Note: this is reposted from my old blog, because Visakan and others harassed me into doing it. If this is a repeat for you, sorry, this doesn’t usually happen.
When I meet people, and they discover that I’ve authored a published memoir, sometimes they start asking me questions about my past in search of my romantic authorial origin story. And I get anxious because my real origin story isn’t totally romantic, unless your idea of romanticism includes Tim Ferriss. So, I often don’t tell them about the Tim Ferriss part. part. I will now remedy this omission.
In 2015, I’d begun being paid for my writing, and I’d had some initial success, but I didn’t know what my career would look like. In some digestive states, I thought I’d become a dashing foreign correspondent, chasing mortar fire with a notebook and a grim expression. In other moods, I saw myself as a Hitchensesque opinion-monger, propelled by rage and boozy lunches, casually wielding fearsome cultural power. But I couldn’t figure out how these things would actually get done, and I was lazy and indecisive.
During this heady time, I came across Tim Ferriss’ book “The 4-Hour Workweek,” and I was like, “oh, cool, four hours a week, that sounds like a reasonable schedule.” Riveted by the book’s delightful prose and extravagant promises, I read it in two days, and felt my notion of the future changing. I resolved that I would do what Tim did, which is to say, I decided to start a side business to effortlessly fund a vagabond lifestyle focused on self-expression and experience.
That didn’t exactly happen. Although I investigated the possibility of setting up a passive internet retail business—I considered cute soaps with literary slogans—in the end, I did what I usually do when I read advice from successful people. I randomly chose about 20% of the advice and executed it in a half-assed fashion. In this case, what I took from the book was:
Quit your job and travel to Asia or somewhere else inexpensive, so you can focus less on wage slavery, knowing that the worst-case scenario is probably “come home and be a bartender or whatever.”
Embrace novel experiences and assume you can do anything.
???
So, I quit my job and went to Thailand. There, I randomly met two women on the street, and one of them became my roommate. She suggested that I go to Kathmandu, so I did, and I met two chess hustlers there during a search for interview subjects. Then, for two years, a lot of other things happened, and I made a memoir out of that set of experiences.
Although the chain of causality here is delicate and multi-faceted, none of this would have happened if Tim Ferriss hadn’t written 4HWW. “None of this” includes all subsequent related events, like my current lifestyle, my upcoming marriage, etc. Everything. The implications of this, to me, are two-fold.
First, I recommend the work of Tim Ferriss, although his more interesting suggestions are difficult to put into practice and require an unusual propensity for habit formation.
Secondly, holy shit, life really is plagued with randomness, right?
I mean, we all know this, but when people think about how life is governed by chance, I think they’re speaking in more general demographic terms. Like how we can be born richer or poorer, in Austin or in Caracas, in fine fettle or in endless frailty, etc. Maybe they’re even speaking more specifically, about whether our parents happen to be loving and competent, or whether our peer group is or isn’t composed of murderous sociopaths. This is kind of scary. But the actual situation is even more frightening.
Someone can just go and tell you something one day. Anyone can do this. It is an awesome power available to every person. And if their message is compelling and it hits you at a moment of suggestibility, they can instantly alter your trajectory. They can tell you that you should go to Asia and find adventure, and then you’re on a plane. Or that heroin’s addictiveness is overstated, and then you’re homeless. Or that your new girlfriend is terrible, despite what your perpetual swoon is telling you, and then you never get married. People can just spew words at your afternoon and make everything different.
Another real example: one time, grappling coach John Danaher was talking to grappler Dean Lister, wondering why Lister focused a lot on leg locks, a kind of submission that wasn’t in fashion in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at the time. Lister said “why would you ignore 50% of the human body?” After that brief conversation, they never spoke again. Danaher, transfixed, developed the modern leg lock game, and thus transformed an entire sport when his team started dominating the game with heel hooks and other lower body submissions. Nine words changed the lives of thousands of athletes.
What do we learn from this? Well, we could learn to be careful about what we say, but basically nobody will ever do this, especially not me. A more practicable lesson is to have a more creative sense of sympathy.
Often, when we’re deciding whether we should sympathize with someone who’s done a bad or silly thing, we decide based on their outward fortunes. Was the burglar raised in abject poverty that created a scarcity mindset and forced them into the illegal economy? Was the extremist dispossessed and lonely to the extent that it was psychologically necessary to find a totalizing ideology? We try to find a simple, coherent story that makes sense of their fate.
Sometimes there are such neat answers to why a person ended up doing what they did, good or bad. But life isn’t always like that. Terrible or incredible human deeds can result from causal sequences that originate in small acts of persuasion. Someone can just go and tell you something one day, without your invitation, and make your life the consequence of their single remark.
Well, I'm glad Visakan and others harassed you then