Mat Pat

One of the reasons my partner and I get along so well is that she has zero — absolutely no — maternal instinct and I likewise have zero paternal drive or instinct. Just nothing there at all.

There was never even any question of children or wanting them. Makes things just so much easier.

Speed Steamin’

When I was taking the competency test to attend community college, I finished and told the proctor I was done but that I hadn’t gotten any results. They were supposed to appear immediately.

The proctor looked confused and said something about having never seen that happen before. He spent some minutes messing around on his computer and then said that my exam had been flagged for probable cheating.

I said, “I’m on video and you’re sitting about eight feet away from me. How could I cheat?”

Anyway, the CC spent quite a long time (more than a week) reviewing the video and eventually decided I hadn’t cheated. They’d just never had anyone get a perfect score on a two hour test in 12 minutes.

LOL. I love doing shit like that.

That test was mad easy, y’all.

Directing

I really didn’t think I would get this far. Asking for advice. (IT Director).

I became the IT Director of a large regional company with about three years of full-time IT experience. It can be done.

By the way, I did great. I was probably one of the youngest people in the country with that role, if not the youngest. What I didn’t know, I researched. If I truly was out of my depth I brought in outside help.

But I succeeded so hard they begged me to stay when I decided to leave that role.

Cope Fact

Indeed. I’m not Asian, but I don’t have to grind to utterly defeat nearly anyone in anything to do with reading comprehension and understanding large volumes of disparate data really quickly and thoroughly.

In that arena, I can do what takes normies days (if they can do it at all1) in 20-30 minutes. There is no grind. I can just do it as easily as water flows downhill. Pretending I have to work hard at it would only be a cope by others.

I took a nap during one of the big standardized tests (CTSB?) back in school and still mogged every kid in the state but two others2. To say that I wasn’t even trying would be an understatement. For at least half the exam period, I wasn’t even awake.

  1. Most often, they cannot
  2. And we all got identical scores.

Read Me In

What is a ‘privilege’ you have that you didn’t realize was a privilege until you saw how other people live?

Off the charts reading comprehension and ability to quickly understand nearly anything. I didn’t truly realize until I was well into adulthood how much of a superpower this is as well as what advantages it gives me.

And for a long time I thought other people just weren’t trying, but it wasn’t that. They just didn’t have the capability. That I could read something in two minutes and understand it all and the entire superstructure of thought behind (and ahead) of it and contextualize it effortlessly while they could spend two hours reading the same work or document and get nearly nothing out of it was a real eye-opener.

This talent certainly made my life vastly better than it otherwise would’ve been. It means I can do “impossible” stuff like day-trade and solve problems in minutes that take other people hours, days, weeks or years.

Extend

Think about the below as you’re exercising.

Longer life and longer health; every minute you work out extends your life (on average of course) 5-9 minutes and your healthy years perhaps even more than that. Also, people treat you vastly better when you’re fitter. Fair or not, ethical or not, it’s true. I’ve had a cute airline staff girl offer to walk me to my gate that I could see clearly from where I was standing, and a DMV woman who spent a long time on the phone on my behalf and waived all my fees because she thought I was hot.

None of that ever would’ve happened before I worked out and got super fit.

Also, and this matters more to me than any of that, it’s worth it to be the best version of myself I can be for me and just as importantly, for my partner. Why reach for mediocrity when you could instead reach for greatness? Why be a formless lump when you could be as a god?

Dream big, strive hard, do amazing things. It’s worth it and so much better than the alternative.