Swimming in circles, forward
The interview aftermath forces the deeper accounting: measured by the conventional yardstick, school, degree, jobs held, he's average and jumpy. Measured by the other one, a year of unpaid, unforced, obsessive building, he's an outlier. Either it's a bubble or it's a direction, and the honest answer is: swimming in circles, but forward.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 41:16 (las dos varas de medir)
- ↳ video diary @ 45:05 (en círculos, pero adelante)
- ↳ video diary @ 36:28 (nadie nos va a venir a salvar)
He left the call feeling “como una mierdita” ▸ 40:04, and the recovery runs through an honest fork. Measured by the conventional yardstick, grades, degree pace, jobs held longer than eight months, public competition, he has been resolutely average, by his own accounting, since he stopped caring about class rankings in primary school ▸ 41:16. Measured by the other yardstick, how many people spend a year-plus unpaid, unforced, building product after product and dropping their vices to focus harder, “ahí es donde yo destaco” ▸ 41:34. Neither yardstick is fake. The mistake is letting the one you just failed define you ▸ 41:05.
The fork’s dark branch gets said out loud, with the manicomio joke to keep it survivable: either they live in a bubble, far from reality, with no idea what they’re doing, or they’re genuinely outside the system and know where they’re headed ▸ 43:20. Julia’s evidence for the second branch is this very process: someone real believed enough to run him through five rounds, “no estamos tan locos” ▸ 43:52.
a veces se nada en círculos; la pregunta es si cada vuelta termina más adelante →
The image that holds the entry is his: being self-taught without a guide is running a marathon in open water, no shoreline, sometimes swimming in circles ▸ 44:19. But the circles have been ending somewhere: after every ten laps comes the insight that says the heading was right, “estamos caminando en círculos, pero sí estamos yendo para adelante” ▸ 45:05. A mentor would have compressed it, “no estaríamos redescubriendo todo” ▸ 45:24, which is exactly what the lost opportunity was worth, and why the mid-ocean rule returns unchanged: “nadie nos va a venir a salvar” ▸ 36:28. The stakes are no longer abstract: “estamos en las mínimas”, one of the two of them needs to land something ▸ 51:23. And the personality trait he claims as fuel is the right one for the moment: proof them wrong, a rejection converted into the next motivation ▸ 38:43, creating opportunity, as ever, without yet knowing how ▸ 45:31…