Just spent a couple of hours sitting in on Singapore’s Parliament, which is a thing you can do if you’re a citizen. Quite an interesting experience and I’m glad I finally got around to doing it
The 1st funny thought I had was “wow this meeting could’ve been an email” 😂 which is a bit of a childish thought, I know. But it does seem broadly inefficient somehow, so many people sitting in a room for hours talking turns to talk. Need to read+think more to have a better POV
The 2nd funny thing is the decorum and ritual. Everybody - from members of the public to the Prime Minister - is expected to bow to the Speaker when entering and exiting Parliament. I appreciate the effect it has, but it’s also funny to me. Ministers gotta bow before they can pee
Jokes and laughs aside, I actually felt something being in that chamber. Just, it’s cool that I can literally walk into the room (well, a viewing gallery upstairs) where my Prime Minister and elected representatives are talking about issues of governance and public concern
I showed up today in particular to witness MP Louis Ng talk about his recommendations for public housing policy re: single unwed parents and their children. It’s an issue that we could be dealing with better as a nation. I appreciated his speech and I appreciated the response
There’ll probably be a news article about it soon. But what the news doesn’t tell you is that you can see that the people in the chamber do care. In her response, Sun Xueling put in real effort to empathise + agree with Louis Ng and the points he raised. I see that + respect it
After Parliament adjourned (~7 hours after it convened?), I saw Louis Ng talking with members of the public who were in attendance, listening to them and answering their questions. 😍 It’s cool that this is my country. I’m glad to be a part of it and I want to help it be better
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I’ve gotten thousands of DMs over the years from people telling me about their problems. Here’s one interesting pattern/cluster I’ve noticed, which I’d loosely describe as
“anxious self-flagellating ambitious guy who desires greatness but refuses to learn from his mistakes”
they tend to say something like, “I know perfect is the enemy of the good but I can’t bear to do merely good so I keep trying to do perfect and keep failing. how do you deal with not being perfect?” and- I’ll prob have to explain this but the vibe is very similar to-
the question I ask in return is something like, “how do you deal with accomplishing nothing over something? that seems like it would be harder to deal with than failing to be perfect, which is the default condition of all human beings from day 1”
i used to agonize about this for years. i came to see that the agonizing is itself unproductive, lol. like an athlete who refuses to rest because he's not performing at 100%, when rest is required to perform. the ideal end-state is to transcend simplistic notions of productivity,
but ime that's much easier to do from a place of strength rather than weakness, so for a lot of people i actually do recommend getting productive before transcending productivity grindset.
i do believe it's possible to skip the middle, but the people who do don't ask for advice
so like if you're gonna embark on this, buncha basic sanity check things u gotta do. define what productivity means to you. what outcomes you're trying to achieve. do an inventory of how you actually spend your time/energy. a lot of people who struggle, horribly misrepresent this
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:
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
greatness is deviance (from the norm). steve jobs used to use the phrase "insanely great"– which is actually a tautology. people keep tripping up over euphemisms around this. achieving deviant outcomes requires doing deviant shit.
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)
always open to the possibility of some special move or phrasing dismantling that belief, but not counting on it
can easily see a parallel life path where I devoted all my effort to trying harder to dismantle that belief, failing, and having nothing to show for it
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