Love this piece. I do wonder though if “assembling yourself out of the amalgamation of inputs and environments that were thrown your way” is a bit inescapable. As you say the best example of it - Jobs - was imitating Friedland, and being the average of your 5 closest friends is a truism. The writing, synthesizing, and sorting seems to be the only way to get at the internal sort of conviction, but even then it’s a sorting and synthesizing of external inputs. I guess I wonder if it’s fair to say the external influences aren’t escapable and can even be extremely positive, but the process of sorting and synthesizing is how we reclaim that locus of control?
Love this piece. I do wonder though if “assembling yourself out of the amalgamation of inputs and environments that were thrown your way” is a bit inescapable. As you say the best example of it - Jobs - was imitating Friedland, and being the average of your 5 closest friends is a truism. The writing, synthesizing, and sorting seems to be the only way to get at the internal sort of conviction, but even then it’s a sorting and synthesizing of external inputs. I guess I wonder if it’s fair to say the external influences aren’t escapable and can even be extremely positive, but the process of sorting and synthesizing is how we reclaim that locus of control?