What are you serious about? How far will you go?

Brilliant post!

I agree with his observations but not how he applies this knowledge. 

As I got older it became clearer to me that not many people are really serious about anything. Some people go their whole lives without ever having met anyone else who I might describe as actually serious, so they find it hard to believe that anybody could really mean what they say, since everything everyone says is bullshit. I remember feeling like that myself at some of my low points in life, when I was at my most depressed.

Looking back now I don’t think I was entirely wrong, the issue was that I was overly fixated on unpleasant truths. I find myself compelled to describe it as “LinkedIn World”, where everyone is performing a bullshit role in a bullshit play.

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Anyway so– it’s actually quite rational for most people to assume that any other random person probably isn’t serious. That they don’t really mean what they say. Lots of people play-act seriousness for social reasons, but quit when the going gets tough. So it makes sense that lots of people are broadly cynical. Cynicism is a completely reasonable defense against fraud and bullshit. The trouble with cynicism as a defense mechanism is that you can get so good at it that you inadvertently also defend yourself against anything good happening for you.

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I mean something closer to ‘dynamic persistence’, and a sense of humor is often critical to that. It’s hard to persist for a long time if you ‘take yourself too seriously’. You become rigid, stiff, the opposite of dynamic, and eventually you bang up against something that breaks you one way or another, because you weren’t able to back down, or laugh it off.

So the point is to take the work seriously but you don’t take yourself too seriously. 

There’s a riff about this in Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art, where he talks about how amateurs are too precious with their work: 

“The professional has learned, however, that too much love can be a bad thing. Too much love can make him choke. The seeming detachment of the professional, the cold-blooded character to his demeanor, is a compensating device to keep him from loving the game so much that he freezes in action.”