Lately, I’ve been prompting myself to be a force of nature. The phrase captures a number of recent practices, and may the most important thing to work on right now.

A force of nature has the strength to do what’s right in an aligned and sustainable manner: the strength to self study any subject, to tell them even though it hurts, and to focus on what matters—without developing internal inconsistencies (which cause existential crises) (alignment) or burning out (sustainability).

Imagine someone who is a force of nature. They are relentless, disciplined, motivated, aligned, effortless, and have a mind like water—key qualities even before this unifying conception. Each of these terms is a concrete practice, sketched here and explained below. A mind like water is one with low inertia, able to react quickly because it has accurate perception unclouded by emotion and ego. Motivation is the gathering of one’s energy into an excited and concerted effort. Alignment is the internal consistency and conviction that comes from all actions serving the goal. Finally, effortless speed [wc] is the sustainable effectiveness that comes from relaxation, focus, and clarity. The funny thing about qualities is that they are simply practices: you start by embodying a quality once, then again, until that quality is yours. Together, these qualities make you a force of nature, able to do anything.

And practicing these qualities might be the most important thing to do right now. This is a high-derivative skill, in that it makes you better at everything else, and it increases the rate of compounding for other projects. It is also inevitable: like all great technologies, it’s hard to imagine a future where being a force of nature isn’t key. Thinking back to my time at Gamut, Orbit, and at school, this has always been a key practice. In fact, focusing on anything else at the expense of this may be short-term-ism.

So how can one become a force of nature? My toolkit includes diet, exercise, sleep (both power naps and waking strategies), music, and meditation. But most importantly, you are now armed with intention. All that’s left is to practice.

How to train each quality:

• relentlessness
  • if it doesn’t work, try again. start over, look for mistakes, binary search
• discipline
  • in any moment, do what you should, even if you don’t want to. (or take a break/rest)
• motivation
  • take a deep breath, collect yourself, then begin. or count down from three
• alignment
  • whenever there is a tension, tradeoff, or decision, have conviction that there is a right answer
  • to find this answer, step back/go upstream to your working ultimate goal, then figure out the causal/interventional impact that each decision would have
  • then, do whatever is optimal for your goal. in this way, there are no real tradeoffs—you just pick the balance that is the best for the goal
• effortless speed
  • this is a buddhist conviction that peak performance comes from relaxation and focus, not stress
  • eg. a ballet, martial arts sequences, yoga stretching, arrows flying through the air, a rushing unturbulent river, musicians playing trills / vibrato (see wc note below)
  • when doing something, don’t stress about speed, rather relax, and focus on just doing it well (with purpose, but not urgency)
  • not a tight, clutching focus but a restful collectedness and concertedness
• mind like water
  • no emotions/ego -> accurate perception -> low inertia, quick reaction
  • how to have no emotions/ego? meditation.
    • practice seeing how thoughts/feelings arise. understand the cause of the feelings, and the actions/background that caused those
    • practice noticing them, and coming back to the method
    • compassion / understand why other people are how they are
    • rather than focusing on your own agency, see how everything causes everything else (the dynamical system of the world) -> no ego

 › thoughts