Visakan Veerasamy Profile picture
Focus on what you want to see more of. 💪🏾❤️🔥 buy my ebooks ▲ FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD ▲ (https://t.co/ilqQnEHlZ1) and ꩜ INTROSPECT ꩜ (https://t.co/K7oSiNnI2C)
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Mar 28 12 tweets 4 min read
might change my mind on this later but rn in this moment i feel like the biggest lie i've been told in my life has been abt the nature of distraction. or u could say the nature of attention. it seems to me that the misunderstanding of it is woven into the fabric of civilization i wont claim to have a perfect or even "very good" understanding of it, but I have a growing sense of the misunderstanding of it. a lot of it is downstream of exertion and control

i've circled around and alluded to this a lot over the years, eg:
Mar 27 17 tweets 4 min read
off the top of my head, a list of things i find myself always a little surprised to have to point out to people: you seldom have to care about "most people" if you're looking to connect with an exceptional person. this is true whether we're talking about dating, friendships, hiring, audience building, etc

visakanv.com/blog/most-peop…
Mar 20 5 tweets 1 min read
and IME some are so hard to change that it can sometimes be better to work around them even if you additionally believe that the OG belief is wrong or bad or unhelpful eg in my case I know I have some less-than-ideal beliefs about productivity and rest, yet for the most part it has been easier for me to just work and “earn my rest”, bad as that belief might be, than to dismantle that belief (been trying for like 20 years with minimal progress)
Mar 16 8 tweets 2 min read
since i was a kid i kept seeing variations of this idea being expressed. the president is an idiot. the boss is a fool. the mogul is a clown. and people would be arguing about whether that assessment was correct or wrong. and that in turn struck me as the wrong frame entirely to me, the correct frame, or the lesson to learn, is that you only need to get some things right. then you can be wrong about everything else and still be a rich/powerful bitch talking shit while the people who get everything else right stay broke and mad
Feb 20 8 tweets 3 min read
Alison reshared this as a response to “what is your contribution to society”. It’s an entertaining watch and rewatch

what i find myself thinking about is how contribution is downstream of distribution. say you do 10 good works, and 1 gets distributed 1000x more than the others studying how this played out in all sorts of domains is roughly how/why I ended up specializing in marketing, networking, understanding how things spread.

At any given point in time there’s always good stuff going unnoticed and underappreciated
Feb 5 15 tweets 7 min read
i'm so curious to understand the economics behind this business. have they actually built the thing? how much did it cost to make? what do they do if nobody buys it? how did they finance it? do they sell smaller subs? let's investigate ok so first of all important detail is it doesn't exist, it seems more like a "if you want it we'll build it" type of deal. a lot of press attention for a thing that doesn't exist! (and the attention economics makes sense there; billionaire bashing is always great for clicks) Image
Jan 24 12 tweets 3 min read
fascinating. i went to look up the original post because this is so interesting to me. particularly the second paragraph where they list out everything they've "tried", which seems like successful processes (audience, paying customers), before listing out the failed outcomes... the entire second last paragraph is also fascinating to me, i'm not sure if I can fully articulate why. there's a kind of double consciousness going on, and my instinct is that this is what is keeping them from achieving success. to put it bluntly, i think they're playing house Image
Jan 22 5 tweets 1 min read
i was rewatching the arnold netflix documentary,
and they kinda casually skim past how, after he decided to stop doing mr olympia contests and get into movies, for 5 years, nothing came out of it. 5 years!! most people would give up imo elsewhere- maybe about the same thing, my memory is a lil hazy– they asked him, "how come you didn't give up?" and he said "oh, giving up wasn't a part of my vision"
Jan 17 4 tweets 2 min read
actually lemme walk yall thru how i've worked through my own versions of these feelings, ie a realtime rerun of past introspection.

A: "I am a failure"
B: "what makes me say that?"
A: "i am not achieving the results I am supposed to be achieving"
B: "ok, two paths here. (1) where do these expectations come from, and are they reasonable? (2), can we get better results? do we know how? what are the next steps?"
A: 1. "family, friends, society... i don't know if they're reasonable, but it's not like i can realistically get away from them anytime soon..." 2. "probably, i'm not very sure, idk, work smarter I guess..."
B: 1. "when did you last have a conversation with specific individuals about the expectations you're dealing with?" 2. "what does working smarter look like? how are you currently allocating your time and energy? what specific outcomes do you want to make progress towards?" you see how this fairly quickly leads to actions that provide relief. recalibrate expectations via conversations with relevant parties, and get better at project management to achieve better outcomes.

embodying this process eventually eliminated the feeling of "i am a failure"
Jan 13 7 tweets 2 min read
time and time again i keep finding that pooping is one of the best analogies for talking about emotion. i hesitate to use it because it's a bit gross, but ime it almost always gets the point across simply and clearly if you're shitting uncontrollably all the time, that's probably not good

if you can't shit at all, that's probably not good either
Jan 12 4 tweets 1 min read
one of the funny things about life– hilarious when it happens to others, humbling when it happens to you– is meeting someone who’s casually, indifferently better at a thing than the median person who makes an identity out of it for example, when a farmer demolishes a bodybuilder bro at arm wrestling without even trying

when a fanfic author happens to have a better info management system than the median “tools for thought” nerd

when a dentist writes a more moving eulogy than someone w/ a fine arts deg
Jan 4 7 tweets 2 min read
the more experience i accumulate in helping (coregulating) my son eat, sleep and breathe, the clearer it becomes to me that i didnt have much of that myself as a kid growing up, which makes so much of my unhinged childhood make so much more sense i spent my teens and early 20s writing extensive journals ruminating on “why am i so fucked up” and the tldr was nobody taught me how to regulate myself healthily, which meant i was a whole nexus of messy entangled coping mechanisms
Jan 3 15 tweets 4 min read
since i was kid i always wondered why things weren't better. i've probably spent thousands of hours thinking and reading and talking about this. my current assessment is something like, there first needs to be a healthy culture where people can openly discuss how to do better most "how to do better" conversations happen in private. this is the part of ~nepotism that's hard to talk about, and harder to do anything about. even if you took away successful people's assets, they can still discuss/practice habits of success with their peers, kids, etc
Nov 23, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read
fwiw, I think solo travel is the best modern initiation for young men, along some dimensions like accessibility, immediacy, etc etc. It’s easier than it’s ever been, which sorta takes some of the edge off, but I still recommend it nonetheless. Go as far as possible from home can’t 100% guarantee it’ll “make a man out you” but it’ll at least shake you out of some of the context-dependent equilibrium you don’t realize you’re in
Nov 8, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
unlearning dehumanization thread notes generalizations are dehumanizing
Oct 16, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
you don’t win by being less of a loser (minimizing negative variance), you win by winning (maximizing positive variance).

I believe that the misunderstandings around this has cost the species quadrillions of $ worth of potential if we actually believed that maximizing positive variance was more valuable than minimizing negative variance, we would design our education systems very differently. most schools are variance-minimization fields
Oct 13, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
a thing that always trips me out is reflecting on the distribution of effort to reward. most of the rewards i get in my life today are for efforts i put in 10, 15 years ago, which at the time often seemed like it was fruitless like right now I could say "buy my book, ", and I will make money in a matter of seconds. it's effortless. but it took me years of effort to get good at writing, and then years more to write the book and to build the audience that enables thisgum.co/introspect
Sep 13, 2023 11 tweets 3 min read
my experience has brought me to a tentative conclusion on this that may seem very defeatist and depressing– but for me, after a while, it became liberating. but first it beat my ass. Do not read further if ur not ready to consider a painful interpretation ok first of all I am sorry about this, if I had to break this to my younger self I would be so slow and careful and tender and patient. Or I might not even do it at all idk. But basically

nobody has ever solved this problem because it is an insoluble problem (as framed)
Aug 17, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
if you’re sufficiently charismatic, people who are attracted to you will thirst over specific “ordinary” features - even body parts - in ways that they wouldn’t when someone else without that quality has those same features. A lot of people seem to misunderstand how this works I don’t expect to persuade anybody who doesn’t see it but it might click for some people
Jul 31, 2023 12 tweets 4 min read
a thing that took me 5+ years to learn, maybe closer to 10 years – and I resisted it for a long time – is something very foundational about attention sovereignty.

basically you begin with the premise that your attention is extremely valuable and you allocate it like a VIP I took a challenging path to it- it felt like fighting against a hurricane – but once you get into the center, everything is calm, quiet and clear

hypothetically it should be possible to get there without fighting. but tbf that wasn’t the path I took
Jul 11, 2023 9 tweets 2 min read
from time to time I think about this post, which I think remains in the top 0.01% of everything I have ever read it’s better than many books and novels and movies and entire tv shows etc