“Let’s start with a test: do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t. Odds are you just think whatever you’re told.” Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters

“Ah, you’re trying to refute me by quoting things I’ve said or written myself. That’s confronting me with documents that have already been sealed. You can reserve that for people who only argue according to fixed rules. But I live from one day to the next! If something strikes me as probable, I say it; and that is how, unlike everyone else, I remain a free agent.” Cicero, Discussions at Tusculum

One of the most humbling things in the world is to see great thinkers struggling towards an understanding – Godin, story and organizational innovation; Gladwell, the evolution of genius; Greene, strategy and self-control; Lewis, what makes someone the best. You can see if everything they write, the circling of the drain or the stacking of the bricks, how they’re methodically closing the gap between what they sense and what they know.

When you stop looking at issues as right or wrong and more like problems to be wrestled with, you conveniently end up with an amalgam with opinions satisfactorily qualified to upset everyone. If, like Cicero, you’re engaged in an endlessly race to seal, discard, adopt, seal, discard as many ideas as possible maybe you’ll end up right where Graham thinks you should. A place where the only plausible explanation for being there is that you made your own way.

And if innovation comes at the crossroads where ideas intersect, then you should be embarking and subsequently colliding as many different paths as possible. I think that’s correct. I’m trying to pick up a book here and crash into a television show I’m watching over there. Or something my Dad told me and some different thing that I’ve seen Tucker do. An implication and somebody else’s actions.

I can only say what’s working for me but for the first time, I’m starting to come up with my ‘own’ ideas.

I’d start here:

I get weird feelings when I go back to places that I used to live. School. Where I grew up. Restaurants I spend lots of time at. Streets I walked down before. It’s always a “oh what a better time” kind of feeling. I was running the dorms after dark, through grassy knolls lit up and empty. I felt really at peace. For a second, I wished I could be back there. Where it was easy and I wasn’t always worried.

Which is totally bullshit. I caught myself. Being there was horrible. There was all kinds of pressure. I was always stressed about this or that, waiting, bored, fighting about something. I had all these deadlines and all this anxiety if I didn’t make them.

What I came away with wasn’t that we tend to idealize the past. I already know that and I don’t think that’s what I was doing. Being back it’s a lot clearer that it didn’t need to be that way. It’s actually a great place – I was the problem. Running through campus at night is one of my favorite things to do. It’s so peaceful. I never once did it when I lived there.

I made all the pressure up. It was a mental creation. An unnecessary torture I inflicted on myself. I am the source and the sufferer of my own anxiety. Idealizing rarely involves adding anything new, it’s mostly about trimming the details – the shit agonized and stewed over. You know, everything you don’t even remember anymore.

I think that driving force is responsible for a lot of the places I’m going. It propels you. But it also eats at you. It’s crushing. Epictetus said “that your son is sick, not that he may die of it.” Doesn’t mean you ignore it and pretend that he’s well. You just opt out of the anguish. Opt out of The Pressure. Or, I guess, you can wait for the past to do it for you.

I’m trying to do that this time around. That’s the nice thing about trying to live in the present – and how brief our piece of it is – you always seem to get another shot.