Charge the Hill, MVN, Ideation [Vignettes pt.2]
Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
-Leonardo da Vinci
Charge the Hill
Running cross-country in high school was the most physically masochistic thing I’ve done in my life. You can call cross-country a sport, but there’s no ball involved. You just run for long periods of time. You practice by running everyday for a couple hours. I ran so much I developed chronic tendonitis. But I did learn life lessons from the sport-- running on pavement is bad for you, our pain thresholds are higher than we thought, finish what you start, and always charge the hill.
In a cross-country race, there’s usually at least one big hill. It tends to be in the middle of the race when you’re already exhausted. The hill looks daunting. There’s no way you can make it. Look how steep it is. You can’t even see the top because it winds around the mountain. It’s no coincidence that the hill is where runners would most often start walking. Our coach would tell us to charge the hill. Meaning to give a burst of energy. To think of the hill as the time when we pass our competitors. Go strong while others are weak. Yes, this is the hardest part of the race, and that’s the point. You demoralize your opponents.
When you charge the hill, you have momentum going into the climb. By the time your momentum starts to slow down, you see the end of the hill. From there, it’s a final stretch similar to a finish line. When you see the finish line, you go hard to the end, giving all your energy. Giving up when you’re almost there is pointless.
I strive to take a similar mentality in life of charging the hill, giving extra energy to tasks and projects I know are going to be extremely difficult. It’s a mind trick like good procrastination. The extra bursts of energy during the most difficult times in the middle, help get to the next challenge.
Minimum Viable Networking
You don’t have to be a networker to accomplish great things in life. In LA, people often say “it’s who you know”, which I find to be a disgusting oversimplification of how to get ahead in life. Although, there are grains of truth to it. Yes, knowing people is important, but you only need a few points in that skillset to succeed in life.
No matter how many people you know, even if they’re your close friends in powerful positions, if you’re incompetent, you won’t get far. If you’re extraordinarily competent, you need less networking skills, but you still need the basics. I’ve seen some of the most talented people in the world go unnoticed for years or even over a decade.
I love the idea of finding a diamond in the rough. Finding someone at the highest levels of competency who by circumstance of their life or just their natural personality, aren’t networkers. They exist and they’re always out there. I’m sure some of the best engineers in the world may be low level employees at Google or Microsoft. They’re unable to play the politics and basic networking game. The same way some of the best writers and cinematographers may never be discovered.
My friend was going to quit cinematography as he had been doing it for over a decade with no traction. He’s now one of the top cinematographers in Hollywood. You could say it’s because we gave him a chance to film our first feature film, but in reality, he always deserved this. His skills and natural talent are off the charts. The sad part is, he may have quit and wouldn’t have created beloved films if we didn’t cross paths.
There are thousands of people like him in every industry. The more well networked one is, the less competent they have to be. The less well networked one is, the more competent they have to be. It’s why it’s hard to make it from the bottom in a lot of industries, but once someone comes up, it’s rare to see them fall. They’ve hustled and been through so much more shit than their peers. Let’s never forget the diamonds in the rough.
Ease of ideas
I’m on the final stretch of writing 52 essays in 52 weeks. [This post was written in December 2019.] When starting off, my friends asked me what I was writing about. At first, I was writing about my work. Then, I just wrote about things that came up in conversations with friends or random thoughts. Most people thought the hardest part about writing an essay/week would be to come up with things to write about… that’s the farthest from the truth.
As of writing this, I have dozens of new essay topics I want to write about. Some are half written while others are just a few sentences. Why has it been so easy to come up with topics every week?
There are infinite things to write about when you're doing. Writer’s block still happens, but it’s pretty easy to write about things you are doing then extrapolate to larger life lessons. This has been one of the busiest years of my life. If I had quit all my work this year to do nothing but sit in a room to write all day, I would have struggled to come up with 52 unique ideas to write about. And I don’t think they’d have been nearly as interesting.
Veterans advise writers to get out there… I’m out there experiencing life and having intense conversations. Writing became a habit. I feel writing is a craft. The more you do, the better you become. A common theme in my first year essays is that quantity begets quality. Quantity of difficult problem solving and sensitive conversations begets quality as well.
I feel things that used to be expected are now considered hard:
Writing essays-- we wrote essays in school all the time. Few write essays.
Reading books-- we had to do book reports as children. Few read more than a book/year.
Working out-- physical education was required an hour per day. Few exercise everyday.
There are things that are objectively difficult to accomplish. But tasks like writing aren’t that hard, they just take persistence.