Posts published by “StartUp Daemon”

That day I slept very late. I think I may have been binge-partying the nights before.

And I didn’t sleep well. It was emergency sirens all about – and a lot of them.

I’ve lived near some of the largest hospital clusters in the world. So I’m used to the clangor of ambulances, police cars and fire engines.

Fire engines are the worst.

But that day was something else. The noise really filled the air like never before, and there was something extra chaotic and panicky about the sirens and how they moved about.

I hopped out of bed and got onto a normie news website.

Someone had bombed the finish line of the marathon, a few blocks from my house. Dozens of casualties. I was surprised I hadn’t heard the blast myself.

The first thing on my mind wasn't about myself. It was to email my mother that I was fine before she went into a hysterical rage on hearing the news.

That done, I needed to figure out what to do with myself. Obviously, the city would be blocked off and dysfunctional for days on, if previous experience was any indication.

I went back to the news to scan for imminent danger – to exclude chemical and radioactive fallout or secondary attack. I was quickly satisfied that it was not an issue. My knowledge of psychology and the apparent size and type of device used suggested that the bombers were probably some idiot children and not a part of a larger plot. And I was right.

All this took less than an hour. Then, there was the rest of the day.

Unlike most people, I’m aware that the more attention you pay to assholes, the more energy you feed them. So I was determined to go about my business with as little disruption as possible. What else could I possibly do?

The first thing on my agenda was to go running, as I did every day.

About half of my usual route coincided perfectly with the final stretch of the marathon – almost to the finish line itself, where the bombing had gone off.

So I went about it.

I didn’t care about security risks because I had done my homework. If my assessment was correct, there was nothing to worry about. Skin in the game.

I didn’t care about being judged by onlookers because I don’t care about other people’s opinions. And because I knew the sheeple would be hiding under their beds anyway, as long as the MSM told them to.

I was slightly concerned only about being accosted by public safety, but their response turned out to be much directed and deliberate than I could have expected.

The only real issue on my run was the filth left behind by marathon spectators. And the fumes of the tireless cleaning crews that had crawled out to deal with it.

By going about my business, I wasn’t addressing any specific emotion or reacting to the circumstances. The intent was directed the other way – I was taking stock of the conditions, so I could go about my business with minimal disruption.

This is what “being yourself” is about. "These are the things I do, and I do them because this is me. Not because of any other condition."

As you become more of yourself, you build fortitude. Your self-awareness energizes it, your overcoming of obstacles to your self-actualization makes you mentally stronger and more antifragile.

Fortitude isn’t something you do at the gym, although physical fitness certainly helps.

Fortitude is your unconditional will to continue on the path you have chosen for yourself, to be the person you have decided to be, regardless of circumstances or “what the community thinks”, including your own fleeting feelings and emotions.

I’m giving you a long-winded semantic definition because I know you will ask for one or come up with something worse.

37) THE FOURTH LAW

Don’t behave like people you don’t want to become.

— sᴛᴀʀᴛᴜᴘ ᴅᴀᴇᴍᴏɴ (@startupdaemon) November 29, 2017

Fortitude is only manifest in our daily actions and our regulation of thoughts and emotions – in harnessing and directing all that energy towards who we want to be.

When confused or unsettled, ask yourself: Who do I want to be? What would that person do right now? What does that person do every day?

Then do as who you want to be would do. Be your better Self.

No matter how bad or unexpected the conditions, your fortitude can come through.

Think of fortitude as a habit – the habit of being reminded of who you want to be and that you won’t be deterred by anything from being that person.

And this is how you know that without fortitude you can never be Authentik.

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Some weeks ago I went to Acadia with a couple of my best and oldest friends (ENFJ & ENFP, both savages and proven troublemakers – an unbearable combo unless you have nerves of steel).

We had decided to go camping for a long-awaited get-together, just the three of us. No wives, no homos.

I knew exactly what I was getting myself into and I enjoyed every moment to the fullest. It was at times a truly transcendent experience. Suffice it to say, we almost got kicked out of the camping ground the very first night by a visibly fearful grounds manager. As per usual.

For the first day of our outing, we had planned a bike ride around the park. We did about 25 km that day. And got “lost” along the bike paths, mostly because we didn’t care where we were going until just before dark.

I hadn’t been on a bike for a decade. (OK, OK, I had been speeding once on a bike without brakes – but that’s another story for another time.) I had not been working out, not even running, for a good three months. To say that I wasn’t in great shape would be a rancid understatement.

But I encouraged the guys to ride faster downhill, often led the pack and ended the day without any complaint – or any subsequent muscle pain. I woke up early the following morning in high spirits, with lots of energy and no pain. That after drinking until late into the night and sleeping in a tent at near-freezing temperatures.

I must surely be exaggerating, mustn’t I? Not one bit. And here’s the little bit of magic behind it.

Your ability to control your body, your organs, your muscles is much greater than you suspect.

You can use your mind’s directed attention to manage physical activity at a level that significantly increases your capability, especially in endurance, and negates adverse consequences such as strained muscles and need for recovery.

This is only ground-level High Awareness of oneself. And a gateway drug of sorts. Just a foretaste of what’s possible when you start removing misplaced beliefs and assumptions, and lean on experience and savagery instead.

People have been making fun of how I move for longer than I can remember. Whether it’s pool or basketball, they’ve likened my movements to ballet. And they didn’t mean it in a good way. This “they” includes my own mother making fun of me. As a kid.

Then as now, I didn’t care one bit about it. Because I knew what I was doing.

I was optimizing my movements to take advantage of inertia and the nature of motion, save energy for the next thing and get the optimal result.

My understanding of what I was doing became more conscious when I took up karate at about 16-17 years of age. In training, I made an effort to master every detail of every movement first. Only after that would I concern myself with hitting the opponent.

During the most grueling practice, I would remind myself to embrace the pain and go with the flow of what we were doing. I intuitively felt the value of flowing with the environment – flowing with the floor, flowing with the air when I was moving – and applied it in every other aspect of life.

Over time and attention, this practice expanded and deepened to different muscles, movements and even internal organs.

In graduate school, I got a taste for long-distance running as a way to pump my brain with energy and get out the aggression of sleeping 5 hours a day and often being intensely bored the rest of the time.

Mind you, I was often doing 18-30 km a day, some of it in midday tropical heat and humidity. It was no joke.

I learnt to switch between different postures, pay attention to my breathing and liver function, control joint movements and stress, understand how to manage my heart rate and still make room for sprinting – which is the most enjoyable part.

One time I went on a 14-hour drinking binge, got home when the Sun was already high up, and minutes later took a 12 km run like it was nothing. The air was so humid that it felt almost like swimming. And I didn’t feel unsafe for a single instant while I was doing it. I was almost 30 years old.

When I hit up the trails with my friends a few weeks ago, this practice kicked right in. Once you learn the basics of High Awareness, it becomes second nature even if you don’t use it for a long time. It’s easier to forget how to ride a bike, literally.

As soon as I got on the pedals, I was already applying mind-body awareness to driving hard uphill. Without effort. I myself was surprised how easy it went.

What did I do specifically?

Much of it is instinctual and unconscious like any other well-honed skill. Hence the expression High Awareness. You do something else, your inner monologue concerns itself with other subjects, and you perform top-level all the same. But you remain focused, in control and directing energy towards this unconscious effort consciously, in Awareness.

Here’s some of what I did on the bike, and without thinking too much about it:

• Adjusted my seat to an unusual height, for which I received a lecture from my ENFP friend about how my knees were going to be killing me the next day (nothing of the sort happened).
• Shifted my body weight between feet and hands as well as onto the bike seat.
• Changed the sideways angle at which I was pedaling with my ankles. This would have looked very funny and awkward from the outside. It was extremely effective and I'm convinced it's what ensured exactly zero joint pain.
• Shifted the main thrust of the pedaling motion between my hips, knees and ankle joints. This was a consistent flow-shifting of stress, without waiting for any one joint and muscle group to get worn down.
• Changed my forward/backward and sideways body tilt even when I wasn’t making any turns and there wasn’t an obvious aerodynamic or inertial reason to do so. This allowed muscle groups and joints to take turns at complete rest. Low stress is not rest – it’s harmful when chronic.
• Shifted my back posture (especially between convex and concave) and the intentional strain in my back muscles, especially the position of my neck and shoulders.

How did I know what to do when? I was simply paying attention to my body on an unconscious level and using many years of attentive experience to interpret and act on those signals.

To an outside observer, this would have looked like a messy knot of physical awkwardness. To me it was an intricate implementation of direction and control that amplified the enjoyment of the trip. Because effectiveness is such a turn-on.

And I was being extremely effective, especially considering my complete lack of preparation for the specific physical activity. Because my attention wasn’t drawn onto struggling with the bike, I was able to enjoy the sunshine and the beautiful vistas along the path.

What I felt the next day not just in my legs but throughout my entire body was rabid muscle growth, the kind you get after a robust well-structured workout.

The slow sizzle of muscle being formed. That’s not painful, it’s exalting.

You can get that elation from your workouts, too, even if you’re not into working out. Putting in the full power of mind increases your effectiveness in growing muscle and helps lower the chance of HIT injury.

And applying High Awareness to your body and muscle movements is just the tip of the mental powerberg.

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You can get a head start on cultivating Awareness with Joseph Goldstein's Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom.

Joseph is one of the few original westerners who brought effective meditation practice from Asia. And I find him the most effective meditation teacher I have ever heard speak.

I’ve almost-died three times – that I can recollect.

The first time I was still an infant in diapers, just a few months old.

I spent much of my childhood on my grandparents’ farm. They had a vineyard and a huge vine shade all around the front of the house. Before the first grapes were fully ripe, the elders would start prepping barrels and grinders for the coming harvest.

One day in the high heat of summer, everybody had left somewhere to do field work. They’d left me in the care of my great-grandfather.

The family had put up a few wine barrels to be cleaned under the yard vine hugging the house. My great-grandfather was filling them with water from a hose.

Somehow my perambulator ended up parked right next to a barrel that was being filled. The water flowed in. The barrel filled up. The water started flowing over the edge – right into my bowl-like, impermeable, rain-proof stroller.

And yes, my divine person was present – asleep – in said stroller. My godly respite quickly turned into an unplanned swimming lesson.

Let this sink in.

Drowning inside your own waterproof perambulator. In the high heat of summer. Miles away from the nearest pond and the nearest cloud. At the safest place imaginable – your grandparents’ home.

Can death get any more ridiculous than this? Can life get more absurd?

I’m skeptical that it can, but I like a challenge.

Next family member who tried to take me out was my grandmother.

I was still less than a year old when she dropped me head first on the sharp edge of a raw brick wall.

You might think this explains a lot, and it well might.

But here’s the fun part. The doctors decided it would be a good idea to put my skull back together without a painkiller, let alone a sedative.

I don’t remember if I was awake or in shock when I got bricked in the head and on the way to the hospital. But I sure as hell snapped out of it when the doctor started gluing my cracked head. How I must have screamed.

Because, you know, babies and toddlers don’t remember and what not.

Well, that’s the very first memory of my life – being tortured as an infant and excruciating pain being inflicted on my unsuspecting person. That image of the doctor leaning over me is carved into my memory like it was yesterday. Moses can go pound sand with his stone tablets.

Be reminded of this joyous episode next time you feel like complaining about your life. I couldn’t complain. I could only scream, and I took ample advantage of the opportunity.

By the time I graduated from kindergarten at about 7, I had the distinct suspicion that my parents were absolutely klueless about how to raise kids (they were). And probably so were most other parents (they are).

I don’t know if those early experiences were among the motives, but I went on a long road of experimentation, one of whose goals was to gain my independence from parental control. And I did. That’s also how Blood in the Game was born.

So, the third time I almost-died, there was no familial involvement. If anything, I was barely able to scrounge together (borrow from my parents) the money to make it happen.

I must have been in my early twenties already. I was on a beach in Croatia, working to improve my swimming skills. Alone.

While I normally swam like a rock, that day I had decided to demonstrate my prowess while a giant cruise ship was coasting by. I don’t know if it was the size of Queen Mary II or Queen Mary 17. Suffice it to say, it was larger than many small mountains.

I remember few details, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t drowning until that thing decided to stop. Big ocean liners make big waves – this much is obvious. Imagine what happens when they pull the parking break.

I was paying attention, so I did expect a jolt or two. Instead, I ended up in something like a centrifuge of giant waves that only pulled me closer to the cruise ship.

Some minutes passed and I wasn’t making any progress towards the beach. If anything, I was making regress – in the direction of death by drowning.

The lo-awarenes narrative says you should believe in yourself and you can overcome anything, blah-blah-blah. Let me tell you something about that. From deadly experience.

Semantics don’t float. You can believe whatever you want and still drown like a cockroach.

If anything, by the time I made the move that saved me I was almost certain I was going to die. And it didn’t make the least bit of difference. Because I was decided to do everything I can to prevent it anyway.

The way I saw it, the situation was pretty simple:

1.  I was minutes away from ded.
2.  I had better use those minutes as best I can to prevent being ded within said minutes.

And – yeah – all that hogwash about your life running before your mind’s eyes is rubbish too.

Young as I was, I had put myself through a lot of craziness already, but I had no ragrets.

I did think of my family and how hurt they’d be if I died. But my only real concern was this – how pathetic it would be to have died in a freak accident off a crowded beach in Croatia. While doing nothing even borderline exciting.

I was about to have a boring frivolous death. That nonsense could only stand over my dead body. Literally, as the case might have been.

Yep, and I smiled at these thoughts while finding myself minutes away from a gruesome death. Only the bottomless sky stared back at me. If I wasn’t swallowing enough water already, I would have laughed for real.

What saved me that day wasn’t belief or any other semantics. It was my composure and the fact that I wasn’t afraid of dying. At least not afraid at the panic level that many people “believing in themselves” would have experienced.

Despite struggling to stay above water, I had kept calm and paid attention. At that point, I figured my best chance was to get help from people on the beach. And there were good reasons I hadn’t tried that earlier. To put it mildly, the odds of it working out looked less than favorable.

Almost as soon as my ordeal had started, I had been pulled in far from anyone who was insane enough to wade in farther than the sandy shallows.

The beach was packed with people, mostly families, but there was no lifeguard. And people were all desperately far away. The beach was loud as hell that time of day – the perfect setup to get ignored and ded.

Lucky for me, there was a stocky guy with his kids by the water. After a minute or two, he saw my waving and yelling for help. He jumped in and pulled me out.

As soon as I could catch a breath, I realized he looked like he competed on World’s Strongest Man contests.

“How are you”, he asked unhurriedly as we were walking out of the water shoulder-to-shoulder.

His accent seemed Finnish, maybe Estonian.

“Swallowed a bit of water”, I said cold-bloodedly.

“That’s always a problem”, he shrugged.

I had to make an effort not to laugh. I don’t remember if I succeeded.

I thanked him heartily, shook his hand and we parted ways.

Here’s the lesson from all this.

Know who you are, what you’re about, what you want from yourself and this life. Accept your imminent departure. Then believe whatever the hell you like. Or, better, don’t.

And avoid swimming around cruise ships, especially if you can’t swim.

God Save the Queen of Finland.

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If you want to have a laugh at the absurdity of life, click here to get "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". I laughed myself to tears when I first read it.

For about a decade, I used to receive a bunch of mainstream media publications.

I never read the opinion and op-ed pages. Then as now, that’s where you’d find the most deranged echo-chambered drivel trying to pass for whatever else.

In the rare event that one in 100,000 opinion pieces makes sense, it’s usually irrelevant to everyday decisions. Zero reasons to waste attention.

Because of my background, friends and relatives off Twitter sometimes ask my opinion on major life decisions such as buying a house of switching jobs. Twitter folk seek my opinion so frequently that you wouldn’t believe it.

And they are often outraged when I say I don’t have opinions on their pet subjects.

Opinion is different from advice, but I don’t give advice either (unless you’re paying for it somehow). Here’s why.

An opinion is a mental pattern ungrounded in evidence or deep cognition. It’s typically the offshoot of some preconceived notion. Even if it isn’t, all opinion does is make the mind resistant to new information. It's a drain on attention and energy.

Whatever its basis, opinion is a cost without a benefit. Authentic, impactful, decisive action is driven by authentic knowledge, desire, instinct – not by shallow opinion.

I’m yet to see compelling evidence that opinions are anything but a deadweight cost to me, so I make a deliberate effort not to have any.

And it does take deliberate effort to unlearn the habit of having an opinion about everything.

What surprised me along the way? That even more effort was required to resist people’s attempts to make me have an opinion.

Because lo-awarenes loix have opinions on everything regardless of relevance or information. And one of the hallmarks of being lo-awarenes is the tribal expectation that other people are like you.

But, you may ask, can’t you be unselfish for a moment and formulate an informed opinion on something other people care about?

When people tell you not to be selfish, you’re being asked to indulge a selfishness of theirs.

Figure out what it is and use it to your advantage.

— sᴛᴀʀᴛᴜᴘ ᴅᴀᴇᴍᴏɴ (@startupdaemon) May 23, 2018

That would be foolish. Even more foolish than having an opinion for its own sake.

People will ask your opinion so they can then abuse your politeness and waste an hour of your time bloviating on the subject. To show how clever, informed, educated or whatever else they aren’t.

People will ask your opinion so you can validate things they’ve done. Or to invalidate their insecurities.

Insecurities cannot be “invalidated”. You have to do the inner and outer work to discard them. No opinion can do that for you. So I won’t waste my time and yours giving you one.

People who ask your opinion are often looking for an opening to attack you. I’ve been attacked for NOT having an opinion, remember? That ought to speak for itself.

People will also try to trick you into getting invested in their choices, but without any real choice or skin in the game for you.

People will ask your opinion to co-opt you into doing their mental work for them or shift responsibility for decisions they’ve already made.

What use is my opinion if you’ve made the decision? Thanks, but I have better things to do.

Arguing over a foregone conclusion is even stupider than arguing for signaling purposes. So what do I do when people try to foist their nonsense on me?

I ignore emails, phone calls and messages. You left me a voicemail? WTF is a voicemail??

If opinion-seeking takes place during face time, I state that I don't have an opinion or refuse to acknowledge the request altogether. Yes, it’s that simple. Shrug. When pressed, shrug again. Try not to laugh, unless there is good reason to embarrass the opinion-seeker publicly.

This can be great initiation practice for dealing with verbal assault of any kind. Just standing there and saying nothing. Let the opponent struggle and fail by oneself, then have a laugh about it in private.

Deflecting social pressure to have your time wasted can be very entertaining and helps build stamina. More importantly, it signals to everyone present that you simply WON'T have your time wasted. It’s a subtle form of public savagery. And public savagery can save you a lot of time and spare you a lot of headaches.

Some days ago someone asked my opinion on a $100,000 business decision. A stack of paper that high could have a significant impact on the questioner's life, and he was asking in earnest.

I trashed the email without responding.

I find myself in the position to be useful to someone every day. Helping people is the very reason I took to Twitter. But it takes two to tango all the way to results. So, I have to be very disciplined in selecting the people who can be helped and the conditions in which I can be useful to them.

How I know them and what I do in those cases is worthy of another missive.

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In the twilight of every mindless drinking episode, the time comes for a reckoning. Drawing the bottom line, but not in glasses drunk, bottles of distillate devoured, hours and days spent in the same bar, at the same table, with the same people, in the same distracted thoughts – or without any.

The drunk always arrives at this one question – how much time was wasted before these sweet hours of timelessness. How much more is to be wasted before stepping out again into this other dimension of eyes tired-aglimmer, thin smiles and full proof against any future? The soft light of the next roadside tavern fades fast before this sinking feeling.

Escape is into merciless despair, like the yearning for a harvest that comes once every hundred years. In the bustling feeling of the dark soil, ruffled by the drizzles of June and eager to fill aromatic grapes. In the handyman's meticulous care after the vine. In the fermentation of the mind obsessed with collecting every last grape at picking-time. In the strong spirit of the vine herself, which defends the clusters from the good intentions of the high-noon sun and the morning dew.

Long after the tillers and the growers and the pickers are gone yet another season, the vine remains – orphaned, withering, yearning to put its last sap into that harvest which comes but once every hundred years.

The old man will end this sorrow. He will come with his cart, he will gather every cluster and every grape in bags and buckets, he will swing axe and pickaxe. A few Sundays later, he will set up savage brandy in the stills. And the vines will make the stills sing in two voices: branches, roots, stems in one, and their sweet sap in another. From these two songs, the vines' last brandy will be born – clear like the eyes of a child, but heavy with the sorrows of a long life.

In barrels and in bottles, the new brandy will rest until that time of the year when the young vines hide their first fruit beneath a thick blanket of leaves. Then we’ll sit together with the old man and drink, but we won’t sing. So we don’t remember that same despair brought on only by time long lost.

Few things delight me more than women who take initiative, even if I’m not interested. But lately I've been bothered by how many young women have zero game, not just in “the game” but socially and as individuals. And this is not some grumpy-old-man observation. Much of it is generational, not merely a matter of age or experience.

A couple of nights ago, I was being invaded by a young girl, very early 20s, who was obviously “on the prowl” that night. She had washed & done her hair, applied some makeup and perfume… and that’s about it. Physicality aside, everything about her appearance was a firm NO because totally nondescript. There was no sense of style whatsoever, let alone one that commands attention, although she didn’t look clownish like so many other young women. She hadn’t even bothered to put on a pair of heels despite her shorter stature.

Mind you, she wasn’t being obnoxious or out offering herself, as is all too common these days. Then how petty of a hang-up over her not wearing heels?

Appearance which you can easily control signals a lot more about you than do your genetics alone. In relation to how we appear in public, the “culture” has been conditioning women to be willfully ignorant of the most basic power dynamics arising from evolutionary psychology. Shunning heeled shoes, supposedly as a mark of empowerment, is just one of the most blatant examples.

The Heel of Man – and Woman

The heel is a weapon of war. The first heeled shoes are thought to have emerged in relation to the stirrup. Heeled boots provided horseback riders a more reliable vantage point than the saddle and stirrup alone. A heeled rider could maneuver the horse better, put more force into strikes with handheld weapons and shoot a bow more accurately. Being heeled would have been a mark of a higher social status – because the man has survived in the wars, is a member of the warrior caste and/or can afford to own a horse.

Heeled shoes were virtually unknown in Europe until the Late Middle Ages. High heels as a status symbol first made an appearance there during the Renaissance. In the 15th century, wealthy Venetian women started wearing chopines – platformed overshoes invented in the Ottoman East to prevent mucking up one’s actual shoes in the dirty streets. Within a century, “designer” high-heeled shoes had become a status symbol for men and women alike across the continent.

Exaggerated shoe heels quickly became a peacock’s tail for the same reasons sexual selection would recognize today. Only the wealthy and powerful could afford to buy and wear shoes that were less practical and increasingly expensive to make. The term “well-heeled” was already in circulation in Shakespeare’s time. But it wasn’t just about expense. Public figures were acutely aware that merely adding to their stature made them appear more powerful and larger than life.

Heels in the Game

More than anything, style is about maximizing your opportunities. You never know whom you’re going to meet. Do you want to look like a slob with your flip-flops and sweatpants? When I’m out running, to the supermarket or for a cup of coffee, I might wear trainers with appropriately thick soles. In any other public context, it’s Oxfords with at least 10 mm heels, preferably higher. This includes long-distance travel: trains, busses, airplanes. And I’m taller than most even without the heeled shoes.

Shopping with women is one of my favorite pastimes, so I know more about women’s apparel than most men. And much of it is good news. Women have the advantage that they can pick from a much wider variety of heel lengths and constructions. Yes, bad shoes can absolutely destroy your feet and your legs. Which is why you take care of yourself when you buy them, not when the damage is done. That’s also why I go extra savage for fit and function when I’m buying shoes for myself.

And I pay attention to what women wear and how they wear it – from the makeup and the perfume to the shoes to the accessories. Because it says so much about a woman’s personality: where she is in life, her understanding of social dynamics and her self-image. And it absolutely reflects experience and intelligence in some measure. Gentlemen, the same applies to your style, although the signals are much richer with women’s.

The Well-Heeled Life

Even with respect to style, heels may seem like a minor detail to obsess over, but their effect on your day – and your life – can be much larger than suspected. Style matters, but your appearance isn’t, as the cliché goes, an expression of who you are. What you wear, and being attentive to it, is an impression on who you are becoming. It’s one of those things, like sleep, that we are inclined to ignore for many years, with devastating results for performance and life satisfaction. And for our health.

1. Higher heels give you a higher stature, literally and figuratively. This bit you’re well aware of. None of it is rocket science. It’s a well-known fact and basic evolutionary psychology, which young people simply choose to disregard even when aware of it. With unobservable but very real consequences. Which is not to say that you need to don 10-inch stilettos when you go for groceries. But why not if it makes you You?

Style in any realm calls for deliberate acts of creation.

You fill the canvas of life or the universe fills it for you - with white noise and entropy.

You get to enjoy the world or the world fucking tears you apart. pic.twitter.com/YPmFhCuAGb

— sᴛᴀʀᴛᴜᴘ ᴅᴀᴇᴍᴏɴ (@startupdaemon) April 13, 2018

2. Higher-heeled shoes for both men and women tend to be higher-quality. The heel itself signals that you are paying attention to your appearance. Which, in turn, signals that you are more intelligent and diligent than yourself dressed according to the latest slob fashions. Even this minimal attention to style shows that, well, you’re paying attention. It’s another indicator that there is direction and intention to your actions, perhaps even to your life. That what you do is deliberate. Which gives you a certain social heft. Deliberateness, especially when subtly suggested, creates gravity.

Growth. https://t.co/sLw2IegTGt

— sᴛᴀʀᴛᴜᴘ ᴅᴀᴇᴍᴏɴ (@startupdaemon) May 5, 2018

3. Most elevated heels tend to produce a distinctive sound as you walk. This applies to anything from Oxfords to stilettos. That sound draws attention. Whatever commands attention is a source of social power. As long as you make sure the sound isn’t obnoxious and is controllable as you walk and stand.

4. Heels create a powerful forward dynamic, which affects your entire mindset. It’s no accident that most well-made trainers are slightly tilted forward from the sole, even though they don’t have a distinct heel. Nor is it an accident that you’d be required to wear “formal” shoes if you take any even remotely serious Latin-American or ballroom dancing class. Wearing the right shoes puts you in the proper mental dynamic, doesn’t just prepare you for the “real” dancing outside the classroom. It’s why the shoes are called “formal” – they give your being form.

I experience the power of form every time I go out. When taking a recreational walk, I prefer wearing trainers because I know I’ll end up walking faster, much faster with my Oxfords. It’s just hard to slow down with the heeled shoes – requires special attention.

This heel dynamic comes in handy when going out at night or for business meetings. Even if I don’t feel much like socializing, I’m undeterred because I know my energy level will be launched into the stratosphere just a few Oxfordsteps out the front door. If manners maketh man, apparel definitely maketh man’s attitude and affecteth his energy level. Heels create a forward movement, a forward intention of sorts, which is distinct from the effect of any dressing ritual or preferred "power" clothing.

5. On the flipside, flats are destroying your feet and your joints. Most flats I see in the wild have inferior soles, unadapted to the typical foot-wrecking urban environment. Wearing flats – even if only between home and work – is the physical equivalent of walking barefoot on concrete. Because that’s what most will walk on even if living in a suburban area: parking lots, concrete walkways, cement stairs, thinly carpeted steel or concrete indoor surfaces. I used to wear flat-sole moccasins and canvas shoes because they can have their distinct style and comfort. But stopped when I realized they were wrecking my feet.

Remember this missive next time you're about to put on flat shoes to feel “empowered” at a business meeting or another social gathering. Pay close attention and you will know what to do.

We have a natural drive towards it. And it’s how we can make uncertainty a home. But rationalism, scientism and the maleducation system suppress it and supplant it with semantic Fakehood. It is of the timeless way.

Ἦθος.

I’ve mentioned it, but I shan’t explain it. This missive ought to demonstrate, more than anything, how words fail most spectacularly at describing it. This is why, to your frustration, I keep using the Attic word ἦθος. It’s not to annoy you or be fanciful, although aggravating you into action and curiosity would come as a bonus. I don’t even use the transliteration ēthos (long sound “e”) because it alone constrains and diminishes.

4) “You are what you do.”

ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων

This is the Foundation and the Firmament.

— sᴛᴀʀᴛᴜᴘ ᴅᴀᴇᴍᴏɴ (@startupdaemon) April 18, 2018

It is much better to show you – if only glimpses at a time – ἦθος in context, experience and action. And an opportunity has presented itself.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been enjoying Alex J. A. Cortes’s periscopes as part of my relaxation & contemplation. (I don’t pass up on a free supply of extra energy.) I’ve even tweeted direct quotes from him for authentic effect. But the one thing that made an impression over time was how frequently his rants touched on different aspects of ἦθος, as both notion and practice. Perhaps without realizing it, this one time he tried to describe it, to deliver a sense of it. And what an opportunity to show you ἦθος while it’s also being grasped at with the spoken word.

Why say that you’ll see ἦθος and not just get a faulty word-description? If you’ve followed Alex’s exploits online or off, you will have noticed that he is very extroverted, and says so himself. He is also probably better at speaking than the average person and perhaps ever-so-slightly more intelligent. You may have been led to believe that such “gifts” are just the outcome of another Jenetyx hair product. And you would be very, very wrong.

What follows is not a definition, as there isn’t one. There’s only “getting it” in authentic knowledge, through action. This is not about Alex being “correct” in what he says (he can’t be). I’m not quoting it as advice either, although there is use aplenty one can find. I surely take advantage myself. But I don’t give advice – your circumstances are yours.

Nor is this about masculinity or femininity. It’s not even so much about people in general. It’s about you more than anything.

To get beyond the literal words, think bigger. When you read and hear “movement”, sense direction, decision, deliberation. Sense that, at a higher level, one can move the world with stillness. Forget the semantics for unfettered power and understanding.

First read through to the end of this missive. Then enjoy the first few minutes of the periscope where Alex says all this (it’s definitely worth it to do both). Make no mistake - it's his public persona - but let go of prejudice and expectation. Hear the tone of his voice, feel the direction of his body language, see the depth of his movement, experience the becoming.

Here we go.

For every person I’ve known, for everyone I’ve worked with, for everyone I’ve studied, for every case study, for every individual I’ve seen rise to the top of something, whether it be modern or historical, everyone has the same thing in common – they don’t stop.

And I don’t know that I can put that into a single quality: well, it’s dedication, or it’s persistence, or it’s responsibility, or it’s self-belief, or it’s mindset, or it’s confidence. It supersedes all those things. You can put all those umbrella qualities together and they all click with each other, they all are complementary, they all speak to the same, shall I say, transcendent universal principle that the way forward is the way to create. If you don’t stop moving, if you keep going, if you keep getting up, if everything about your way of being is that there is continuous action to you, you get what you want. You do. It doesn’t matter the domain, it doesn’t matter the subject, it doesn’t matter the field, it doesn’t matter the profession, it doesn’t matter what it is. It only matters that you stay moving, that there is some essence of movement about you. What is your practice? Movement. Progression? Movement. Evolution – is movement. Time goes forward. In a way, in a transcendent way, in such a way that you are aligning yourself with the way of the universe. The nature of the universe is forward. The nature of time is forward. If you want to work with that, if you want that to work for you, you have to BE that. You cannot stay still. You’ll die – you can’t.

Death is the only thing that stops.

Move.

That’s it.

Move.

That’s the “secret”.

Move.

If you move, it falls upon you that you should want to be better at moving. If you stay moving, it will come naturally to you that you want to wise yourself up, that you wanna get smarter, that you wanna refine the process, that you wanna learn systems. If you want to stay moving, you’re going to have to learn the principles that sustain that. If you want to stay moving within any given environment, you’re gonna have to study that environment. If you want to stay moving in the face of adversity, you’re gonna have to change the way you see adversity. Movement is the sub-structural quality of everything. Movement is time. So if you are that and that is your way of being, what stops you? Nothing. Only death. Only death.

And you get to pick and choose how you die. That’s why when you guys ask me the questions “I’m in a rut, how do I get out of it?” I have no idea. How do you wanna die? Seriously, though. How do you want to die?

Heraclitus put worlds more than this in five words.

πάντα ῥεῖ

ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων

More to come.

 

The Only Secret I’ve Learned in 29 Years https://t.co/rXjiaD4Qta

— Alexander J.A Cortes (@AJA_Cortes) April 5, 2018

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