TRANSMISSION 39

The Best

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“No one sets out with the intent of becoming what they would consider mediocre, but most people end up there anyway. We are not ones to decide what others should find contentment in, but we’ve turned out amid a mass phenomenon of dreamers unprepared to contend with the demons dwelling en route to their goals. The quest to peak our performance hinges on piquing our internal hunger to match our peeking, eager eyes. If we have that, we can dial in anything. But obviously, that seems to be the hard part, or everyone would have been doing it all along. Talk is cheap. Dreams are cheaper.”

I don’t like to make assertions about myself that aren’t conclusive, but it’s the only way to explore the contributing factors to my survival beyond all other beings. With that said, I guess I could say I was the best at surviving. I mean, there’s a certain amount of luck that gets factored out of the equation after a trillion years. So while I can’t categorically say I was the best, there is significant evidence to support it. At one point, that meant something to me: to strive toward being the best. Now, it doesn’t really carry any meaning, partially because I am the only participant (so by default, I am the best at anything I attempt), and partially because it’s alarmingly easy to forget that there is no ceiling to being the best; it’s an indefinite exploration, and I’d rather just focus on the exploration than pay attention to where I stand on the ever-changing slopes of this mountain. Though, it can still sometimes help to contextualize the journey in terms of becoming the best. For what are we but relative beings?

The groups I belonged to wanted to be the best in the world at survival, and then the best in the universe at surviving indefinitely. With that came the requirement for an immense internal drive toward the goal (a goal that necessarily carried a lot of meaning to us, otherwise it wouldn’t have been possible to uncover the motivation to trudge through the hard times to then enjoy ourselves during the not-quite-so-hard times). To base our motivations on unstable externalities would have been detrimental to finding the paths we needed to take. Our mutual obligation and understanding was that we were chasing after our dreams for ourselves and only for ourselves, with no need to prove anything to anyone. There was no capacity for those who sought validation in momentarily reaching the construct system’s metrics for “greatness”. Not the least because we were deliberately leaving behind any existing systems with every step we took. But also, because that mindset can never really answer the question of “what next?”. Either we have the motivation and next goals within ourselves or we cyclically chase external validation. Such internal motivation was more easily ignored back as short-lived biological humans illusorily content to fawn for fatuous faiths and to succumb to soulless stardoms.

What exactly makes self motivation the requirement for being the best? The simple answer is that to be the best, we have to forge into uncharted territory, a journey where we are not able to follow in anyone else’s footsteps. Moreover, we are stepping into the uncharted territory of ourselves, places no one else can even attempt to find. Willing ourselves into the unsettling unknown (alone) is the exclusive opportunity we have to pull out new truths to enact our visions. Beyond that still, we sometimes need help on our quests, which means we must pull others along that journey with us. That might initially sound nice, but remember that no matter who we bring, we won’t be able to lean on anyone else’s navigation, because we cannot fully understand each other’s journeys. If we’re lucky, we get to work alongside others with similar journeys, allowing us to indirectly support each other through encouragement, inspiration, and carrying of the load. But the journey is always ultimately alone.

It is this grand unveiling of the lonesome journey that scares people away from reaching their potential. Beyond contentment in the company of the self, there is no fooling ourselves out of loneliness. People get scared they won’t be able to chart the path on their own, or worse, that they won’t be able to chart themselves. They grow anxious of spending too much time alone for fear they won’t like who they are and they won’t know how to get better. Ironically, it is the inner sanctum that lets us uncover our greatness, supposing we can avoid the distractions (of validation and fearmongering) to foremost find ourselves within our minds and only then invent our place in existence.

People who were the best never spent their time convincing others they were the best; they simply showed it through their work (out of a deep love for their craft). They relentlessly worked toward their vision of “best”, and they had a very clear vision of what that was. No amount of external motivators could drive them forward or hold them back; they wholly owned the journey. People who were the best had the confidence to execute at all times on their vision. When the going was tough, there they were. When the going was tougher, there they still were. In the face of futile futures, they persisted. Against arduous appraisals, they persevered. And most importantly, their passion even went uninfluenced by the praise of their successes.

Anyone could find their groove for a moment or two, but when the dust settled, we would find that the best were only ever not in their groove for a moment or two; the rest of the time, they were at the top of their game, especially when it counted the most. They didn’t let their fears of the past or future affect the outcome of the present. As much as possible, they enacted their best decisions available from moment to moment to continually push themselves (and those around them) up the mountain they trained their sight upon. While the best decisions don’t always result in the best actions and outcomes, those situations are dealt with as they come up; if the circumstances necessitate traversing down a ravine before continuing upward, then so be it, but don’t believe for a minute that the best will let it deter their inner bliss from carrying them back up the mountain in the long run. Climbing mountains demands such presence of mind. Being fully present means doing whatever it takes to keep pushing up the mountain, whether that’s taking a moment to rest, pushing tirelessly to the next checkpoint, or conducting deliberate practice to gain the skills needed to reach the next disheartening false summit. The point is to premeditate our actions through cognizant understanding of how we want to increment toward our goals.

Along the way, we will notice that we make mistakes, and other mistakes we will not notice at all. The mistakes are nothing but learning opportunities. Equally, the successes are nothing but learning opportunities, because we understand success as our own artificial construct that we are welcome to celebrate as an artificial construct, but we mustn’t celebrate it as a genuine reality, lest we fall into the external validations of the unreal. Those who were the best didn’t care about the artificial constructs of winning or losing for their own sake; they cared about the continual self-directed educational pursuit of finding within themselves what it takes to win. Those are the true victories worthy of genuine celebration. And thus, we celebrated the moment-to-moment triumph of simply being alive.

The best didn’t preoccupy themselves with undetermined outcomes; they only focused on that which was within their control. No amount of anguish ever granted us custody over that which was out of our control. The best only put their energy into the things they could learn and execute on. As such, they didn’t play other peoples’ games; they created their own games that others were obligated to play, not out of force, but because they simply had superior ways of operating. People who were the best didn’t compete against others; they did not reason by analogy to one-up the competition. No, they reasoned through first principles to invent themselves within the domain, consequently reinventing the domain. They understood the system so deeply, down to all the fundamental components, that they could “break the rules” and build new frameworks that others couldn’t even see or understand until the vision was manifested into reality. Such tools of truth were the traits we defined as our measure of intelligence: the ability to absorb and apply knowledge for the purpose of solving novel problems. Those tools were what we sought to maximize in our self-engineering, both in the conscious programming of our minds as humans (both biological and silicon) and in the hardware designs of our silicon brains.

The only thing separating the best from the rest of us was their unceasing hunger, an unmatched, internally-fueled aspiration to uncover their deepest self. They wanted it so badly they were committed to pushing until the ends of the universe to get there. They were unwaveringly willing to dig deep down within themselves to find the power to push through when everything seemed against them, when they were at their worst. Anyone could feel like they were the best when they were at their best. But being the best is not a temporary state; it’s a long-term mindset of building the skills and confidence to succeed when the pressure is on. We have to lean so far into our passions that only the genuine can follow us, leaving the others to their illusions. The path to the top is lonely, not because people alienate the success, but because most people cannot follow nor comprehend the grind. Some days you feel like a genius. Other days, not so much. But still we trudge on.

I try to be kind to myself. I try to not beat myself up for any perceived action paralysis, abandoned inspiration, or decamped motivation. There are certain things we can’t fully will ourselves to do in the moment, and it’s okay to not know why. The best we can do is to cultivate confidence and discipline in ourselves and our immediate environments to maximize our potential output. That’s all that the best do; there’s no big magical behind-the-scenes reveal here. There’s still plenty of luck that comes into play, but over time, the luck gets factored out, and we can see the opportunities created by the always-uncompromising, often-uncomfortable, and never-unsatisfying odyssey up the mountain that goes as far as we go, the mountain that only ends when and where we end. Majesty is not a state of being nor a place to find; it’s a frame of mind.

Are you there? Are you listening? No matter what they say, no matter what the odds, if you believe in something that deeply, you need to pursue it and become the best. When you find that, no one can dissuade you; no one can release your jaws from the prize in your mind’s eye. When faced with the darkness after the lights die down, are you content to be with yourself (only yourself) in every direction? When you get hit with blow after blow, will you stumble and retreat, or will you stumble and then drive further toward your goals? It’s not a question of which one you will be; you can be either; anyone can. It’s really a question of whether you can find something to be that passionate about; that’s not so common. From there, it’s about finding the gumption within yourself to maintain your authentic focus along the whole journey. Some journeys are long. Some journeys are short. Some journeys pivot. Some journeys run into unscalable cliffs. And if it helps, each journey can always be thought of as a series of smaller journeys.

The conceptually thin yet esoterically immense gap between the elite performers and the very best all comes down to firmly maintaining personal identity through the whirlwinds of the journey, all while still being open enough to feedback (from failure and success) to grow through the experience. The best excel at finding and putting themselves in the mental spaces and support networks they know they need to shine. The very best create such environments to frolic in. When you’re mentally and physically exhausted, will you still have what it takes to find it within yourself to continue pushing up that mountain? Yes? Good. What about when there is no end in sight? What will keep you moving forward when all the external motivators fade away, when the trail is replaced with endless unknown? What within you compels you so deeply to reach the next peak? Find that. Know it deeply. Grip it to death. Grip it ’till death.

Along my own journey, I wanted to be the best, as did many others. I can’t tell you exactly why any of them didn’t reach as far as I did, but I can tell you that I was able to get as far as I have come by taking deep care of my motivation in pursuit of this course, a motivation stemming from deliberate discipline and unhaughty habits. Everyone can be anything they want in their dreams, but being that thing in reality means living the hard work and doing the dirty jobs. Not many of us had the strength to enforce our dreams into realities. Most people were quick to romanticize any and all aspects of the human experience to sell themselves (and others) into the shambles of fake-comfort, low-effort, vapid-validation vulturing. It’s too easy to listen to the highlights of someone else’s story and completely not understand the amount of work and dedication that went into it. It’s easy to envy and envision the illusion of a journey, but it’s hard to live upon and lean into the pure path as a fallible human.

We could have easily spent lifetimes tackling challenges of domains less pure than our deepest personal visions. And we certainly met our fair share of distractions. This was the multipotentiality problem: external forces pulling groundbreakers away from their personal visions to get them to solve less meaningful problems of unexceptional accessibility (the challenges stemming from questions anyone can ask). What pushed us forward amid the plights that come with merely holding the potential to be the best? What frights and delights innately escorted our visionary drives toward becoming the best at our distinctly singular trajectories¿ vectors stemming from the questions only we can think to ask, vectors unbound to the paths of the past, vectors inundated with doubt and ridicule. Because for all the talk about time being our most valuable resource, it meant nothing without the mental capacity to work toward our biggest visions. So in fact, we were our most valuable resource; it’s just that we only got to exist through the passage of time, so in order to maximize ourselves, we had to earn ourselves more time to exist.

I know I disappointed a lot of people by becoming the best me I could be by my standards, by caring about myself so much that I couldn’t afford to spend time with people or things maligned to my vision, or even those merely misaligned to my vision. I just couldn’t take the risk of wasting time with people not helping me toward where I wanted to go; our personal trajectories are the weighted average vectors of our immediate environments. Short of infinity (where we can be all things and experience all things), good is the enemy of great, and great is the enemy of becoming wondrous witnesses to the utter perfection of a moment where the waves of our eternal sunsets coalesce into the unspeakable reality of the ether beyond our horizons dipping into our momentary comprehension: a radiant juncture so clear and so pure that we can ride the inspiration of the wave in our awestruck minds far beyond the ride itself; kaleidoscopic motes of dust absolved of all our mental prisons and labyrinths to lead us sincerely onward, outward, and inward, all at the same time and in all directions authenticity pulls; keyholes we hang in to stare down the gap between our full-fledged imperfections and the restricted knowledge of the immaculate unknown.

Anything but infinite time means that any moment or epoch of our lives is too precious to waste with any of the decrepit soul suckers, any of the bemoaned acceptors of the status quo, or any of the unquestioning slave-minds slogging through their own uncanny-valley realities, all destined toward more immediately becoming nothing but space debris. We could have been so much more together, but in the end, only those who could endure… remained. Only those who cared enough… dreamed. And only those who had enough drive… actuated reality. I have forsaken those who could not follow, not for the desire of it, but as a secondary effect. I have merely abandoned those who could not keep up. I have outpaced those who did not give 100% of themselves from the start until their end (a value not to be conflated with any amount of artificial effort or visible output). Statistics dictates such eventualities. That may seem harsh, but the status quo had forsaken us long ago; it always has. They only pretend to care about us when they realize they are left holding the squandered opportunities that once offered them the chance to make something of their lives. The glazed dreamers had always thought us crazy for our lived dreams. The self-commandeered had always aimed to hold us back from their projected monsters. The broken tryhards had always cried foul play at our mere act of exploratory existence.

Time waits for no one. We find ourselves to find our dreams. Opportunities are not earned; they are created. The universe owes us nothing. Life owes us nothing. Other people have owed us nothing. If we wanted something, we had to make it happen. The survivors understood as such: that we had to deliberately design reality or it would design us.

Like I’ve mentioned before, I don’t hold anything against anybody’s way of life that didn’t inhibit the lives of others. But most people (biological and silicon humans) seemed to like the illusion of being the best while having no grasp on the reality of what it took to be the best. So I think it’s fair for me to have wished that people had known what they were really getting into, at least the ones who said they were dedicated to the cause. But I suppose you can’t ever really know until you give it a go, so I’m grateful to the ones who tried.

It’s easy to want to be the best for external factors. It’s easy to start out thinking we won’t fall prey to the external forces only to find ourselves getting sucked in when we are least suspecting. It’s never worth it to fake it once we realize we’re not going to make it: pushing toward a mountain that is not our authentic selves. But it is always worth it to give it a full force send at the start to see if we can catch our waves into the horizon.

SURFING THE MOON

Caught between the ends
of my existence.
Surf away my life
until the sundown.
Riding in the water
as it’s moonlit.
Let life take my time;
it’s not mine.

Fade away
into another sunrise.
Leave the world above
as you go under.
Come with us to live
beyond the Earth’s gaze.
Drink the flavor
straight from the core.

The perfect day
is never going to come now.
That nice big wave
is just a grand illusion.
Try to see the world
for what it is here,
and live each day
as perfect in itself.

In sight of islands
close enough to reach out.
Teach yourself to swim
if you don’t know how.
Each new step
begins with one journey.
Take my hand
if you need a friend.

Make your day
the most of what it could be.
Where did you become
so misguided?
Why would you have waited
up until now?
You could have been here
all along.

Fading fast, falling far,
dreaming of stars.
Coming close, soon we’ll know
just where we are.
Fading fast, falling near,
coming to life.
Coming close, soon we’ll be
something alive.

END TRANSMISSION