This is why people gradually check out as they age. It is very rare for someone’s life to have increasing significance with age past a point. There really is a “hill” that you will be over eventually unless external factors make you increasingly significant with age like RBG
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For most people your significance is entirely a function of a) your talents b) the magnitude of your realistic ambitions. Unlike scotus justices or founders of increasingly valuable companies like Steve Jobs, few of us have lives of naturally increasing structural significance.
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Your talents decline, your time shortens, your structural significance stays largely constant. This is the typical outcome, so no wonder people start checking out more with age. At best you can add a bit of leverage by working through others, and sacrifice precision of ambitions.
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Writing is more precise but less leveraged than editing. As an editor you might help shape 10x as many words but with 1/10th the precision. Like John W. Campbell vs Asimov, Heinlein etc.
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Being a founder is more precise but less leveraged than being a VC Being a lawyer is more precise but less leveraged than being a judge. Leverage is people leverage here. Until computers get way smarter, machine leverage is less relevant to life ambitions
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I’m fascinated by the science of mediocrity and the art of being ordinary. It’s weird that by definition most people are ordinary and mediocre but there’s no books about how to do it well. Only books about how to be exceptional. Which by definition can’t work for most readers.
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Yet being ordinary and mediocre isn’t merely an automatic backup/safety option that kicks in magically when you fail at being exceptional. That’s actually “failure” a whole different class of scripts. Ordinariness must be chosen and pursued according to its own logic.
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You can be bad at ordinariness and mediocrity though. Especially if you confuse it for a Plan B in relation to a Plan A to be extraordinary. It’s like trying to run a car on rocket fuel. Bad idea. Can’t run ordinariness on will-to-power thymos. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumos
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I’m not sure what the right fuel for ordinariness is. Probably something like absurdity.
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Everyone wants to be Holmes, but being Watson is not a failure to be Holmes. It’s its own, messier thing.
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