#1: This is The Other Way
That difficult debut post...
Hey 👋🏻
Any time I get a fancy, new, pristine notebook I make sure to ruin the first page with a scribble to remove the daunting barrier of the blank canvas. Otherwise, I end up in this strange power dynamic where I’m not sure whether I own the notebook or the notebook owns me.
I’m aiming to reboot my writing practice with the side-benefit of hopefully bumping into people who enjoy doing things The Other Way.
What is The Other Way?
I have a tendency to seek out alternative perspectives and finding unconventional, contrarian angles that have some combination of:
Working better than the accepted norm
Having more novely and utility than the norm
Potentially unearth secrets
To me, The Other Way is something like that.
It’s that subtle feeling you get when someone tells you something that alters the way you look at the world, like a piece of architecture you pass every day on your way to work that takes on new meaning after learning a new piece of information about the building that had remained hidden in plain sight until now. I believe the world is full of things like this and I enjoy finding them and sharing them.
I’m currently looking to find new secrets in the areas of: intuition (over processes, frameworks, and prescribed ways of doing things), felt experience versus analytical, liminality, nonduality, Stoicism, some bizarrely niche parts within video games, Jonathan Blow’s design philosophy, the life and times of Andy Kaufman, the works of David Foster Wallace, and general design critique, as it currently stands. But that will change.
In short: this will be messy and thematically inconsistent, but at least it should hopefully be interesting for both of us.
The actual truth is that there are many more secrets left to find, but they will yield only to relentless searchers.
— Peter Thiel