🤯Unknown Unknowns #123 - Frustration

I spend decades catering to other people's tastes - parents, teachers, bosses.

The way to make your parents happy is to do what they want.  The hack to getting good grades is to figure out your teacher’s opinion and write essays that have that conclusion.  To get raises and promotions, you need to “manage up” - you need to anticipate what your boss needs and do it.

Now, as a writer, there is the lure of followers.  Find a niche and stay in it - write what other people want to hear.  

It’s easy to just follow along. Do what other people want and get rewarded for it.

But we all have a desire to express our taste, you can see it at the most basic level of humanity.  Why do we talk about the latest show we all binged?  We all have a take on what a character should have done.  Why do we play fantasy sports?  Because we’re tired of rooting for a crappy team with an idiot GM whose job we think we can do better.  

We all have opinions and judgements that want to be released but we’ve been conditioned to hold it in.

I’m not saying that you can’t learn anything from your family, teachers, and bosses.  But you need to discern what’s good about their taste and develop your own.

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📝 Writing of the Week:

I’ve been writing unpolished, around 100-word mini-essays.  Just reflections on ideas from podcasts or things on the news.  Here are the latest:

1️⃣ Gamification

2️⃣ Politics and Nigerian Princes

3️⃣ Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

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🔍 Discoveries:

1️⃣ A commencement speech by Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes:

“We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running.” - Bill Watterson

🔗 Some Thoughts On The Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled

2️⃣ “I’m going to teach you to be vulnerable because that’s the only way you fix yourself.” - David Goggins on the Huberman podcast

🔗 https://twitter.com/podcastnotes/status/1742948371638231488

3️⃣ Michael Caine has a mantra, “Use the difficulty.”  Whatever trouble you come across, use it.

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💬 Quote of the Week:

“My opponent is my teacher, my ego is my enemy.” - Renzo Gracie

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You can find more of my writing at chr.iswong.com.

Questions, suggestions, complaints?  Email me at [email protected].  

Feedback welcome.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with a friend or two.  And feel free to send anything you find interesting to me!

Leaving you in peace,

Chris