Take a Simple Idea and Take It Seriously

None of us sees the world in quite the exact same manner.

Thankfully, otherwise things would be boring.

We are all the mix of our natural inclinations, our environment, and our experiences.

I am reminded of that when I see other creators that have arrived at similar conclusions as I have had in the pursuit of the best way to improve one’s life.

We would agree on something, but our own experiences getting there would vary, so their advice is different than mine.

And this makes a lot of sense, because we’re different people, with different life paths.

So the reader will then either relate to the other creator’s work, or mine, depending on who they are, and their life path (or to another creator altogether.)

It means we all build a set of lessons hanging around in the background of our mind that control how we see things and how we move about in the world.

If you had burned your hand on the stove, you will have a trauma, which will make you very wary of touching the stove again, at least when it’s hot.

One of my central lessons that I talk about often is the idea of attention and how where you allocate it defines your perception of reality.

The reason that one lodged so deep in me is that I once radically changed what I let into my attention for a long stretch of time, and I trace a real change in my actions back to that period. Basically I brainwashed myself unknowingly for my own benefit.

So what does that idea look like taken seriously?

If each thing that enters my attention builds my reality, then I have to filter everything through one question: what do I want my reality to look like? And then I feed my attention to those things and starve the rest.

My desired reality certainly doesn’t look like negativity, depression, pessimism, passivity. That naturally means that doomscrolling, politics, gossip, dumb negative people, all need to be erased, replaced with creation, smart inspirational people, learning, health.

Me defining this through attention is where it might differ to someone else, they might have lived the same thing, but would have tied the result to a change of identity, or some law of attraction/manifestation stuff.

Would they be wrong? If their path leads to the same change?

Probably not. If the story they told themselves got them to move, then it did its job.

These lessons we carry, our own private explanations for why our life went the way it did, they harden into the mental models we run everything through.

I had a period when I studied the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet. Bezos, Musk, Hormozi, etc. I watched a bunch of podcasts from each of them.

What shocked me about them, is how they repeated the same stories and the same ideas over and over again in every interview, years apart. What the hell was this? A PR stunt? Had they been trained to say the same things in interviews to not incriminate them or make people hate them?

If you read Bezos’ shareholder letters or listen to a few of his interviews, you notice he’s been circling the same few ideas for 20 years. It’s the same with Musk. It’s a small set of principles, repeated for two decades, in nearly the same words.

And yeah, if those few ideas are the exact things that got them where they are, why would they ever drop them? They found what works for them and they never let go.

Leaders are supposed to be the best teachers, and this Hormozi quote is central to all this: “We need to be reminded more than we need to be taught.”

This means you remind, remind, remind the basics of what is most important over and over again. Because people forget and get lost into distractions.

That’s true focus, staying with the same mental models for decades, and conquering your particular field with them.

When I look at Hormozi in recent podcasts, what strikes me are his new ideas. Hormozi is a learning machine, he is still on the path and adding new stuff. Bezos and Musk are at their apex and riding a wave that is locked in, because it works and it got them to the top of their field.

Hormozi lately talks more about pain (courage being the first trait he’d want to teach his future son), about the meaning of words, about utility as his central philosophy. He built himself his own logical dictionary to think and communicate more clearly, and it’s masterful to watch.

I relate to this a lot.

I see this in my writing, how it evolved over 100 articles published. I’ve started to veer off from consumption and passivity, towards action and doing.

My pillars are still attention/focus, learning, leaving herd thinking/consensus, uncovering your fire to reach your potential. But you would notice they have increasingly evolved towards pure action and doing as their primary function.

None of those pillars were handed to me finished. I found them by thinking about ideas, trying them in the real world and dropping the ones that didn’t hold up.

If you haven’t found a wave (idea) that you can surf, you need to keep trying new waves until you find it, ride it all the way, then look for another. If the wave never stops, like for Musk and Bezos, then there is no reason to hop off of it. And that’s the ultimate goal, finding those truest waves that will lead you to where you want to go.

This is taking a simple idea, and taking it seriously.

In the meantime, the way to notice better waves is to seek truth, and not be loyal to the waves you’re on.

Again because this is extremely important and you might not have taken this simple idea seriously: Don’t have any loyalty to ideas, only have loyalty towards truth.

This is what Karl Popper speaks of when he says that everything is a theory waiting to be replaced by a truer theory. Everyone thought physics were solved by Newton, until Einstein found a truer theory. That’s until someone else comes and finds a truer theory.

Your own ideas work the same way. Whatever you believe hardest right now is just the best theory you’ve got, standing until a truer one shows up.

Present you can’t fathom that because you’re on the wave having fun, and maybe you wouldn’t even realize that this wave is barely moving, or taking you to the wrong place.

So how do you find the good waves without burning years riding dead ones?

This is the whole game: your ability to find the few ideas that will sit in your head right now and let you move forward, and then take them seriously enough to build your whole life around them.

The trouble is these ideas are slippery while they’re stuck in your head. You can feel one is there without being able to say it clearly.

Writing is the best tool to uncover them. You put a thought down on something outside your head, and now you can look at it, turn it around, sharpen it.

Especially when you write it to teach it to someone else, you start understanding it more yourself, because you can’t hide behind a vague feeling anymore.

Writing lets us take our thoughts out of our heads and come back to them later, which is why it beats a conversation that’s gone the second it’s over. And now with AI you’ve got this on steroids, because you have something that can do the back and forth with you, push on the idea, hand it back sharper (when it’s not too busy ass kissing.)

But writing only uncovers these ideas, it doesn’t create them.

And reading is the same. It helps you make sense of something you’ve already experienced and just like writing allows you to uncover it. There is truly a cheatcode in absorbing what it took someone years to learn in an afternoon.

Additionally, reading can unlock ideas that you can seek to try out for yourself in the real world.

But it’s worthless if you stop there.

You make an idea truly yours by living it. You try it out in the real world, it either works or it burns you, and now it’s welded into you because there’s pain attached to it and a story you can point at. The lesson itself was never really the valuable part. What you keep is the pain around it, the experience, the story you walk away with.

The idea you only read and never act on stays on the surface, and you’ve forgotten it in a week. The one you lived goes down into the background of your mind and starts running your actions without you noticing, the same way burning yourself on the stove does.

And this is what almost everyone gets wrong. We’re drowning in information, everyone is reading and watching and taking notes, and almost nobody changes. The ideas aren’t the problem. They stay ideas, sitting there unlived, and an unlived idea has never changed anyone.

That’s what it means to take a simple idea and take it seriously.

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