Manu

peter thiel’s greatest gift to humanity is his elucidation of verticalstriving and horizontalstriving every young smart bright ambitious kid gets oneshotted by the interplay between the vertical and the horizontal. perpetual exclamations of “oh the grass must be greener over there” have made otherwise very capital young people into legging into twenty different types of careers/directions/competencymaxxing paths without having made meaningful progress in any one of them. to take risk isn’t to try a lot of things, it’s to be able to commit to one. the grass will never be greener verticalstriving, going from zero to one, loyaltymaxxing, locking into one direction and giving it everything is the only way to compete in this hypercompetitive world where your competition is looking at every single crack at the hyperspace of your essence to try to find a way to destroy you. this is something that seems simple but is insanely important to always keep in your head so you don’t fall prey into the greenermaxxing cycle and you wake up at age 30 with no core competency or experience as a nice point of synthesis, was discussing w a dear friend @SolanaLegend that generalists are slopmaxxed - if your main sell is that you are a generalist, it is a simple way of expressing you have no core competency and were apart of the normiemaxxed population who got oneshotted by the challenge to be courageous and commit.

everything is downstream from discipline peter thiel proclaimed that “the most contrarian thing is not to oppose the crowd, it is to think for yourself” signalling has destroyed modern value systems, psuedonormies are oneshotted into being slaves to performative contrarianism. thinking that showing they have hints of the contrarian spirit flowing within them is an end in and of itself most ambitious people will have spent the first part of their lives selling and optimizing to convince others they are capable of thinking idiosyncratically that they get brainwashed into thinking that’s the entire goal…no! the goal is to get to a spot where you can exercise your own idiosyncratic thought freely, i.e. do what you truly want to do. have you ever stopped to wonder….why is it actually favourable to be contrarian…? what’s the point if you’re still a slave to norms (be they nonstandard ones). contrarianism and idiosyncratic thought without courage is theatre and intellectual play. with courage and discipline, it manifests into something truly remarkable, serving as your conduit into the world of extreme diligence. don’t get lost. you were put on this earth to do more than just be a tickboxmaxxer.