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If you REALLY want what you’re going after AND you see and acknowledge the suppressed power to do stuff in the people around you, you’ll appear to others to be painted in impossible colors. Many will do whatever they can to help you & some will follow you to the ends of the earth
I think you need both, and the common denominator is courage: the courage to quit playing it safe and start doing something real, and the courage to empower others with perhaps even more potential power than yourself, no holds barred
The first one is the courage to play: to not be afraid of one's own mind, to construct sandbox worlds, to engage w/ conspiracy theories & other taboo narratives, to shamelessly enjoy the flora & fauna of mental life, to not take any of it too seriously
The second one is the courage to be master *and* apprentice: to build real relationships around real things, to be fearlessly intimate, to deeply & vulnerably love the part of each person you know that represents who they are when all cylinders are firing
People *know it* when you look at them and see their best selves — not the facade they're trying to sell you on, but the real thing that's under like a thousand layers of insecurity and pointless pseudo-introspective looping. If you wanna go after a superpower, go after that one
How do you become courageous? Humans do this with storytelling & rituals, two very flexible & effective formats for information + emotion transfer that we've either delegated to the institutions of mass culture or basically scrubbed from modern life
10 Things Successful People Do Differently to Achieve Greatness. Boo, hiss. Shut up. They all READ SCIENCE FICTION, that's what they do.
I'm trying to figure out How Humanity Wins. The TLDR: "people play a LOT, alone & with each other, with their whole hearts." But they can't right now; it's too scary, they never learned how, they've been punished for it, Hollywood & churches took the tools for self-determination
For what it's worth, I'm a thoroughly messed up person who gets scared *all the time.* Every single negative trait or tendency stated or implied in this thread is something I've seen in myself. I don't have the missing manual and I'm starved for better stories
If you're picking up on some thematic trends in these recent "pep-talky" tweets, yup, it's X-Men. You're the mutants and I SEE YOU even if you don't see each other 
I know it's not a Very Serious Person Doing Very Serious Things sort of thing to admit, but everything I'm doing right now is basically powered by X-Men self-insert daydreaming. I was so, so lonely when I was a kid. I wish someone had seen me.
I 100% endorse doing this, btw. Find stories that really click for you and go walk the hero's path. The "bad guy" in X-Men isn't really the villain of the week, it's isolation — specifically, the kind of isolation that causes people to reject their own gifts
Most important idea here is “don’t take it too seriously.”
We need a compilation video of theoretical physicists looking at their work, saying, “Huh. Well that’s f***ing weird.”
We don’t *really* know what’s up, ever, on any level & we’re nicer to each other when we grok that
We need a compilation video of theoretical physicists looking at their work, saying, “Huh. Well that’s f***ing weird.”
We don’t *really* know what’s up, ever, on any level & we’re nicer to each other when we grok that
