dull but pleasant sensation accompanied by a slight smile and an inner vision of people reading my book and talking about me with excitement, like my ex-wife Amy and I did reading Friedrich Nietzsche, who is long dead.
I read this book when I was a teenager, and I particularly recall reading this passage, and I recall thinking: who the fuck does this guy think he is? How dare he compare himself to Nietzsche?!
This book did change my life, and after reading it and talking to Brad a few times now, he has earned my deep respect. I told white lies before reading his book, in order to get people to like me, because I felt inherently unlikable. I still wonder if my impression management is completely authentic. I also wonder if my ability to code-switch is radically honest, and I do catch myself paltering from time to time. But for the most part I feel radically honest, and right now I desire to be radically honest about my ambition.
I got this text from a prominent individual from our sensemaking space: "You are doing an amazing job, though. Kinda weird actually how you—just a cowboy without even a horse—have outdone all these little Game B orgs like RW, Emerge, etc, who also had community building as their aim."
Like Brad, I feel a warmth when people think of me in a certain way. If I am giving off the impression that I am this crazy horseless cowboy riding through the noosphere building communitas, then that makes me feel really warm.
Unlike Brad, being thought of as a super high IQ genius is a turn off, but being thought of as a fused-completely-with-the-daemon genius is a huge turn on. The daemon concept comes from Ancient Greece, and the Romans had a similar concept but under a different name. They called it the genius.
I sense my strength is having an intuitive ideational prowess, coupled with a thumos that encourages me to ride into things first and think later. I get so annoyed with details, and I seek quotes—in an act of conscious confirmation bias—to support my way of being, like this one from La Rochefoucauld: "Undue attention to details tends to unfit us for greater enterprises."
Being perceived as a daemonic inspired genius, engaging in great enterprises, gives me a high. I can step back from this and Stoically reflect on the fact that I just have a fucking website, and hosted some Zoom sessions, and gave these sessions some weird meta titles. I am pretty clever in leveraging the little status I have, but in reality I have very little status. For example, in terms of social media reach I only have 3k followers on Twitter and 2k subscribers on YouTube.
And where would I be without the likes of Andrew Taggart, Jordan Hall, and John Vervaeke? People who have influenced and guided my thought? And where would The Stoa be without Raven Connolly? That feisty blackbird who is in love with abstraction, and has done an incredible job with hosting an incredible amount of sessions at The Stoa, and giving it that special hotness?
The Stoa would be nothing without the excellent facilitators we have: A.J. Bond, Daniel Kazandjian, Travis Mann, Tyson Wagner, Steve Beattie, Maybe Gray, Ria Baeck, Rebecca Fox, Raya Sun, Collin Morris, Jessica Watson Miller, Jason Snyder, and Jared Janes. Or our featured sensemakers: Bonnitta Roy, Pat Ryan, and Samo Burja. Or the current editor of these journals, Hannah Robbins, who keeps my poor grammar and ego in check.
So no, the lone cowboy thing is bullshit, and it is a fucking illusion. I would not be here, and The Stoa would not be here, if we were not all riding on this daemonic energy together. It is an open question for me now: should I continue to throw water on this cowboy fantasy, or should I playfully ride with it? It does inspire me to create, and I have so much I want to create.
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