A need to “prove oneself” to internalized authority figures leads to things like climbing conventional status ladders, or staying in an unhappy marriage, or piling up as much money as possible to preserve the appearance of having “made it”.

What motivated Esther to do things like take a receptionist job at a film company, pick up her life and move to San Francisco, and risk her savings on her startup was something far more personal and idiosyncratic: a conception of the interests she wanted to explore, the people she wanted to meet, the products she wanted to create, the life she envisioned and wanted to build for herself—and, yes, the proof that she really could count on herself to do it.

This is super inspiring on so many levels.

It seems like life becomes a little more palatable once you figure out who you are and start leaning into that.

So yes, you can build yourself a life like Sam Hinkie’s; or you can doggedly pursue your passion for a single idea, like Kati Kariko; or you can follow your curiosity where it leads and then “connect the dots in retrospect,” like Steve Jobs; or you can master a complex skillset that allows you to provide for a vital human need, be it via medicine or accounting or sports or food preparation or software development; or you can be an artist, or a craftsman, or a homemaker, or a Renaissance (wo)man, or a community-builder, or any of the countless forms and combinations of well-lived lives that have been and have yet to be conceived. 

Choose with the knowledge that almost any choice is better than a default on choosing, and that most choices (with some obvious exceptions) are two-way doors. 

But choose with full awareness that what you’re choosing, what you’re building, is a life; your life. It’s never just “this moment,” or “this job”, or “this relationship”; it’s a point on your timeline, an inextricable part of this one precious, singular span of existence you get to design. So if you find yourself conflicted between “present you” and “future you”, the solution is not to sacrifice either one to the other; it’s to solve the underlying design problem.

Pairs nicely with this line from Rush’s “Freewill” which often drops into my head:

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Despite the wealth of research and clinical insight that psychologists have accumulated over the past century, there is still no unified theory of how, when, or why therapy works. Instead, the field's knowledge is scattered across hundreds of particular "schools of therapy" that largely talk past each other, despite their many common elements.

Among other issues, this makes it frustratingly hard to know what to look for in a therapy or therapist, or what strategies to use when undertaking one's own self-improvement.

To address this problem, psychotherapy researchers have been working to distill the principles of change found across many therapeutic approaches. Partly building on their work, and partly bringing my own philosophical lens to it, I've proposed that we can go a step further and articulate two fundamental assumptions implicitly shared by every effective therapy:

1. that therapy’s core aim is to help people exercise more agency over their lives;
2. that people exercise agency primarily through the pursuit and application of working knowledge.

This was one of those articles I had to read through a couple of times so I could breathe it all in.

As someone trying to do the hard work myself, I can say that it took knowledge from multiple different sources to begin to grasp the concepts that I needed to get through my own struggles.

This appears to be a fairly standard human experience. My daughter is going into third grade now, and it's fascinating to see what her math assignments look like. It's a lot easier to get a grasp on addition when you are given a bevy of different tricks and techniques to ultimately internalize the concept.

Can't wait for Dr. Gorlin's book to come out!

So then I asked him: what kind of VC does he actually want on his cap table (that is, owning a portion of his company)? What would be true of the sort of investor who really gets him and resonates with what he’s building?

The same question applies here as on a first date, I pointed out: do you want them to fall in love with you, or with a fake version of you that you now either have to maintain—at the expense of the person you actually are and want to be—or else face irreconcilable conflict and disapproval when you finally drop the facade?

You want to reach the investors in the room who want to flame-spot audacious and idealistic young upstarts like you; who’ve staked their careers and reputations on the thesis that the world needs more of just the kind of company you’re building; who resonate so hard with your story and are so wowed by your talent that they’ll be willing to invest in, nurture, and protect your agency as a founder.

One can of course relate to money in pathological ways. For those whose standard of value resides not in a conception of their fully-lived life (a la the builder), but in the impressions or judgments of others (be it God or society or their parents or some other “drill sergeant”), money means whatever it purportedly means to those others—status, in some circles, or wicked materialism in others, or in still others, “privilege” to be forgiven with obligate philanthropy. 

By contrast, a builder’s relationship to money is not mediated by any of these external intermediaries. She understands that money is a medium of value exchange, and what she values is set by the life she wants to build and the world she wants to live in. 

There are also simpler pathologies, such as when fear or insecurity drives founders to pursue short-term monetary gains over the longer-term health and durability of their business. But such financial anxieties can be diagnosed and remedied by re-orienting toward the overarching goal of building one’s best life, which presumably includes a healthy and durable version of one’s business (or whatever one is building) as part of it.

Quite a useful way to reframe money and its importance to a well considered life.

Both the “drill sergeant” and the “Zen master” mindset share a common underlying worldview on which our lives do not fully belong to us, in that we have relatively little agency over the goals we set and the means by which we pursue them.

The “builder’s mindset,” by contrast, flows from a qualitatively different and deeply countercultural worldview: one on which all of our efforts can and ought to be organized around the ultimate goal of building and enjoying our own best life.

My goodness, this hits me right in my feels.

I’ve been absolutely obsessed with reading Gena Gorlin’s work lately. Several of her articles have deeply resonated with me.

I’m gonna share this passage as well, because again, as I aim to come up with some sort of tangible list of values, this will be helpful:

The “builder’s mindset” represents a fundamentally different set of underlying core assumptions about the kinds of beings we are, what we can do, and what is worth doing, compared to the other mindsets. This includes:

1. The view that we are rational agents capable of and responsible for shaping the natural world according to our needs (i.e., of building).

2. The view that exercising one’s agency to build one’s own fully-lived life is a self-sufficient end goal, needing no further justification or permission.

3. A primary motivation by love and values, rather than fear.

4. The view that human relationships are necessarily win-win, not win-lose or lose-win.

For point number one, she even references my favorite Steve Jobs quote. I mean, come on… this article was tailor made just for me.

A lot of therapy and coaching clients I've worked with are initially very preoccupied with some issue that has been a major blocker in their life. Maybe they’re very socially anxious, or depressed, or they’ve suffered a lot of trauma. And the pattern is that they organize their lives and identities around these very real problems in a way that precludes them from actually, really living. A common example is the client who says “I can’t start dating until after I’ve fixed my social anxiety,” or “I can’t apply for these really ambitious jobs until after I’ve fixed my depression”; so they identify their dysfunctional behavior patterns and process their feelings and pick up new self-care frameworks from one therapist or self-help guru after another, all the while stalling in their career or romantic life. What they often don’t realize is how easily this “shadow work” can itself become a coping mechanism to avoid the harder work of actually going out and living their best lives. 

To their great credit, these clients are usually quick to get on board with the idea that every effective social anxiety treatment involves exposure therapy (e.g., going on a bunch of awkward dates!) and every effective depression treatment involves re-engaging in valued activities (e.g., doing challenging work!), once I present it to them. But what I often find is that there is still something subtly “off” about their internalized approach to these tasks: like they’re not going out and living their best life but rather just doing more shadow work. For instance, they might go on a date and then report back about how well or poorly they managed their anxiety or their negative self-talk; but I don’t hear much about how much they liked or connected with the other person. Or they might describe the coping strategies they used to “get through” a job interview, but I don’t get the sense that they showcased any of the passion and brilliance with which I’ve sometimes heard them riff on their most ambitious technical projects.  Not too surprisingly, they tend to get middling romantic and professional outcomes with this approach, which further reinforces their “I’m broken and need fixing” mentality. 

To really unlock their full flourishing, I find that these clients need a more fundamental paradigm shift: from “I’m broken, how do I fix myself?” to “This is my one precious life, how do I make it awesome?” Once they are looking through this lens, they may well still decide to work on their social awkwardness or their proneness to depression—or they may decide to invest their energy in other, higher-leverage endeavors, drawing inspiration from the many socially awkward and depression-prone individuals (from Ella Fitzgerald to Abraham Lincoln, respectively) who nonetheless lived unambiguously awesome lives.

I came across Dr. Gena Gorlin while doing research on the intersection of psychology and AI, but these three paragraphs from her most recent newsletter were an unexpected kick in the pants for a different problem I’ve been working on.

I don’t necessarily need to “fix” my depression and anxiety. I need to ameliorate their symptoms to the point where I can resume experiencing the joys that come with living life.