in the 5+ years I worked for my ex-boss Dinesh, he constantly, casually-yet-intensely would ask me about my goals & desired outcomes
"what do you want to get out of this?"
"how will you measure your progress?"
"what's the next step?"
"what's the limiting factor?"
I've since internalized that stuff so thoroughly, and found it so useful, that I now almost struggle to remember what it was like *before* I installed Dinesh's instrumental thinking module into my mental suite
(I do have old journal entries I can read to simulate it)
the wack thing is, once you internalize this, or a version of this, you look at the world in a completely different way than people who haven't internalized this. and you look around and you see that very few people really internalize this. you can get whiplash from the contrast
549am thinking about my relationship with myself. I would say itโs mostly great, tremendous improvement on every dimension over the past ~15 years, and yet still there is so much more I want to understand about myself, so much about me I do not really know
this is probably the realest reason I have been โalmost doneโ with my book for so long. I have very high standardsโ unfairly high, I thinkโ and a part of me feels like I must have some personal breakthrough with the book while writing it or itโs not quite โauthentic enoughโ
itโs strange that my life is like this. I could hit publish right now and make a bunch of money and move on with my life, but thereโs a HAL-9000 in my head that goes โno Visa, Iโm afraid I canโt do that.โ And Iโฆ have not attempted to negotiate with this guy. Why not? ๐ค
nobody has lived thru โ50 years and nothing happenedโ in like... idk, 500 years? Maybe somewhere between 500-1000 AD, idk my history is not that good to make assertions but broadly once we got the printing press everything gets pretty wild from there
I think it's time to do a thread of different kinds of sexy dude
1. the intellectual/philosopher type
get yourself a turtleneck or otherwise dress preppy
make a lot of prayer hands when thinking, like you're about to drop a rap album
smouldering intense gaze
poast bookshelf
2. the guitar guy
if you have at least one cool action shot you can count on that one and then be derpy/silly with the rest, conveys that you don't take yourself too seriously
you could also write lyrics, wear hats, generally license to be "a creative soul", bard archetype
got another guy asking for dating advice recently, and a funny thing that stuck with him was sth from my marketing/branding playbook: I asked him to think about the sort of archetype he wants to embody, to imagine how his date would gush about him to her friends in the groupchat
he had never really thought of that before in much detail
guys
this is $10,000+ advice:
think about what kind of impression you want to make
don't invent a fake guy that isn't you
rather, find the coolest/hottest version of you out there and model your version of that
some women are into suave, charming types
some are into quiet, intellectual types
some are into outdoorsy types
some are into indoorsy types
YOU ARE ALREADY SOMEONE'S TYPE. you just need to present yourself accordingly
you know something cool that might not be obvious to non-marketers
if you have a website and you are judicious about putting together images and links and attributing stuff, google does reward you for it
I once nerded out about singapore expressway maps for a while
and a strange consequence of that is, I get search traffic to my site for "singapore expressway maps", because I collected a bunch of images I could find
on bing I even seem to be ahead of wikipedia, lol
"I have lately felt a pressing need to understand Singaporeโs road map."
as you can see I have a lot of opinions about maps