Dear Diary: Am I a Loser or Just an Idiot?
troubleshooting how to make coaching something I would love to do
So last week I realized that I’ve been a coward, running away for sixteen months from my responsibilities, and that I will be stopping that. My main excuse for why I haven’t started offering intro calls to readers already is that I have a baby coming in a few weeks and think it would be a mistake to get that ball rolling if it’s just going to stop again for at least a month after he’s born. I also want to finish my taxes and get as much quality AH content cleaned up and republished as I can to support the announcement.
This is all true. But it is also all bullshit. Because it allows me to keep putting this off.
What should you do when the “rational” decision and the cowards decision agree? They agreed when I quit in the first place. I don’t know if that was a “mistake” exactly. Maybe it really was the best decision for me at that time. I’ve certainly learned a lot over the last sixteen months. I haven’t quite built something great yet, but I’ve definitely laid a lot of foundation. Should I have instead forced myself to continue doing something that was causing me significant pain for no obvious benefit, just because it would have made me “not a coward”?
I think the better question—then, now, or any other time—is “why did it cause me so much pain in the first place?”
That answer is complex. I only grasp the beginning strands of it. It’s not that I never tried to pull them, but rather that I did not have enough knowledge to pull them effectively back then. I think I have that knowledge now. So… why?
Something about coaching feels like a scam. It’s not just coaching. Something about people paying me for my knowledge rather than my time feels like a scam. Something about being in a tolerable financial situation while not being in perpetual misery toiling away for hours doing things I hate makes me fear I am enacting some great ruse upon the world.
But this is stupid. I have worked my ass off. I have pushed myself every day for over a decade. I have read well over a hundred books on personal development. I have consumed ten thousand hours of other long form content directly related to business, strategic thinking, or skill building. I have spent fifty grand myself on coaching and therapy. I have written well over a million words journalling and reflecting and seeking to improve myself and my competence. And all this while I was working a full time job and being pretty successful at that, eventually becoming the right hand man to the CEO of one of the largest MSPs in the country before I went off to build something of my own.
There’s more. It doesn’t matter. The point is that what I’ve done is not something that “lazy scammers” do. And further that my old bit about “how I got three promotions and built a business while working twenty hours a week” is misleading in the same way that Tim Ferris’s Four Hour Work Week is misleading. He’s worked sixty to eighty hour weeks for decades, the “four hours” just referring to the thing that was directly getting him income at any time. Same thing for me. I am just dumber and younger so it took five times more hours. But any time subtracted from my “real job” didn’t go to jacking off and smoking pot, but instead to my “second job” of figuring out myself and the world.
Even when I’m not working, I am working. Things that normal people do as leisure, I do consciously, analytically, and with intensity toward a higher goal and objective.
For example, whenever I get back into vidya for a bit I treat it like a job. I have spent thousands of hours studying competitive shooters, practicing strategies, and performing drills and routines to increase my performance. I was in the top single digit percentile in the world for Halo, Overwatch, and then Battlefield. But all this still felt like failure to me. Because eventually I plateaued with thousands—if not tens of thousands—of people who were better than me. And I never got paid for it.
Even every movie or TV show I watch is “work”; not a “relaxing evening zoning out” but an “intense dissection of cinema, stories, and human psychology”. And I am this way with everything else too. I can’t “half ass” anything. I have “no chill”. The only thing I enjoy is improvement. The only thing I value is competence. And I generally achieve it in everything I attempt.
So why then am I so afraid to present myself as competent? Why do I feel so insecure about directing others? Why does it make me so uncomfortable to “sell” myself? Why do I have to make such a conscious effort to recall my accomplishments?
Well because I am a failure by everyone else’s standards. I like myself. It took years to feel this way, but I now think I’m pretty great. I just know that I am a weirdo with niche interests, and most people probably don’t think I’m as neat as I do. It’s not that most people think I’m “bad”. Probably no one would use the term “failure”. They would just say “not so successful it is extraordinary”. I’m the one who equates “a lack of extraordinary success” with “total failure”. And, since I am an Fe loser, this situation makes me insecure.
I am not “extraordinarily successful” by the standards of my “idols”—all the people at the top of any competence games I compete in. If it’s business, then like Musk or Gates or Jobs; if it’s ideas, then like Yarvin or Urban or Siskind or Socrates or Nietzsche; if it’s oration or influence then Rogan or Peterson or Sinek.
I am also not “extraordinarily successful” by the standards of my peers. All my competent and successful friends are pragmatic tech nerds who, with all due respect, don’t have a creative bone in their bodies. They are at best amused—and most often just confused—by why I would care to write or do anything that doesn’t directly serve some practical objective like making more money or becoming more free or gaining more power or getting more chicks. Minor Dissent (post blog-split) maybe makes a little sense to some, but Onlyfrens could never. And even Actualization Hub doesn’t seem as “focused” as would fit into their mental models. “How will this make you money? How will this gain you more status? What product are you selling and to whom?” They don’t necessarily ask these explicitly, but they’re implied. The idea that there could be some arational thing in charge which just needs to communicate this stuff regardless of any immediate practical benefit to me is completely bewildering to them. The idea that I am not “in charge” here, that I am a dream catcher, or rather, a meme catcher—a vessel by which ideas are pulled from the ether and brought into reality, a gestation pod within which they grow and become strong so they can eventually go and conquer the world—would probably just make them laugh.
I am not “extraordinarily successful” by the standards of the average person. I think of my family or my wife’s family. They follow the rules—mine the liberal rules, hers the conservative rules—believe in and support their team’s “current thing”, and just want to like do their job and go home and “hang out” or something. I still don’t quite understand what these kinds of people want. But I know that what I’m doing is certainly weird and esoteric and confusing to them. My mom will always perceive me as successful, but I don’t think it is—nor ever can be—because she actually understands what I’m trying to do. She is just a mom, and mom’s hold “my kid’s a success” as an axiomatic first principle. If anything, they will completely distort reality to support this.
What about my creative neurotic drug friends? Some of them certainly see me as “successful”. But that just doesn’t really mean that much to me. I love them, but they have mostly given up. They find my ambition as bewildering as my ambitious friends find my creativity. I don’t think I instill inspiration in them, just more confusion. And even if I did inspire them, I am not sure what could come of it. I cannot do the work for them and I wouldn’t want to. I want to give people the tools, stick with them enough to make sure they know how to use them, and then move on to the next.
There are lots of people that are both ambitious and creative. And I’ve met a few. But, at least thus far, we always rub each other the wrong way. I could write a long paragraph about it, but the TLDR is just that I am too shape rotator and they are too wordcel for us to get along.
I could go on with the other niches but I think you get the point. There is nowhere I feel I can point and say “hey, I competed in that competence game and won something worth winning”. I guess I “won” my wife. She is great. But being exclusively a relationship or dating coach doesn’t sound particularly thrilling to me.
So If there is no big niche of people who consider all my results as something to strive for, how could I possibly feel confident coaching? How could I possibly not recoil and lose faith in myself at the first sign of something I was not prepared for? How could I possibly create the level of impact necessary to make me feel like I am not just a scam?
I mean, I probably know how to cure half the world’s depression. And I could make pretty much anyone twice as effective, help them enjoy their jobs twice as much while also doubling their salary. But the problem is that no one wants, nor should want, your advice if you don’t have results they seek. And, more importantly, they need to be similar to you and feel a connection to you for them to take your advice seriously.
The way you do this is to first signal that you are ingroup. And then that you are higher than them inside of it. The very last thing they need to know is that if they are willing to invest the time, money, and energy to learn from you that you can get them to where you are.
My problem, at least so I believe, is that I fail on step one. I subscribe to no ingroup. I consider myself a member of dozens of ingroups and a leader in none. I am climbing some kind of weird meta hierarchy that is invisible to most people and opaque to even myself.
How do you find an audience for a hierarchy you can barely even see? How do you build a product for an ingroup that doesn’t (yet?) exist?
Maybe I am weird in this, but I just can’t sell a product that has no clear and defined market fit. If I am going to truly helppeople, first and foremost need to belief with conviction in the product I am selling. And it’s not even obvious to me what the product even is.
Well, what I am good at?
Habits. Becoming addicted to doing things that are good for you. How to trick your brain into loving to do low time preference valuable things instead of high time preference bullshit that feels good now but screws you later.
Self-awareness. But what is the value of that? It is broadly applicable. That doesn’t work. I guess a practical thing is “identifying your strengths and weaknesses, maximizing your strengths, and minimizing your weaknesses”.
But I already see where the problem is here. My greatest gift—that I find universal solutions that work for almost everyone—is also my greatest curse. These two, like the dozen other things I could list that I am an expert in, come down to the question of: “to what end”? People don’t want strategies “just because”. They want strategies that will help them reach their goals. Do I want to be a professional coach? An executive coach? A performance? A personal coach? A relationship coach? I theoretically have more than enough knowledge to successfully do all of them. But If I don’t have a niche, a framework, a specialty, not only will I fail to effectively market it, I won’t actually want to sell it. Recipe for failure!
This is all the wrong question. What result do I want to create for people?
What I want is for people to live meaningful lives. What I want is for people to fully maximize themselves. It’s not about helping you make money or start a business or become more effective or build great relationships or whatever. Yes, of course those are some necessary components but they are not the true objective. My true objective is to eliminate inefficient use of human capital. This is so autistic. Let me humanize it.
Do you have any idea how many brilliant people I know who just get high and play video games all day? Or all these creative people who work some shitty desk job in a perpetual state of insecurity and anxiety? All this creative potential, all this mental capacity, completely wasted. And it’s not even a binary like that. Everyone is less than what they could be. You could provide twice, three times, maybe even ten times the value to the world if only you could optimize yourself maximally. Imagine what the world would look like if everyone was achieving even half of what they were capable of. Not just what we would invent and create and all the problems we’d solve, but also how much happier we’d be.
You don’t want to play video games and scroll social media and wage slave some job you hate or whatever bullshit you waste your time on all day. You only do these things because you’re tired or lonely or desperate or lost or scared or confused. You know you’re not even close to what you could be, but you’re moving as fast as you can muster.
Everyone is ineffective. At least in comparison to what they’re capable of.
For me this is just obviously the most important thing that needs to be done. I don’t have to fix climate change or racism or supply chains or technology or whatever. I need to fix the people who will fix these things. Everyone has a role and they need to maximally fill that role. Both for the sake of the species as well as themselves and their families, friends, and communities.
Why do you think it’s called Actualization Hub? Because it is supposed to be one central place you can go to find everything necessary to optimize your contribution to the world and become someone you’d actually like and be proud of.
We all consume resources. We all make mistakes and hurt people and break things that don’t deserve it. And we will all do these for as long as we live! Being a pain in the ass is an inevitable byproduct of living in a physics constrained universe (ie one with scarcity of resources, time, and space). We can never wash ourselves of this “original sin”, but we can make up for it. Or at least we can try. Polish up our flaws and defects; try and build the greatest most valuable, generative, and positive thing we can in hopes that it can redeem us—at least a little—for all the other parasitic, destructive, and toxic things we will do along the way.
So I guess that’s what it is. People who believe in that vision. For themselves and for the world. Does anyone even belief in that vision? Does it matter? I do. And that shit is solid. It took me a decade to really isolate it but for the last at least five years it has been at the core of my being. Maybe I just need to distill that into a mission statement and staple it to my fucking forehead so I stop forgetting. And then maybe I’ll stop being a pussy. It is when I lose connection with this that the problems arise. And the easiest way to lose connection to this is to take on clients who aren’t aligned with it. Or at least without setting this at the foundation of the relationship when it starts.
I mean, I think I need to compromise at least a little. I am nowhere near as good of a coach I know I can theoretically become. And the only way to get anywhere near my potential—anywhere near the top percentile, which is the only place I’ll be even remotely satisfied with—is just through experience. Being too restrictive can be just as dysfunctional as being too flexible. But I clearly over-compromised myself in the beginning. I basically took on anyone who was willing to pay me, no questions asked. That was a mistake. A mistake I made because of my own insecurities. And one I intend not to make again.
So, I’m not here to help you get rich or get laid or like yourself or become more productive. All that shit is just a means to the end that actually matters of making you and humanity as a whole into something worth being proud of.
This is important. But what does it actually mean practically?
I have to write the Actualization Hub manifesto. Some kind of mission statement. Is it too restrictive? Am I too much of a freak for believing this that no one will ever want to work with me? Maybe. But also maybe not. And you can only ever succeed at things you’ve mastered. And I’ve certainly mastered this. I’d almost rather pay my bills by going back into IT consulting than through clients who aren’t moved by this vision. If I run out of money would that change? I don’t know. Probably not. Doesn’t matter.
I’ll write the mission statement, clean up and write some other posts that make clear my skills and gifts, and then offer to meet with people who think I might have something they are searching for. Only after I’ve done these things can I make any kind of informed decision about whether the next step is more compromise or less.