Eating Shit

“I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.” - Joseph Conrad

Eating shit can be good and bad. Good? Surfing. Bad? Working for someone else.

There's two ways of eating shit when you surf. One is when you're physically capable of riding the waves. The other is when the waves are physically challenging. When you're physically capable of riding the waves but you can't catch them, the shit you're eating is mental. I'm not at the point where I realize what's going wrong. Am I too far forward? Am I too far backward? Am I not going fast enough? Doing more reps when you're not sure why can be mentally taxing. When waves are physically challenging, you also need mental strength to keep going out there. Getting crushed and knowing you have to paddle back out just to get crushed again.

Either way, you know you need to eat the shit to get better. You won't improve without the reps.

When you work for someone else, you eat a lot of shit. Pointless work, the wasting of time, unless you have a great relationship and communication skills you will eat shit. And it's not productive. You can be productive despite the shit eating, but the actual eating of shit is useless. It's inevitable because everyone has different values and priorities. Your boss does not value your free time as much as you do.

Repetition is necessary to learn because repetition builds taste. You develop a sense for what quality is and how to recognize it and how to express it. The difference in the surfing and job examples is that in the job you are doing reps on something that you don't care about. You're developing taste in eating shit, not in something you actually value. The exception to eating shit at the job is when you are perfectly aligned with the work that you're doing - you're in it for the work itself not for downstream effects.

However, what is useful from eating shit, good or bad, is that you learn more about yourself. You can learn what you care about. You can learn how you respond to adverse conditions. You can learn how much you can suffer. But these are all "cans." You won't unless you're introspective.