Time Capsule #177
Self-reliance.
Greetings,
If you are also enjoying the first snowfall of 2025, I reckon you will doubly enjoy this newsletter, as I doubly enjoyed writing it.
The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
—Albert Einstein
✏️ The Courage to Be Oneself
A man must consider what a blindman’s bluff is this game of conformity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Rather unknowingly, the guiding maxim of my life in recent years has been to ‘trust oneself’. Never be satisfied with simply following the crowd, or accepting truths as they are served to you. Build your beliefs — your life — the way you best see fit.
Many have written of the power of trusting oneself, from great transhumanists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to modern writers like Fumitake Koga. It is a philosophy which, in hindsight, has paid dividends in the short few years I have integrated it: I have almost invariably found that the more people who advise me against a contrarian thought I have, the more said belief ends up paying dividends in the future.
But that is not to say being oneself is an easy thing to do. You will have to deal with many naysayers and suffer great feelings of uncertainty along the way. But as I see it, trading the integrity of your own mind for the comforting embrace of conformity is simply a price to high too pay. It is better to fail in one’s own way than to fail walking the path of another.
So as much as this newsletter is for my readers, it is also a reminder to myself. A reminder to develop an original relationship with the truth, and not one of societal tradition; to behold God face to face, as the forgoing generations did. I have a strong intuition that, in a world of increasing artificiality and distance from the original, being oneself will be a path that bears ample fruit, if one is willing to work honestly and stick it out for long enough.
Lux et Veritas
💡 Food for Thought
Reserve your nonconformity for your private life.
🔗 Sunday Best
When You Truly Work for Yourself — Naval Ravikant
This is the paradox of working for yourself, which every entrepreneur or every self-employed person is familiar with, which is that when you start working for yourself, you basically sacrifice this work-life balance thing.
You sacrifice this work-life distinction. There’s no more nine-to-five. There’s no more office. There’s no one who’s telling you what to do. There’s no playbook to follow. At the same time, there’s nothing to turn off. You can’t turn it off. You are the business. You are the product. You are the work. You are the entity, and you care.
If you’re doing something that’s truly yours, you care very deeply, so you can’t turn it off. And that’s the curse of the entrepreneur. But the benefit of the entrepreneur is that if you’re doing it right, if you’re doing it for the right reasons or the right people in the right way, and if you can set aside the stress of not hitting your goals, which is real and hard to set aside, then it doesn’t feel like work.
And that’s when you’re most productive. You are basically only measured on your output. And you’re only held up to the bar that you raised for yourself. So it can be extremely exhilarating and freeing. And this is why I said a long time ago that a taste of freedom can make you unemployable.
God gives us a cross, and gives us the strength to bear it.
—Leo Tolstoy
Yours Truly,
AT