I’m mediocrely at home here. It’s the second best place in the world for everybody. If you can’t figure out the best place for yourself, move here and hang out till you either figure it out or run out of money.
I’m going to call this The Power of Second-Best. Also appears in disguised forms. For example, Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy can be restated as: The second-best raison d’etre for any organization is self-perpetuation. https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html…
The thing is most people are really bad at goals and motivation, so most reasons for doing anything tend to unravel at the first contact with reality. So backup default reasons tend to kick in. And over a long period, only the best second-best things survive.
Earlier thread on why people suck at primary motivations. So we pretty much survive on secondary motivations. Which tend to be tested, lindy, not unique to us, and more forgiving of messy ambiguities and uncertainties of life.
The older I get the more it sinks in that 90% of effectiveness is just taking a thing seriously enough. That translates to just wanting the thing itself rather than adjacent things that may or may not happen as a side effect. Most things sort themselves out if you’re serious. twitter.com/vgr/status/127…
Whatever happens in your life, you won’t regret more money, time in LA, or knowing Python. Most of your cunning plans will fail, so your life outcome ends up a function of the consolation prizes you collect along the way 🤣