mentioned this on a podcast yesterday and it struck me that it’s so much more powerful than I properly convey. Getting good at asking for help means you get a lot more help, it’s one of the major cheat codes of life. It’s kind of like actual free money but sometimes even better
this can be “duh” obvious to people who are good at it and shockingly counter-intuitive to people who aren’t:
giving people a discrete, specific, simple, finite, straightforward way to contribute to something... can be *you* doing *them* a favor. Even as *they’re* helping *you*!
Because most people love to help, and to feel like they’re helping! They just don’t want to be *responsible* for you. So you have to convey that you’re responsible for yourself, and the outcome, and that you won’t judge them. in fact you give them a space to experiment/explore
Here’s a short vid (two parts) of a great example of this in action - watch how Samin puts her friends to work in the kitchen, and how that is a gift that she is giving them, by involving them in the process.
here’s another! I’ve been immersed in this sort of thing for so long for so much of my life that I tend to take it for granted that you can lead & orchestrate other people and they’ll love you for it if you do it well, in service of shared goals, even improvised ones
and when we evaluate the skills and success of others, we tend to underestimate the degree to which they’ve been helped by others. Every person is a team effort. yup- including whatever icon of rugged individualism you might have in mind
we can collaborate, we can make friends, we can help each other out and have a lot of fun in the process. The important thing is that we respect each other’s autonomy
that’s incidentally where people usually fuck up and get burnt: if they have some early awkward or embarassing failures where they ask for for too much, it’s easy to overcorrect and never ask for anything again. The thing is to start small and be mindful of other people
siblings: visa is always in his own world, in books, and on the computer. also guitar.
friends: visa is a kind earnest optimistic prolific hyperverbal shameless nerd
joined first role bc I needed money, stayed 5+ years because it was a great work environment, my boss was like my therapist/mentor/coach, kept learning and growing
since leaving I’ve been working for myself bc I value creative freedom & personal autonomy more than anything else
always interesting to look at older characters and witness my brain parse them in terms of contemporary characters, archetypes. I’m seeing her as “Jennifer Lawrence x Taylor Swift”
oh the shark is hypothesized, not part of the fossil
so maybe the shark got bored or something
the squid got killed while it was eating
F
oh man for some reason this gave me flashbacks to an game I played as a kid... googled "submarine shark educational game"... wow, this is amazing. it's several years older and way more pixellated than I guessed / remember...
I sometimes remind myself that there are lovely people in the world who are terrible at Being Online. One of my favorite dudes is this guy who ran a jamming studio – delightful, generous, sweetheart host vibes, but on the forum he would type things that made me wanna punch him
to be clear it's not like he was posting bad takes or anything – he was being his typical cheeky self, but in his plaintext voice it came across as obnoxious, rude. he would be great on tiktok or youtube or something, you can fall in love with him in seconds
actually he's kinda like michael pena's character in ant-man. imagine this guy posting tweets but everyone just dunks on him because he types like a fool
and then he chuckles and tosses his phone aside and is like "internet's crazy, man, what can you do. hey let's get ice cream"
Some interesting riffs from this blogpost by Mark Rosenfelder about Jane Jacobs' ideas: zompist.com/jacobs.html
1. "Western economists mistook the fitful but constant economic boom from Smith's time on as a permanent condition."
2. "Thinking in terms of national economies smears over the economic facts. Once we take off these lenses, we can see that the world consists not of developed and poor nations, but of dynamic and poor regions."