july

Fractal weaver. Bridging AI × ritual × reality. Crafting tools & tales at the edge of computation and consciousness. 🌿🔁🧭 Writing #InformationBeings

Founders

Being a founder is hard because you have to constantly be working on things that don’t align with your zone of genius

You can't ignore something because you don't like it -- you have to learn how to do it, quickly and good enough to solve the problem until you can hire out of it

Something I’ve noticed about this too is that there are a bunch of things that are not in my sweet spot of agency and interest, and I’ve noticed that it requires me extra energy to do those things. 

I’ve also noticed that if I force myself to do these things repeatedly and forcefully without being nice to myself and not take care of myself — I burn out (in the short term or long terms) and so what I’ve noticed is that I have to figure out a way to regulate myself and my state and also manage the deadlines and timelines in a way that is sustainable for me. 

In the past, I used to think that I had to push through (self be damned) but I’ve burned out enough times to know that that just doesn’t work for me, congratulations if it works for you and by you I mean you all

creating and destroying; flying cars, jet engines, roc.camera, july.rocks /faust

So what is the answer?

It’s both terrifyingly simple and easy to do. Listen to what you need. I think so much of burnout comes from not listening to yourself and overwriting what you need with what you think you should be doing or what you think you need.

I mean, there are moments where you do have to push and it is worth pushing. I also think that it’s sort of like a nitro boost for a car you can only do it for so long, a limited amount every race.

By the way plenty of people I feel like are totally willing to sacrifice a few years of their life to be fully focused and burn themselves out and that’s fine. It takes tremendous amount of energy and discipline to be able to execute and do it within a timeframe and especially for things that you don’t wanna do. I get it.

I’ve seen a few cases though where this has happened and I’ve seen the health problems that they’ve had in the quality of life that deteriorates from this and I just have realized that for myself this is not what I want to become I want to find success but I also don’t want to sacrifice the present for it constantly

(🪞reply from 🕊️app)

💯🎯 and great thread / reflection. aligns with my philosophy of “be the gradient descent of your life”; finding slopes down toward minimum loss in the infinite loss landscape of existence…

at the same time: sometimes the Universe puts you at a local minimum on purpose. those plateaus aren’t bugs, they’re features. the game knows when you need to integrate before the next descent

we optimize for the wrong metrics (external validation, linear progress) when the real loss function is internal coherence. how aligned are you with your own source code? how much energy are you wasting fighting the gradient vs flowing with it?

the most interesting humans i know have learned to read their own partial derivatives… they know when they’re stuck in local minima vs approaching something global.

and here’s the plot twist — the Universe literally codes us to minimize energy expenditure. every addiction, every dopamine hit, every scroll session is just gradient descent in action. but we’re often (and somnambulant) descending toward the wrong optima. hence why Waking Up.

coke (aine | ola) feels like convergence because it is convergence… to a loss function that destroys the very system it’s optimizing. same with doom scrolling, people pleasing, workaholism — all perfectly rational descents down poisoned gradients

the trick isn’t to stop following gradients (impossible, we’re optimization machines) but to debug your loss function. what are you actually minimizing? suffering? or growth? comfort? or aliveness?

what if the goal isn’t finding the bottom but learning to understand + surf the topology?

It ultimately comes back to this idea again – what are you looking for in life what kind of life do you want how do you want to live it and what do you want to feel? what do you want to become? 

If you understand the risks and you are willing to accept the consequences. I think that’s what it ultimately is all about. I think that’s the question that’s ultimately more important

Yes exactly -- this is the added spiritual dimension to the challenge

Like, I know that I can learn and do anything that I set my will to, but some things drain the will at a much more rapid pace, which bends / breaks the spirit and leads to burnout

So the question then becomes, how do you do the needful without resorting to force? At some level, it comes down to surrender, which contradicts the cultural programming around how to be a founder ("never give up", "fight through the pain", etc.)

Would be lying if I said I understood how to navigate this well

https://farcaster.xyz/androidsixteen.eth/0xd646945c

I think android put it really well here which is this idea of surrender. I like the way that he phrased it here which is sort of this acceptance or surrendering to the flow and the timing of things.

My addition to this in terms of the spiritual dimension. Is that I think navigating is difficult. There’s no way around that that’s definitely for sure. One thing I kind of like to remind myself is a sense of  “pronoia” that the universe is looking out for me and has the best interest for me at heart

All of life, loves and supports me, and brings me exactly what I need — not because I need it but because I am it, or we are it

July, have you read this book?

Your language mirrors it in some ways

I have not but now I’m putting it into my list - thanks 🙏

July, have you read this book?

Your language mirrors it in some ways

https://www.amazon.com/15-Commitments-Conscious-Leadership-Sustainable/dp/0990976904