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Becoming A Magician

Inspired by

  • Becoming a Magician

  • any significantly advanced technologist seems like a magician

  • imagine a version of myself that i cannot yet understand
  • you would simply have to step back and build something completely different altogether
  • magic is competence is so far advanced from your confidence with such alien mental models that you cannot predict the outcome of the models at all.
  • people typically try to "double down on what worked" which means wringing more value out of the same mental models, tools, and processes

The way to extraordinary growth and changes often involves a fundamental ontological or ‘lens’ shift in how you see the world. Magicians are wearing not just better, but fundamentally differently shaped lenses to the rest of us.

Meeting magicians is the first step to becoming one – when you are attempting to learn implicit knowledge that by definition you don’t understand, it is important to have a bunch of examples in front of you to feed your brain’s pattern-recognition systems.

Concrete steps I take to find them include asking my most interesting friends to introduce me to their most interesting friends, going down similar rabbit holes with the bibliographies of books that excite me, and generally living in ‘explore’ mode at various points in life, while recognising that not every avenue will lead to a jackpot.

Questions I like to ask myself include: - ‘What is the most capable version of me that I can imagine?’ - ‘What would I be like/spend my time doing if all my current major problems had been solved?’ - ‘What are the things I say I value but don’t act as if I value, and what would my life feel like on inside if I actually acted as if I valued those things?’ - ‘What am I afraid of doing, and what would my life be like if I wasn’t afraid of doing those things?’.

  • author refers to a "nonlinear strategy", what they mean is a strategy that cannot be extrapolated from your current artifacts, methods, language, and training (engelbart H-LAM/T)

Conclusions

  • daily grow/explore your graph of interesting people deeply and broadly
  • build an engine to build new whole sets of mental models
  • generate new language and artifacts and methods and training
  • i think i stick to methods too much, i need to be inventive with all 4
  • surround myself with magicians who do the magic i want to do

References

naive Vision for myself

Before taking the advice of the post, here are some thoughts about what I would value. The post explains that you have to write a version of yourself you cannot imagine, so you cannot write within your existing constraints. Therefore, the below goals are naively small and close to who I am and what I could start doing today.

  • reimplementing and contributing to core oss tools, lisps and vim etc.
  • breaking new ground on terminal and tui as a first class citizen of a graphical window manager
  • no constraints from physical space to walk in and start drafting 3d art in some scad-clj derivative or composite tools
  • no frustrating time constraints to learn the needed skills to produce art
  • no frustrating time constraints to maintain a 90 minute x 6 day fitness routine with low impact and no real risk of injury (not running outdoors)
  • need to add an elliptical at home, eventually a treadmill?
  • increase my transit range while still maintaining the level of simplicity, increase access to tools
  • live somewhere turnkey, never want to think about stress or logistics or traffic or weather if possible
  • expand my thinking more, sure i have done that a lot, but on what dimensions haven't i (beginner's mind and assimilating new skills)
  • pick up inspiring old ideas and write them out to their blockers