Two Ideas

Hi, 

I have been trying to combine two ideas this week from two famous thinkers: Naval Ravikant and Steven Pressfield. 

Here are the quotes: 

"The man who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves the destination." - Naval 

"Resistance is directly proportional to love—the more you care, the greater the fear." - Steven Pressfield. 

Since graduating college, I have been on a 9 year crusade to combine as many of my favorite ideas from my favorite books to create a semi-succinct perspective. The difficulty is that great ideas are not one-dimensional and to give them their respect you have to let them breathe. 

In that breathing, you can find incongruences. What I have found is that those incongruences are more reflective of a lack of contextual understanding rather than incompatibility. 

Today, I am going to try to talk through why I like these quotes and how I think that they could play nicely together. 

Let’s start with Pressfield. 

This newsletter is not a reflection of my love for writing. This newsletter exists for two loves: my love of ideas and the love of communicating ideas that I love. 

Ask Casey, living with me is like playing theoretical trivia. She will walk around the corner and I will hit her with, “what do you think about communism? I read a really interesting article about it.”

I get it, it's exhausting. 

What happens with this love, is that when I think about my newsletter, I get fearful. I get fearful that I won’t communicate ideas clearly or sell them in a way that other people won’t think they are as interesting as I think them to be. 

So, when I think about Pressfield’s quote, I feel the fear of writing because I don’t want to ruin the taste of a good idea. I want it to always be pure. 

I always want to love it. 

Naval’s quote, however, makes it sound easy. The man who loves walking will go further than the man who loves the destination. 

This has two meanings to me, the first one is that if you love walking, you won’t want to stop at the destination thus walking further. 

The other is that getting out of bed to walk is easier for our walk loving friend. 

This second meaning doesn’t jive with my understanding of loving a craft. I feel an immense amount of resistance around the hobbies and the things that I love. It is often hard for me to start the things I care about, and easy for me to start the things I merely enjoy. 

Here is where my interpretation can be expanded. 

The person who loves walking is willing to walk badly. When the love of walking is greater than your distaste for poor performance you keep going. 

The repetitions that you get while walking well or poorly are compounding your skill on the things you love. 

I think this is the overlap. 

The fear is around external judgments of your performance, not the internal joy of doing the thing you love. 

What you will find is that the days you do something poorly are actually the days that you get better at your craft because anyone can do something when everything is going well. The people who are able to still pull something together when it isn’t going their way, those are the pros. 

Kyle