Wax Inamorata

About 10 months ago I started asking myself and those around me what was the nature of reality. Looking back, the question was exceedingly naive, but only because the journey to where I find myself now has been so laborious. To go from card-carrying idealist, to newly converted materialist is about as striking as one can transform, but it rely underscores the dedication I have put into my cognitive and professional development.

This journey has been about an excursion into one’s self, only to realize that the perceived structure of that self was mostly an elaborate illusion. So, shedding layer upon layer of delusion at breakneck speed, I’ve forced myself to endure the shame and nakedness that enlightenment so often brings. Enlightenment is so often colored with delicate hues and empyrean settings, but the cruel reality is that enlightenment, the elucidation of self, is a frightening and painful ordeal. You must part from concepts and beliefs that formed the foundation of who you found yourself to be. Enlightenment in its most concentrated form is more akin to a furnace than the warm rays of a summer afternoon.

Yet, strength is built up and you are formed as a new creature indeed.

My goals have shifted much in this last year, from enterprising entrepreneur, to subtle academic turned clinician learning to tinker with the delicate knobs of human existence. Although intuition would lead one to belief myriad things about our nature of being, empirics have lead scientists to almost unfathomable promised lands. This appealed to me as I felt the pining of a self that didn’t merely wish to optimize the interactions between man and his surroundings, but to truly understand them on a level that fostered accelerated optimization that could lead to lasting success.

Many of us can be good at making money or brokering trades — I simply wish to understand why.

My goals have promptly shifted, clearly, and I have been in the process of reorienting my trajectories as a result. By and large, my future is much more to my liking.

However, I’m at the age at which many of us are fulfilling biological needs, namely, settling down and starting families. We are genetically predisposed to want to have children and pass on our genes: we are the most evolved of Earth’s carriers of the “life-algorithm”. But, our complex evolution has brought us to varying stages in which we through environmental and experiential circumstances choose to delay or completely override these transcripted instructions. Hence why Gen-Y has pushed off child rearing en masse and opted for social successes first.

I digress.

I live in LA but I would go apeshit if given the opportunity to study at MIT, Columbia, or Harvard, the hallowed grounds of many psychological and neuroscientific movements. In my mind’s eye, I am more than qualified to hang with the big boys and deeply contemplate the inner universes that we all carry. This is my nearly monothematic drive at this point; I am singularly focused on the attainment of this aspiration.

How do I fit a woman into this narrative? Well, thats another intriguing morsel I’ve found myself chewing on…

Over the summer, I wrote “Why I’m Not Ready For A Relationship” and systematically eviscerated my younger self. My goal was not wanton self-deprecation, but instead it was a healing and learning process for my inclination towards narcissism. In the present, I tend to be fully convinced of my plans in toto or at the very least the tools at my employ to put together plans. Thus, I tend to be hardheaded and resistant to correction in the moment. That article was a not-so-subtle reminder to the modes of thought I often use and a guide to the pitfalls I should avoid.

As a young man, I was extremely self-conscious and socially insecure with regards to my physical appearance. It followed that I was unequivocally attracted to gorgeous women who made me feel attractive. I projected my broken self-image onto them and used the reflection as a de facto sense of status. However in that process I rarely took the time to parse out who these women actually were and if they were a good fit for me.

I’ve honestly never considered what I wanted in a woman. As long as I could celebrate her outer beauty and tolerate her inner self, I was good.

This has been a disastrous method, clearly.

But, again, my relentless questioning about what constitutes reality made this revelation possible. Many external viewers, mainly friends and family, already knew this and told me on several occasions. But, the brain must become emotionally connected to concepts if it is to value them; I had no emotional connection to my own shortcomings — I wasn’t denying them; I was utterly unaware of them.

So, here I am, an aspiring doctor of the mind, considering what I actually want in the woman I “choose” to spend the rest of my life with. While this question is anything but easy for me, I think I know enough about what I don’t want and what doesn’t jive with my personality to lay the foundations for a coherent description of what this woman may be like.

The first and most critical aspect is that I am not creating a hard list of things I must have. Just like I’ve matured from a few years ago, I will continue to mature, grow, and improve as a man, scientist, and whatever identification associated with me.

My first professional scolding came from my second internship in college where my supervisor, tired of my attitude, called me into her office and told me I was emotionally immature. My responses were consistent with someone who lacked control over his inner world and this was a problem: she shouldn’t be the recipient of whatever crap I was going through; I was 22. Over the last four years, I have done everything I can do to modulate my emotional responses to positive and adverse stimuli and although I have a very long way to go, I think I’ve made considerable progress. A major thing I want in a partner is that same dedication to personal improvement. Whether it be emotional or intellectual, I will be captivated by a woman who is invested in her inner wealth.

On the topic of intellect, I require a certain type of mind. Less about brute IQ or the ability to regurgitate information, I will be deeply intrigued by a woman whose cognitive architecture is complex and rigorous. She would be the type of person whose mental contents would be supported by a masterful mental framework. How she thinks would keep our conversations lively…

But, the appropriate “how” must be offset by cognitive flexibility. She does not have to think like me, but must remain open to alternative modes and methods. An “open” mind whose interests include the mental gymnastics concomitant with intellectual inquiry. She will be someone who is comfortable — no, longs — to embrace the nakedness, the discomfort that comes with enlightenment.

That enlightenment process is about vulnerability. I am notoriously difficult to coax into vulnerability and my goal would be to embark on the intellectual, emotional, and affective journey with someone who desired to become vulnerable to me as well.

Vulnerability done right leads to intense loyalty. Although brain science has some scary things to say about hormones and a proclivity for infidelity, I rest assured that the woman of my “choosing” will find herself as dedicated to me as I will be to her.

I can be extremely pessimistic, especially in my moods, so the woman that knows when to reach out to me and when to leave me be will point to someone that understands me. My personality is one that requires a strong counterpart, I can be intense and insensitive. I can’t say “she has to be stable” because that creates too much vagary, but along the same lines of the mental frameworks, the emotional frameworks must be in order. If she is flying all over the place emotionally, we are bound to hit walls.

I honestly don’t care about her race, job description, or any of those types of descriptors: she can be a physician from Senegal or an administrative assistant from Montana. Its more about the construction of her mind than anything else. I, of course, have may physical “types” and appearances that I am attracted to, but those are rather diverse. More background noise than coherent decisional dialogue, but you can bet your ass I will think she’s the most beautiful woman on the planet..

So, that is what what I look for. If I never find it, you can find me on a campus near you considering the fabric of the cosmos and their correlates in the brain, haha. I’m very happy with my progress thus far and I know that my future is as bright as I can conceive it, romance included.

bryce

Embracing Your Struggle

In your youth struggle is your job.

It is your occupation and you should very well give the entirety of your effort to it.

The gripe a preceding generation always has with its successor is that they are too headstrong; the kids think they know better because they have calculated and adjusted for the errors of their parents. One of the prevailing mantras of parenthood is to raise your kids to be better than yourself; a mantra that like so many idiosyncrasies in verbal communication veils some difficult truths to swallow.

There are many problems endemic to human interaction but it is my belief that chief among them — and I’m not using that with creative license, I do indeed mean chief — is our persistent belief that life is linear. We spend a significant portion of our time trying to creative predictable results with education, legislature, religion, politics and the like, that we start to put our independent beliefs above the veritable panoply of interpretation that exists adjacent and opposite to us.

In order to gain peace with the world we must learn to get over ourselves. A task much easier said than done.

Our generation has experienced things that no other group on earth ever has and as much as we herald that in our communicative channels, I do not believe many understand the gravity of that. We are a more informed cohort, but we are not necessarily any more advanced than those before us. We may have more opportunities than those before us, but that doesn’t mean that those opportunities come without a fight. The conditions of human experience have changed, but the nature, as always, remains aberrantly persistent.

We believe that wisdom can be bought or expedited because we have learned from those who toiled in the decades before we were even thought of. This precludes us from ever truly understanding what youth is about. To add consternation to chaos, our parents do not have clear understandings either; they may possess a tacit, learned understanding, but to translate that into meaningful terms is lost on many people.

So young people go through these early years trying to forge their way into a system, only to be indelibly whittled down by inevitability.

You MUST struggle now. That is your job.

You cannot look to particular conditions, those are meaningless in the eyes of objective reality. You cannot say, “I’m going to change corporate America by starting my own business”, that is a clear contradiction. It is not until you struggle and learn why corporate America is fucked that you stand even a shadow of a chance of any meaningful reform.

The struggle of learning is the constant because it reflects the nature of humanity. No one can deny that the specifics of our culture and ancient Egypt were different, however, an adept eye can see that the generalities, the larger scope of human expression is unyielding. If we focus only on the micro then we remain in our delusion, fighting wars of ego and redundancy while swearing we are making changes.

The worst thing that can happen to a young person is that they find success early. They will self destruct because it is a commonplace tendency for humans to grow complacent and rigid when they think their system of operations works. They will more than likely create even more egregious errors than their predecessors; they’re actions will be identical, however the ever increasingly scrutiny by society mixed with the greater abundance of information will amplify their ignobility.

You must sit in your struggle and confront it daily. You must soak in its astringent acids everyday for it will burn completely the useless necrotic tissue of youthful ignorance. The skin will rejuvenate and instead of coming back as it was or simply coming back thicker, it will be tailor made for the life you have chosen. You won’t just be tougher because certain situations don’t call for ubiquitous toughness; you will be dynamic.

The dynamism is the calling card of the elite thinker, the knower that traverses the land as adroit observer.

What you think you know, what I think I know is of no consequence to the life force that animates us. What you feel or what convicts you is a fly to a whale; not only is it inconsequential, it exists in a completely different medium. The dimension of wisdom and the dimension of opinion do not exist on the same plane; you must divorce yourself from yourself.

In your struggle, you must employ all of your wit, all of your faith, and all of your deepest stratagems to unlock the secrets of your own existence. Whether you call upon a higher power or not, there are secrets that are only revealed after one has suffered to gain them. That suffering is your sacrifice, it is your toll to a realm that moves superior to our own.

Do not pray for your struggle to end; pray for you to outmatch your struggle. Pray for the skill to outwit your obstacles and outperform your rivals. Match that skill against all the things you have learned falling down and getting back up and then, only then, will you taste the delicacy of wisdom.

We all believe that the opposite side of struggle is some earthly success. That my struggle ends when I get paid or my struggle ends when I get married to the person of my dreams. But those will be ripped from your hands if you have not filled yourself with the thoughts of wisdom. Proverbs 8:11 says it best

“For wisdom is better than rubies and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared unto it.

It goes on to say in verses 17-18:

“I love them that love me: and those that seek me early shall find me.
Riches and honor are with me; yea, durable riches and righteousness.

Wisdom is the opposite of struggle, not some expression of success. Wisdom is success. Some people say wisdom is knowing what to do with the information you receive; I don’t care how one defines it, I just know that when they get there they act differently. Many people believe they are wise, yet, their actions are foolish. That is not to say that wise people don’t make mistakes, but their actions taken as a whole will be different.

In closing, Balthasar Gracian famously said in his Art of Worldly Wisdom that one should, “think with the few and speak with the many.” What one should see is that, yes, there will be those that are incapable of wisdom, but the more invidious aspect is that even those that are “wise” will find themselves at odds with one another. Wisdom, especially that of this world, is an infinite a realm of consideration as that of folly, to engage others is dangerous to your own progression.

Thus, the conditions change, but the nature of man remains the same; tribalized, divided, and perennially conquerable.

But all that matter is conquering one’s struggle.

bryce

The Enlightened Way: Detachment

The Fallacy of Human Experience

We are an obscure planet in an obscure solar system on a distal arm of a massive yet obscure galaxy in an infinitely expanding universe.

Lets take a moment to reflect deeply on that fact. Your life is indeed a rat race of obligations, expectations, and interactions, some of which are more contentious than others, but in the grand scheme of things, you are absolutely miniscule. You are a piece of a larger cosmic production and whether you believe in a Divine being or not, this production is governed by rules and principles that supersede any day to day obligation you may feel.

In my opinion, people spend far too much time obsessing over themselves and over the human experience in general. Its seems that people are consumed with propinquity; things that are close must be of greater importance, however, its this mindset that constantly drives our world to brink of destruction. We are imbalanced in our understanding of existence and this causes us to become disoriented.

I cannot diminish the importance of human variation in expressing life. I cannot say that it is always prudent or plausible for people to disregard their natural proclivities and simply gaze at the stars. There are those among us that are susceptible to emotion variation, others who are susceptible to devices of the mind, and others, yet, who fall prey to the destructions of idle hands. The list goes on and on. We are all fundamentally different beings who place priorities on however we have come to develop.

But, this does not mean that the evident chaos of our world is necessary. It may be natural; since we are so varied as entities it only makes sense that impasses and divergence lead to complexity and persistent discord, however, that naturalness does not necessitate existence. We can, through cultivated thought and a stillness of spirit, begin to forge a prototype of a world at peace.

My proposition, to all of those developed enough to cast away pointless ego, is to realize that you are insignificant. Your opinions, your developments, your convictions are intrinsically worthless. Yes, you may, through the vehicle of reality, exert force on the natural world, but a compulsion to do so is resolutely futile. I am not promoting nihilism either! Man should be freed be this notion. You may choose to focus intensely on yourself and create an illusion of significance, but to do so really causes no greater benefit.

The anger that we feel when we are slighted, the frustrations we feel when things don’t go our way, the sadness we feel upon unrequited love are all examples of how our experiences can obfuscate an enduring peace that is possible.

This philosophy may seem radical, but it is the same equanimity of mind that is promoted by the Christian and Hindu faiths. Christianity says to cast your cares on The Lord for He is in control. He is big and you are small. Ecclesiastes even says to make your words unto God few because He exists so high above you. His supreme holiness renders your specifics obsolete. Hindu, especially that taught within Kriya Yoga, see that life is cosmic production and we can either choose to consume the delusion, MAYA, or we can choose to step away from it and enjoy the drama ourselves.

If you have no spiritual pathway to speak or you are an atheist, this changes nothing. The sheer immensity of the universe, the fact that there are stellar objects billions and billions of times larger and brighter than our sun whose light we can see now was produced several hundred million years ago should inspire the same humbling awe that an adherent to faith has for God.

When I am honest with myself, I don’t care about race relations, human rights, animal rights, politics, religion, business, or the economy. Although I am a black, Christian, business owner who votes independent, these are all negligible in my contemplations of being alive. I take very, very few things personal, I hold no grudges, I harbor no obsessive thoughts about this or that. I spend time marveling at the wonders of being alive and the intricate processes necessary to bring me to every nascent moment.

Up until recently, I needed people to think like me and I wanted synchronicity of thought. My conception of Objective Truth meant that deviations or interpretations from some ineluctable concepts were useless and eventualities of flawed beings. While this may be the case, I have learned to step outside of the tempestuous dimensions of human affairs and consider things of superior strata. I am no yogi or sage, but a young man who values things that endure.

Momentary human expression is micro and subject to wild variations per the dynamics of those involved, yet the massive universe, the creation of the Supreme Being Himself rages on in every direction until infinitude. I can never see my oscillations, as real and proximal as they are to me, as anything of consequence. I may feel fear, feel anger, feel depression, but these are passing fancies and I am quickly resolved.

Infinite Balance

What you create will be your ultimate success and your ultimate demise.

My belief is that being human fundamentally pivots on the ability to create meaning, especially concerning abstract concepts. This ability to create meaning is revealed in a myriad of different processes ranging from the things you find important, the things that trigger certain behaviors, and the concepts you contemplate the most. As you develop cognitively, emotionally, physically and so on, the meanings you create will evolve into standardized or codified actions you feel are “right”. This rightness does not necessitate ethics or morals, but instead, an individual’s satisfaction in the trajectory of their behavior. Many coutner-culturists understand that their actions support no known moral standard, however, their focus is not on morality, but on some other behavioral modifier such as freedom or power. As long as they are free or they are gaining influence, they feel they are doing things right.

I often find myself wondering what I actually want out of life. I don’t wish to understand the world because its nothing more than a derivation of human nature held together by the forces of the universe (or Divine forces if you’re spiritual). I don’t toil to understand human nature because for what its worth I’ve figured out what I need to and I’ve grown rather effective at interacting. This doesn’t mean I’m not still learning, but simply it isn’t a focal point of mine. I only have a nominal interest in money and even less interest in the type of influence associated with greed.

This inability to find some quantified or qualified goal goes back to the meaning that I’ve for so long associated myself with: being right by associating with true, incorrigible concepts.

I believe that whatever you create, whatever you come to codify or standardize, not only sets the stage for your pièce de résistance but also the formula for your ultimate demise. The inertness I often feel while trying to understand what I want out of life stems directly from the fact that I’ve created a deep meaning in finding something that exists outside of life. It may be laudable for me to seek substantive existential, Objective Truth; however, that Truth does not exist on our dimension. Thus, I am rendered inept by my own devices.

Lets say that you build a software that completely revolutionizes the personal computing industry. You have an enduring belief that all people’s should be connected and your software provides a platform for social networks and messaging exchanges. You begin standardizing your thoughts on the matter, championing a more interconnected world where information is free for everyone and access is denied to no one. I can unabashedly guarantee you that your beliefs will signal the rise of those that value privacy and “moderation” of virtual communication. They will proclaim that face-to-face interaction is superior and the virtual identities paraded on social media sites are farcical. And so on.

This is a tenuous example, but I hope you understand the overall point. Whatever system you establish, you indirectly establish its demise. By creating the doors to your beliefs, you also create the backdoor to its failure.

As most information does not exist as a binary system, you aren’t generally creating one demise. You are creating a myriad of them. As you fall more and more in line with your created meaning, you are establishing a wake of anti-meanings which exert equal and opposite forces in your environment. They may no be problematic today, tomorrow, or even in your lifetime, but your tilling of the soil created fertile grounds for the wake of your opposition.

This observation is most prevalent in “wise” axioms, aphorisms, and quotes. Have you ever noticed that so much “wisdom” fundamentally opposes some other “wisdom”? Things like “be yourself” are contrasted with “learning how to follow directions” and others of that ilk. We tell a child to express themselves, but then scold them when that expression falls outside of what we want. The focus on one aphorism eventually gives rise to the need for its opposite or else society becomes overweight and imbalanced.

Thus, the cosmic battle for balance rages on…

If we are the summation of our thoughts and the world is a summation of us interacting, then by complex transitive principles, the world is also a summation of our thoughts. Our thoughts are the eventualities of us attempting to create meaning and our actions are us bringing that meaning into our shared reality; the intrinsic value of our beliefs approaches infinity, it is so valuable individually that is possesses no worthwhile value to the collective.

If I were to have to make a point and willingly don the robe of insanity, I would say that the world is doing exactly what its supposed to. If you are championing or obstructing this cause or that, you are doing exactly what you are supposed to. If you are killing or you are bringing to life, you are doing exactly what you are supposed to. If you possess overwhelming ambition or suffer from complete lack of motivation, you are doing exactly what you are supposed to. If you were born in poverty or you were born in paltriness, you entered this world exactly as you were supposed to.

Life is radically fair, it will even itself out by providing fertile grounds for your opposition to grow. Humans may be subjective, foolish creatures, but we do not control this world, we merely create it. Life in its ruthless pursuit of balance monitors and evens, irrespective of the inhabitants. Thus societies may come and go, empires may rise an fall, good men may perish and may wicked men endure, but this constant WILL persist.

bryce

The Breath, The Notion, and The Thought

Every few months, a word or phrase gets lodged in my mind and I will ponder over it until I reach some understanding. 2011 was Wisdom and Patience, 2012 was about the Mind, 2013 has been dominated by Life’s Ambiguity and The UNreality of Existence. For the last few months a new term has taken root in my meditative soils, Uncertainty, and it has proven be quite the quandary for me. This term has acted as a sort of mental polymer between these vast topics, connecting and filling in the cracks for my grand philosophies.

Every philosopher has taken a concept and built empires around it. Immanuel Kant with his categorical imperative. Anaximander had The Apeiron. Ibn Rushd found unity between religion and philosphy. Paramhansa Yogananda fell in lockstep with Kriya Yoga. Musashi had the way of the sword.

Thinkers who brought meaning to their own universe through the meticulous study of one of its facets.

For myself, I have found meaning by examining the principles of uncertainty. If I were to go back in time and look at every single moment at which I found myself at a crossroads, they would all undeniably be instances where I was uncertain. This may not seem like much to anyone else, but for myself this is nothing short of groundbreaking. See, since childhood, I have been an extraordinarily deliberate individual; everything I found myself doing had a purpose. I was a concrete thinker, a pragmatist, and someone who preferred the diminition (if not complete eradication) of risk. Therefore, I was an amateur strategist before I even understood what strategy was.

I hated uncertainty; to me, there was always a way of knowing, if I couldn’t reason rationally then I would employ the superrationality of Christian spirituality. Therefore, I could always know or at least intuit the answers to any conceivable question.

As I progressed through college, faced with a myriad of obstacles and victories, I continued to observe my surroundings, the impetuses sustaining them, and subsequently my responses to all of their stimuli. I found myself contemplating people, emotions, love, God, science, and academia, trying to make sense of this hodgepodge of “things” that seemed to be so normal to everyone else. In neurology, RAS or Reticular Activation System, the brain begins to ignore a stimulus that is repeatedly presented, a phenomena known as habituation. For instance, even though you are still sitting on a chair or resting your shoulder against a wall while you read this, you are not consciously aware of it (well, at least until I just told you). The mind is an overwhelmingly complex mechanism. In the same way it can drown out the chair, many people cease thinking about regular occurrences such as love, emotions, or people…

We simply adjust or adapt to them.

I couldn’t do that.

Instead, I began connecting the dots from this situation and that, reading wholly into comments made by a certain kind of thinker and those contrasting with another. I constructed many mental scatter plots and attempted to fashion as many regression lines to help understand propensities and tendencies. I took my own failures and juxtaposed them against my successes to create cogent thought lines about what works and does not work.

What began to emerge were these highly subjective patterns that somewhat resembled one another but never fully repeated. The truly ponderous part was that most people did not see things that way. We understand that universality is mostly impossible, yet we are still trying to create these standardized methods of thinking and teach each other “the right way to do things”. We try to create these agreements (I talk about linearities later) so that we can all consistently trade information and relate to one another; the more effective the process, the more it “seems” to be the “right” way to do something…

Hell, I’ve been trying to teach people the “right” way to do things since I can remember.

But why are there no “rights” and “wrongs” outside of traditional morals and ethics (which are in and of themselves debatable)?

For the last 2 years I have considered this question in its every emanation. I put myself in others’ shoes and looked back on my own thoughts and actions, created decisional matrices, and continually underwent intense introspection; all the while, I had a piercing sensation that I wasn’t progressing any closer to my quarry.

Thats when it hit me, I couldn’t take my processes and expect identical results in someone else because life would not give them identical circumstances. Their life tracks were outrageously divergent from mine, they had not experienced the same things as me, even though we may be virtually identical to one another genetically, we are wildly divergent metaphysically.

These deviations from one another in the realm of choice, mixed in with the universal constant that is chance, create a potent brew of uncertainty, one of the major progenitors of the human race.

All the dot-connecting in the world could not change that fact.

So what then? Do we simply throw up our hands, say, “well life is not promised”, and “YOLO” our way through? Do we concede that life offers little to no constants and throw ourselves to fatalism? Perhaps a lesser mind find those to be a fitting practices and to which I will say “to each his own”. However, my understanding of the mind is that we are poignant co-creators in our life track, our living narrative, therefore, I can continually influence this world to help bring things into fruition.

I speak a lot about “linearities” which are agreements between people. The more people are involved in a linearity, a paradoxical trend arises: the agreement becomes stronger in the center, weaker towards the fringes and it becomes controversial as more and more are pushed towards the fringe. Just look at religion: Christianity as a theocracy flourished from the 4th century until the Enlightenment period in Europe, however, the more influential it grew, the more unstable it became because God, an intensely individuated understanding, cannot fathomably be universally agreed upon. As people began experiencing The Lord in various manners and through various worship methods, agreements were no longer tenable. Legislation is the same way: more and more people will agree that murder is wrong, however, given enough time and enough people, a crime of passion or a slaying in self-defense will arise, causing schisms along the formerly stark lines of morality and ethics.

When talking about “creating” one’s life track and forging their own robust existence, concrete thinkers will instantly go back to large linear agreements to challenge such a belief. You are a part of society, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, when have you ever seen God come down and do ______________. These large social agreements carry what I call “social inertia” and their influence over a populace is significant; there is no easy way of breaking them down.

However, social anythings are plastic, they are capable of being bent or broken, depending on the ingenuity of the thinker. As the thinker accretes more and more knowledge on the nature of being, he or she becomes adept at bursting through these so-called rules of a community. However, chance, uncertainty, and ambiguity will still be there, rearing their ugly heads.

You must stop seeing life as three-dimensional. That is an illusion so that your physical sensory organs can make sense of the world around it. Instead, see life as multivariate with dimensions occupying the same space. That is the best way for me to explain uncertainty and ambiguous concepts, it is why nothing in life can truly be known or understood because while you may be burrowing deep into one facet of understanding, there are infinite others that are just a valid exerting force on the world around you.

The perennial strategist understand this, he or she then doesn’t concern themselves with trying to forge some consistent, “universal” understanding of life, but opens themselves up to many different ways of viewing their life track and the life tracks of others. Chance is the one thing that they can’t control, so they prepare themselves for as many potentialities and eventualities as possible, deftly dealing with them in the moment. There are no books, no theorems, no “ways of thinking” that enmesh a true strategist, he or she is as fluid as the wind, employing whatever and whenever they can at any moment to pull them closer to their perceived goal.

A perfect strategist has no goal, has no destination, has no purpose, for those are all dangerously concrete; they do not mire themselves with such frivolities. No, the superior strategist has nothing more than The Breath and The Notion which precipitate The Thought. The Breath is his willingness to engage and The Notion is the willingness to progress. The Thought then arises as instantaneous will.

They will themselves into being, they harmonically move with their environment, for as co-creators they trust that the environment reflects their deepest needs.

Thus, fate nor choice, destiny nor decision, truly concern the strategist, for the two are one and the same.

In a world of uncertainty, a place of extant ambiguity which nothing can be truly known, the strategist focuses wholly on the moment before the present, poised and ready, ever vigilant for the next move.

bryce

Kingmakers: A Practical Guide to Strategy and Tactics

Few people have a grasp on strategy. What they do understand are plans, contingencies, and buffers, but none of these address the true cruxes of strategy. Moreoever, many people are tacticians, they can understand short term maneuvers because they generally require little timing investments. Many of us become master tacticians when putting out immediate fires, rent is due, the car broke down, you suddenly have to figure out how to do that project you forgot was due tomorrow. These pressing matters require the type of strategizing that most everyday people confuse with “strategy” as a whole. I’m going to give you a quick crash course on how to make both of these work for you.

There is one major obstacle to strategy: life. Life can be thought of as an aggregation of perceptions, after all, perception is indeed reality. Therefore, as one navigates through the ambiguous and ever changing waters of life, they find themselves fighting the quintessence of reality, other people, in order to get what they want or need. Strategy as a whole is the ability to see beyond the short choices and make long term preparations for the sake of a grand objective; most humans lack the fortitude, the nastiness, the diplomacy, or the subterfuge necessary to hone in on such goals.

No most of us are tossed and turned in the turbulent tides of everyday life.

We have children, jobs, and bills. We have dependents, creditors, and social norms. We have immediate wants and needs that are far more urgent and forceful than the dreams we have for 20 years.

So strategy very quickly gives way to what I call ‘short-cons’ or short terms plans made as concessions to a relentlessly demanding life.

Don’t misunderstand me, short term plans have their place in the order of life; there is no man that can go through his years without having to make maneuvers whose duration lasts only a few hours, days, or weeks. However, for those of whom subscribe to loftier goals in life, a strategic understanding of the world around them is imperative.

Humans are preprogrammed to congregate in majorities because there is predictability in numbers; there is cohesion in practices that are performed by more than just yourself. Therefore, many short term moves, tactics, are the eventualities of greater social underpinnings. For example, if you are in need of money, you will find yourself following widely understood paths, maybe you’ll YouTube Donald Trump’s real estate moves or get coerced into some multilevel marketing firm. Maybe you’ll go the understood nefarious route of drug dealing; these are all easily conceivable actions that one can take.

Tactics tend to be concrete, whereas strategy frequently flirts with the realms of ambiguity and possibility…

Thus strategic foresight is the capacity of an individual to straddle several long term tactical routes, while compressing and reconciling all the potentialities one may encounter along the way.

It is not so much the rejection of any particular concrete path, but the ability to organize these paths, then make educated models or scenarios about what may or may not happen. This modeling, over time, allows the strategist to spot trends and develop much more elegant paths that may have not been readily apparent before. The faster this occurs, the more powerful the results, the more dexterous that strategist is.

My life has been a unfolding genesis of accidental strategy and understandable tragedy. I was gifted not necessarily with excessive book smarts, but a certain intuition, a certain “finger-feel”, that made me perfect for strategic focuses. I understood power structures inherently, I knew where to strike and with whom an alliance was critical. I found myself non longer having to fight my battles alone, but backed up by unexpected mercenaries who respected my person. The funny thing is, I was always approaching things from the tactical standpoint. A concrete thinker, I was from a family who was always facing financial problems, whose bad habits I inherited, and whose knack for solving these monetary quagmires was always short termed and never a true solution.

Thus, these two parallel tracks became apparent to me: the perennial strategist and the emergency tactician, competing for cognitive supremacy.

In a world dominated by the mindsets of other human beings, the hardest aspect of strategy is the short term pain one must endure to see through to the end. Tactics are the mainstay of the masses because they deliver instant gratification, while strategy forces one to undergo the most astringent of crucibles. A bulletproof strategy will cost you friends, especially friends that hold concrete ideals like time and money supreme.

Time and money, are mere constructs to govern the behavior of humans, so what do I plan the game for? Power.

The goal of the adroit strategist is never time nor money, but power. Influence. Time can never be possessed and money is cheap, but the ability to have one’s ideals and needs met is timeless. This is why debt is such an incredible instrument in finance. Yes, securities are important, cash, stocks, bonds, and so forth are of the utmost necessity, but having someone else possess those while you hold the value is king. It is a strategy of psychological, financial, AND social banking, as opposed to something more unidimensional such as money.

When someone owes you something, you possess more power than you could possibly imagine.

But, like I said, that is a part of this game that few ever truly grasp.

You are currently a part of another person’s strategy whether you like it or not. Strategy is amorphous, it has no rules, no parameters, unless agreed upon by all the parties and even those rules are flexible. If one is a strategist worth his merit, he is capable of making moves on several perceptive levels and implementing unconventional tactics in the process.

Make no mistake, strategists WILL fail. I have my fair share of creditors, personal and professional, who are not happy with me. You WILL fail. You WILL piss people off and cause damage to your fragile networks.

What separates a strategist from a tactician is what they do in the storm. If he changes course to address the immediate needs, he is a tactician. If he honors his agreements by bullishly sticking to his previous claims, he’s probably a strategist with some tricks up his sleeve.

Strategy does not denote corruption or a lack of integrity. Strategists are not inherently con artists. But they are people whose chessboard is substantially larger than yours. Unless you choose to become an opponent, it is best to let their plans unfold; in the end every king has had an advisor make him immensely more powerful.

bryce

Frontiership: Playbook for the Pioneer

It is not easy being the first at anything. This is compounded by the fact that its even harder being the second at anything. Most people laud the pioneer, but forget that the first follower is taking an equally huge risk putting his faith on the viability of the pioneer’s idea. Regardless, it isn’t fun waiting for sunrise when it comes to new concepts. This creates one of the great paradoxes of humankind, the need for change counterbalanced by resistance to new things. New challenges our natural comfort levels because it aims out our ego. All of us suffer from a level of hubris, we pridefully believe we have many of the answers. Out of that comes openness to the idea of change, but resistance to its actual occurrence…

As I have been virtually screaming from the hilltops for the last few weeks, life is an illusion of the most deceptive sorts. Reality is best described as a collective of best guesses. Normality is best described as the average of those best guesses as agreed to by a specific population. The problem is, of course, that most people do not question what “reality” or “normality” are, they don’t see its deconstruction as useful. However, those with pioneer minds see that the very fabric of reality must be worked and reworked while trying to make their reality an accepted reality.

In 2011 I introduced my discourse on a concept called “antinomy” [which I incorrectly called antimony for several months. Oops]. Antimony as defined by Webster is: 1) opposition between one law, principle, rule, etc., and another.
2. Philosophy . a contradiction between two statements, both apparently obtained by correct reasoning.

A few posts ago I discussed communicative breakdowns due to “incommensurability” and “non-fungibility”. Antimony takes this to the next logical platform: individual arguments each make perfect sense, yet compared to one another they are contradictory….

Human cognition is nonlinear. Human everything is nonlinear. Thus antinomies appear everywhere when looking at our interaction.

Our evolution a blaring example of this. The only thing constant in life is change, yet most of us are resistant to change. Antinomy. We actually like reality, its comfortable to persist in our little bubbles and therefore, we don’t have a problem with believing reality is real.

I work with one of the larger districts in Southern California and let me tell you, it is a shit show. The politics at the campus level mirrors the politics at the district level. Every person protects their little piece of cheese with ravenous effort, regardless of how trivial their post is. The whole system is in desperate need of overhaul, everyone understands it and most are for it, yet change will probably never come. Most of them think that the necessary change is a higher budget, erroneously believing that more money will equal more effectiveness. That is their reality although it wouldn’t be more than a bandaid solution on a fully broken leg.

The problem for the pioneers of anything, be it culture, business, education — whatever one goes a’pioneering in — is that you must constantly fight one perfectly logical reasoning while attempting to instill another. It is logical to believe that money could solve the educational system, but a more potent logical framework sees that many of the issues are in the policies, the abject rigidity, and the out of touch faculty present on every site. The culture of urban education is broken, the kids are benefactors of this grave reality.

But how does one go about fixing such problems? Most pioneers don’t have have the clout to create any real traction and these ambiguous issues are tall orders….

The first task of the pioneering entrepreneur is to begin practicing patience. The world has been broken for a long time and it will always have things that need to be fixed. The problem is this: most of us become pioneers so that we can win the resources, instead of taking the time to get the resources to win. In other words, most of us are trying to become successful so that we can make money, instead of making money so that we can be successful. HUGE DIFFERENCE.

As a pioneer, you MUST take the time to develop your resources. I mean hustle, create smaller cash flows, build an extensive network, partake in meaningful educational pursuits, and lay a foundation before you do anything else. Winning comes after the resources.

How do you win the resources in a world that purports it wants change yet mostly likes things just the way they are?

Here are 3 guidelines to building up your human capital resources in a schizophrenic world:

1) Remember: Humans are human.

We have the same basic needs and we have the same basic wants. The key to winning is getting people out of defensive mode caused by our incredulous nature.

Here are some tactics to lower the defenses of unsuspecting consumers and get them to act human again: Shock and Awe. Hit them with something that momentarily consumes their perception, then advance while they are still fixated (or frightened). In other words, do something risky!!! Prototypical Information. Telling people things they don’t know that they don’t know is an easy way to captivate an audience. You are bound to come across know-it-alls, find their ignorance and attack it relentlessly. Shut Up and Listen. We pioneers spend too much time trying to convince people we’re right when the best way to create a following is to actually listen. Crazy, right?

Provided that this is actually my job, I’m going to stop this section here. I can’t give away game for free. If you are really interested in any of this, I’m here to help.

2) Trojan horses always work better than sieges.

Most of us spend our time trying to beat our information down the throats of those around us. A more efficient and effective means of persuasion and ultimate conversion is the “foot in the door” strategy. Don’t outright disagree with something, agree with principles or components, gain trust, and then offer subtle suggestions as to what you’d do differently. Once you’re in then feel free to completely eviscerate it, by then it should be too late.

3) Relationships mean more than anything

Building profitable relationships is primacy in the world of frontiership. The suavest of the slick talkers aren’t concerned with competing with you or I: they simply align themselves with powerful allies. Relationships don’t open doors, they are the doors. Part of breaking down the human resistance to change is to be an ally of a person people trust. Duh, bryce.

Okay, okay common knowledge. The trick is understanding that relationship comes before the pitch. This is where patience comes in. I know most of us are chomping at the bit trying to get our idea off the ground, but its imperative that you build then sell later. Make connections not because you need something, but because every ally is a tool. The best jobs, the best contracts, the best opportunities are more often than not presented first to people that are known within a network. Get prepared to buy some drinks, buy some dinners, play a few rounds of golf, or head to a yoga class.

You know this right? Then go make friends. Stop networking, start socializing.

Hot tip: most women like to hear your story prior to your pitch. Feel free to open up a bit, have some nice anecdotes ready. Order a nice glass of wine. Chianti’s are a good choice. Men are more about the bottom line. Order a Whiskey Sour and tell them how much they’re going to make or how its going to improve their life.

These are basic, basic, basic steps to winning. Frontiership is about winning is it not? Why else try new things, because the old things suck.

bryce

Secret to Success

There is

no

secret to success.

Anyone that tells you otherwise is lying or trying to sell you something.

I am indeed selling something, but instead of buttering you up with fantasies I’m going to give you a healthy dose of reality.

Success can be grasped in an infinite number of ways, there is no formula, there is no special algorithm.

BUT, successful people are able to see key things that allow them to attain a level of progression, lets call this strategic foresight.

I’m going to introduce 4 personality types:

Unconventional

The unconventional person takes what is already being done and reworks it in a way that is fresh to the observer’s senses. They are not concerned about the status quo’s, those are social normalities and “safe havens” for people who are risk averse. I hear almost on a daily basis “___% of millionaires did so by buying real estate”. I’m not refuting that statement, its definitely true, but an unconventional person would take that real estate process and work it into a means that truly defines them.

What the unconventional understands is that most people are in the business of guessing at “best practice”, then turn around and perpetuate these ideas as Gospel truths, when the reality is they are just as subject to change as anything else. Orthodoxy and convention have their place and they can work for a myriad of people, but for those truly interested in leaving their mark on the world, doing something commonly understood in an uncommon way is the shortest path to their personal and professional dreams.

Be warned, unconventional pathways will attract serious criticism. Its the student in high school saying they don’t want to go to college, they’d prefer to see the world and surf. Detractors will pounce on the unconventional like he or she personally offended them. All kinds of history, stats, and anecdotal evidence will be presented as reasons it won’t work. You better damn sure be committed to this path or you will do nothing but affirm their doubts.

Example: David Karp, Tumblr

Ravenous

There is hungry. Then there is ravenous. A hungry person gets up at 9 and makes phone calls. A ravenous person is up at 5 prepping and knocking on doors by 7:30. A hungry person makes 75 more calls a month than required. The ravenous person is still making calls as I type this post.

The ravenous is the man or woman that is truly undaunted, completely unimpeded by fear. They have absolutely no care in the world for people’s opinions of them and they will bust down every door until their goal has been met. They have a voracious appetite for success and their preferred means is ruthless tenacity.

You will know a ravenous by the energy they possess, the almost wild eyed look on them, and their dedication to whatever project or goal they are pursuing. Whether it be in the conventional corporate world or on a more unorthodox path, they are forces of nature. Period.

Example: Michael Jordan

Fastidious

The fastidious person is the conventional person. They went to the right school and got the right job. They are supportive of the status quo and have adroitly figured out how to operate within it.

There is nothing wrong with being fastidious, most of them started making the “right” decisions early on in life and don’t need much creativity when it comes to forging their path. The fastidious is smart and resourceful, willing to work hard and contribute to the greater milieu in which they are working.

If you are a fastidious, get the job, pay your dues, and rise through the ranks. Do not be swayed by those that tell you that you are boring or selling yourself short, just make sure that you understand unconvention must sometimes be employed as well. If so, find someone that offsets your natural proclivities for order and go from there.

To be honest, the world spends most of its time trying to prep us to be the fastidious, hence why we have so many problems. Any time society attempts to standardize information or best practice, people get marginalized and the greatest room for growth appears on the periphery or unconventional pursuits. If we were to all go the route of non-convention, then the room for growth would be under the more sober minded fastidious route.

Example: Indra Nooyi CEO of PepsiCo

Clairvoyant

The clairvoyant is an interesting breed because they are almost always unconventional. The difference between the two is that the clairvoyant has the expressed purpose of altering the perception of the conventional mindset. Let me further explain.

The world is segmented along various axes and planes, but the most frequently used axis is age. The older a person is, the more experience they have, the more expertise they are said to have, the more set in their ways. The problems for most young entrepreneurs or business owners revolve around the fact that they have very limited experience and they are continually told what they should do. The clairvoyant will turn around and and seemingly embrace the advice as a ploy only to alter the perception of the person in the end.

In Robert Green’s 33 Strategies of War he discusses the ‘horns of a dilemma’ as implemented by the Zulu warriors fight with the British and Hannibal’s campaign against the Romans. Hannibal’s deceptive techniques earn him a seat in the clairvoyant’s hall of fame because of how smoothly he trapped his enemy’s. He put his weaker soldiers (usually from the captured nations serving Carthage) in the middle and his fiercest warriors (led by his brothers Hasdrubal and Mago) on the flanks, so that as the middle inevitably fell, the flanks then surrounded the enemy on all sides. In other words, as the Roman’s penetrated deeper into the Carthaginian army, they were in fact racing deeper into a death trap.

This strategy must be at the employ of the clairvoyant. As you find yourself contending with people who think they know more than you, you must let them believe they do, you must let them believe that are teaching you. The further they push, the more leverage you have to bring up your unconventional thoughts.

This strategy is perfect for those who are tackling industries with long held beliefs about the best ways to do things. Business consulting gigs, new forms of dance or creativity — any attempts at reforming outdated constructs — must be done this way or much energy will be wasted fighting with people who have more power and respect than you.

Example: Napoleon Bonaparte

Conclusion

These four personality tracks are a drop in the pan of the different routes that one can choose. Truthfully, many of us are a hybrids of two, three, or maybe even all four, depending on the industry we are entering and the passion we have for the work.

Furthermore, we must always remember that any information put out in the world is based on humans and thus subject to radical change. The only reason why the clairvoyant or unconventional have any real advantages these days is because our society is still rather standardized. As more and more entrepreneurs enter the scene and more people search for ways to shift the paradigm, the most fertile soil will be back in the realms of the fastidious track and so on.

None of them are right, none of them are wrong. The bottom line is what works for you. Furthermore, the universal underpinning of all HIGHLY successful people — not the rich kid who inherited money and doesn’t do shit — but a true HSP (highly successful person) is a work ethic that never ceases. They may not be as aggressive as the ravenous person, but they fall and get up over and over again. They wake up everyday and get after it even when their spirits are low. They grow daily, paying close attention to their personal and professional evolution. They are authentic, even if that authenticity is being a horrible person (enter Captain Jack Sparrow’s speech on a dishonest man). They absorb information like a sponge and learn to operate under any circumstance. The clairvoyant’s power isn’t in the fact that he’s an arrogant child prodigy, but in his ceaseless quest for a better way.

Hope this girls some of you a better understanding of yourself and where you want to go next.

bryce

The Illusions of the Present

Time is the most pervasive imaginary construct currently known to man. All of us use it, all of us need it, because it is an organization of behavior. With an agreed upon organization of behavior we are able to collaborate and coordinate any activity.

But it is still an illusion…

The greatest problem I have as a thinker is that my mind seems hellbent on processing an inordinate amount of information in a very short period of time. Information, however, is derived from many different parts of our existence: some have spiritual origins, other mental, and so forth. Furthermore, there are millions of variables influencing the data we are downloading at any given time, making my job as a seeker of knowledge that much harder.

But time. When thinking about chronology, the passing of time, one cannot help but thinking about spatiotemporal concepts as well. Space and Time. It is for these reasons that we are obsessed with traveling back or forward in time. Can we travel “back in time”, theoretically yes, but I am of the persuasion that we would not end up at a “place” a space, because this world is built on the profoundly imaginary.

Things are not “real” or set in stone, you cannot go back the space that you were in 3 years ago even if advanced physicists figured out a way to back to the time.

You still with me? Good. I’m going to switch gears just a bit, please keep all of these concepts in mind.

Every morning I start out the same way, I read through my business account’s Twitter feed to see whats going on in the markets/business world. Every day seems to be the EXACT same thing: chickens running around with their heads cut off. For those of you that follow the economy, you know that America has enjoyed one of the best half-years in over a decade. The Dow Jones Industrial broke 15,000, the S&P 500 broke 1600 and we had the longest string of high opening Tuesdays in quite some time. The jobs reports came back positive. Durable goods, non-factory jobs. On and on and on… Yet everyday the analysts predicted doomsday. Every morning omens of misfortune. From Ben Bernanke (chairman of the Federal Reserves) quantitative easing regime to Obama’s economic principles, the talking heads continually predicted terrible things.

Most of them have been wrong.

But why? If we are enjoying unprecedented success, why is it that our ability to enjoy the present and make accurate predictions is inveterately off? I am a finance aficionado, not an expert. My opinions on the market do not matter. What I’m pointing to is mankind’s inability to make consistent concrete decisions in the present because of the sheer amount of information available, thus what we know to be the “present” is an accumulation of best guesses and projections, although we buy into the illusion that it is a concrete representation of things.

The present is the most alluring illusion known to man, fitting perfectly with the most imaginary construct, time. The present is a codified timeframe, thus it acts in accordance with the chronological illusion.

I know many of you still don’t understand what I mean by “illusion” and are ready to throw me in a straitjacket but allow me to explain. I understand all of this intuitively and many of my peers do as well, so it is a bit hard for me to explain, especially to someone used to concrete logic. My saving grace is that I am a staunch concrete thinker, rather rigid might I add, so this contradictory ambivalence allows me to exist between the worlds of concretion and imaginative.

Okay, ridiculous philosophy aside, let me explain the imaginary world we live in. Nothing is “real” because everything can be changed. Nothing is “real” because its origins can be found and resolutely refuted. The present is not “real” in that fact that it can be interpreted many different ways and produce many different outcomes. What we tend to rule as “real” is what I called the “aggregate reality” or the reality of the masses. It is a metaphysical body of agreement that many people can see as plausible or understandable. The very nature of life is fluid, a constantly bending, convoluted series of contradictions, therefore, man has had to organize it in such a manner that many different people could functionally use it. Thus time, money, race, and so one were contrived. They were means to collective ends, not concrete ends themselves.

Thats all fine and dandy right? What the fuck does any of this mean, bryce? It means that all you know can be readily made useless. All that you know is probably useless already. It means that everything on TV, everything on social networks, everything on this blog is both true and untrue depending on how, when, and why you look at it. It means that with the appropriate mindset you can “change the present” thus “changing the future”. The one thing we cannot change is the past, for it is a dead illusion whose effects are felt through the various psychosomatic channels.

My take home message: the present offers entirely too much information for the common human being to ever really know anything. Thus at any given time you are looking at man’s best guess about how or what things should be. All of these best guesses taken together comprise society and the global order, what we know to be “reality”. You as a free moral agent and a potential catalyst for change must, must, must understand that the reality we are living in is not the end all, it is not real, it is not “right”, it is not anything.

This information is boundless in potential for use. Struggling to get over a breakup? Realize its not the only reality you can utilize. You can go on without them. Struggling to start that business? Create a reality in the minds of your consumers by communication. Need motivation because you feel like the odds are against you? Understand the reality of those odds can be altered and you can be the victor. Struggling to find the meaning of life? Appropriate an elegant reality and begin to question the universe, question God, question the very nature of being. As a Christian I have used this to not regress further from God, but closer to Him. I understand things not as a limited human, but as a boundless spirit who sees the folly of this illusory world.

This shit is not easy to swallow or easy to practice at first, but once you truly understand that the present — this entire world — is a stage for your triumphant production, you’ll begin operating on levels higher than you believed imaginable.

You Too, Can Be Awesome

I recently made the decision that graduate school — business school — is the next major hurdle for me. Having scaled the Kilimanjaro that is private undergraduate schooling and currently scaling the Everest that is entrepreneurship, I am ready to attack the Mount Whitney that is B-School. Given that I am a bit of an elitist and a perennial perfectionist, I’ve set my sights on Harvard and its 10% acceptance rate.

Yippee.

However, I am rather stress-free while thinking about this Herculean task, not because I am a wunderkind but because I tend to look at life much, much, much differently than the average person.

There is nothing that I want to do that I cannot. As in there is nothing on this planet that I cannot accomplish once I set my mind to it. Peering at the world from the inside out, I am a sheer force of nature and I have every intention of completing all of my dream tasks. Ivy League business school included.

Why do I have such dauntless confidence?

Is it because I was born this way? Fuck no.

I was a scrawny (still kinda am) kid with nappy hair and big ass glasses. I didn’t think I was shit except for the second or third name on a list that was organized in alphabetical order.

What changed was my senior year in high school. I literally did everything I wanted to do and I never looked back. I chose one school: Loyola Marymount. Got accepted. I chose one girl: started dating her. The following summer I needed a new car and a bunch of other things: secured them. I needed a new job: got hired during the interview. The following summer I wanted to play college ball without having touched an organized game since middle school: got a scholarship to play D2 ball.

I willed my way through college tuition fiascos. I willed my way through a major a hated. I willed my way into the seed money I needed to start my first business. When my car broke down 2 months before graduation I walked 3 miles to and 3 miles home from school everyday. I crossed the graduation stage and came into my first high net worth client. I willed my way into a Marina Del Rey penthouse. I willed my way into my contract with the Long Beach Unified school district. I concocted creative strategies to get myself and my business partner in front of C-Suite executives. I willed myself through 12 months of absolute nightmare professional and personal circumstances. And I’m willing myself through the process of picking up the pieces…

Is all of this because I’m just an awesome person? Fuck no.

I see my life like a movie. Not any old kind of move. Fast and the Furious. Rambo. James Bond. Unrealistic suspense and action movies. I look at life as one enormous stage through which one has a million and one chances to prove themselves and do over until the moment they pass on to the next world. I live and I live very fucking hard. Pure, unbridled, relentless living.

At the end of the day, the world is what you make of it. Cliche saying if there ever was one. But I sincerely pose this statement as a mantra for you to live be. Your life is what you make of it. If you choose to exist on the existential sidelines, watching the Mark Zuckerberg’s of the world succeed, saying, “man I wish I had a mind like his”, you are doing yourself a great, great disservice. If you are afraid of failing to the point of paralysis, you are doing yourself a great disservice.

Life is about living, my friends. Living abundantly. Not everyone is going to go to Harvard. Not everyone is going to build a billion dollar company. Hell I have fantasies that I know will probably never come true but they are because I have my priorities lying elsewhere.

When you start to really put your mind to this crazy little hooker we call living, you’ll be surprised how much you can achieve. How “elite” you can be. There are so many “elite” posts in the world, you are bound to become one of few at something. So go ahead, put on your black tuxedo or your little black dress and prepare to zip line out a 44th floor window on some James Bond 007 tip.

bryce