The belief
A life spent in pursuit of something you deem worthy is a life worth living, whether or not you get recognized or arrive there.
That in itself rules out nothing. It lacks a guiding rule, and for most it would leave them drifting off path. So here is the part it leaves out.
You only fail by circling and not trying, not by not arriving.
That is the test, and it can be checked. At the end of a week I can ask whether I moved on the thing or went around it, and the answer is not open to interpretation. The outcome stays out of the judgment, because the outcome is not fully yours. The action is.
I should say who this is aimed at. It is for people who were not handed a meaning they actually believe. If you have one, this is not a correction of it. I am agnostic at the center of things. I lean toward there being something, because the arrangement is too strange for me to be confident there is not, but that still leaves me without a given reason to be here. This is what I do with that.
What not acting looks like
I have a Roam Research vault from a couple of years ago. In it is a complete plan for becoming a vulnerability researcher without going to school. Every subject in order, the resources for each one, how long each would take. It took weeks. I never opened it again.
It was not laziness and it was not a lack of interest. Building the plan felt like progress, produced nothing, and protected me the whole time, because a plan that has not been started cannot fail yet. I did that for years in different forms, and the artifact is still sitting there.
I also work a desk job at the university, and for a long time I treated those shifts as time to get through. Same mistake in a smaller frame. Those hours are not a waiting room before my life starts. I can sit at that desk with a laptop and come out knowing something I did not know when I walked in, and now I mostly do. Not every hour has to be productive. But there is a difference between choosing to do nothing and letting the time get taken by default.
A pursuit is not a goal
If your pursuit is completable, it is most likely a goal. A goal is a number you reach. A pursuit is an asymptote, a curve that gets closer to the line forever and never touches it, and the distance keeps shrinking the whole way. A pursuit would have many goals achieved along the way.
I have a habit of leaving things. Sometimes after I have gotten good enough to know I could, sometimes earlier, when it stops being new.
The clearest case is chess. I played my best friend at a coffee shop most days for a long stretch. At some point I started winning consistently, and by the last few months of it I was not losing at all. That is when I stopped playing. The honest first reason is that I had gotten scared of losing, because there was no version of continuing where I only won. The second reason showed up later and it is the more comfortable one, that beating one person was completable and there was nothing left in it. Both are true. Fear came first, and I want it in that order, because the second explanation on its own is the one I would reach for.
He kept playing. He has put thousands of games into the app since and does not seem to care when he loses, which is the part I did not have.
I used to read that whole pattern as weakness. Part of it is. But part of it is that what I was chasing was small enough to finish. Beating one person is completable. Getting good at chess is not.
I am in no way against goal setting. I think they are even something that is needed. It is how the pursuit becomes actionable in your day to day. They are different things and I spent many years treating them as one, which caused me to have a problem finishing anything, making it feel like an ending.
I will not argue that this belief is convenient for me. I never really reached most of my goals, so saying the goals themselves were the problem is either the cop out or the actual reason, and I cannot tell you which from here. So here is what would make me drop it. If I go deep on one thing, past the point where I have proven I can do it, and I still walk away, then the size of the target was never what was going on and this was an excuse with better wording. That is a real outcome and it is one I could produce, and if it happens I will say so here.
Leaving after depth is a different thing. Once you realize a pursuit is not what you thought it was, it benefits nobody to stay in it. Do not get trapped in an identity other people created and expect from you. That is not the same as walking away because the work got hard.
Two versions of the same defense
The vault and the chess are same same but different.
When I write up the perfect plan, spending weeks on it, making sure I don’t leave out a single thing you’d need to learn to master something, I can be great. But when I dive into learning it, I become someone who has the ability to fail, and it tests my fear of whether I am smart or not. Chess grew into that unintentionally. I played because I enjoyed it. Then I stopped losing, and it turned into the same thing: if I play, I test the fear.
If I get even a step toward being great and then run into a rough patch, the doubt eats me and I stop trying. Whether that looks like not doing the thing at all, or like messing around so I can tell people I wasn’t really trying, it is all protecting an ego built out of people telling me I could be something before I had been anything.
I would rather have evidence of what I am actually good at than live in a false reality where I could be good at anything.
You cannot aim at something you cannot see yet
When I was a kid I played RuneScape. After the Grand Exchange came out I mined clay, wet it, and sold it, and I thought that was a good way to make money. It was one of the worst. Kids my age were running Barrows and flipping on the Exchange, and some of them had fire capes. I knew all of it existed. I could not tell which of it was worth doing, and no amount of thinking about it from where I was standing would have told me. Playing told me.
That is most of why I do not believe a person can sit down, specify who they want to be, and then go be them. You do not know what you do not know. What you can do is point roughly, move, and correct. The correcting is not the plan failing. It is the method.
Reality is cruel to people who think they can make a perfect plan. Imagine being a pirate in the days before a weather forecast, making the perfect plan to reach the treasure on the map, trying to predict every wind that will hit your sails before you have set sail.
It also took me too long to work out that progress is not linear and it is not on a schedule. At twenty-three I thought my life was effectively over because I had not started. At twenty-nine I think that was ridiculous. I still feel a version of it some days. But the years already spent are gone, and spending more of them mourning the first set is the only way to actually make the waste real.
What I actually needed
Here is the hole I found in all of it.
The pursuit on its own was an incomplete belief, and it left me drifting. What follows does not come out of it directly. It was the fix for the hole in the direction.
You can live your life in pursuit and that alone is an amazing thing. But for the easily distracted and the starting line planners like me, it is an incomplete way to live.
Pursuit is a broad term, and while you are in one you still need a way to weigh your tasks. I can sit at my laptop at nine saying I want to be in pursuit of something worthy. It answers nothing and gives me no way to head out. This is not a discipline problem. Self discipline might be the single greatest attribute a person can have, and even with it, nothing to weigh your tasks against leaves the greatest of us wandering. There was nothing on the other side of the scale.
The belief says a life in pursuit is worth living. It says nothing about how to get one specific person, with my particular set of failures, to sit down and work. That came from my own record, which is the only evidence I have that is actually about me.
The target
The target is what you are pointed at. It is not in charge of my life, but in the hours I set aside it is the dictator. Time shared with people who are in pursuit of something else, it has no bearing on.
My target: understand machines at the level where the bugs live, and go deeper in one domain than I have gone in anything. Build a new way of seeing my world, not just a new place to see it from.
The first part is the direction. Being able to break down a board, or an old machine I found at DI for five dollars that does not work, and figure out why. Bugs meaning software or physical, anything creating an unintentional problem or a vulnerability in the machine. That is where failures have character.
The rest is more embarrassing to write. I have lived without depth. I have skimmed a lot of things, and not in the way that leaves you with a multidisciplinary way of attacking problems. It left me able to bring a lot of things up and then not explain them when asked, which is not a fun experience. Character comes from failure and depth, and I have spent a life avoiding both. So the first measure is not a level, it is time. Am I still in the same domain in two years. That cannot be graded generously and it cannot be faked. It is also only a test of staying, not of depth. You can stay somewhere for two years and remain shallow. Depth needs its own evidence, and the evidence is harder problems, work I can do without following someone’s instructions, and things built or taken apart.
Everything that is not that time is not a violation of it. Reading, fixing old tech, a long conversation, sitting around. Those are not the pursuit failing. They are just not that time.
The rules
The rule for this list is that a line only goes in if something that actually happened produced it. Everything I could not support that way is out, no matter how good it sounded. It gets longer when an event makes it longer, not when I think of something.
The last one is the newest and the thinnest.
- Cross the threshold instead of negotiating with it. Starting is the hard part, not the work. I spent a whole semester hating the walk to the math desk and enjoying myself within ten minutes of sitting down at it, every time, without that ever making the next day easier.
- Build the consequence before the novelty runs out, because that is when I leave. I used to think I stopped things because nothing was forcing me. Looking at the record, I stop when the thing stops being new. Everything that survived had a deadline attached before that point. This site is one of them.
- Stay past the point where I have proven I can. See the chess.
- Never leave when the only evidence against the thing is that it got hard, boring, or bruising. Those are the three reasons I have actually left things, and none of them is information about the thing. There are real reasons to leave, and they show up in line eight.
- Let reality correct me without turning it into a verdict on me. I studied two days for a trig test, memorized the practice test and the formula sheet, and got a 70. I knew how to do those specific problems and did not understand the concepts underneath them. I studied properly for the next one and got a 98. The 70 was information about a method, not about me.
- It is easy to feel like you are in pursuit when you are really avoiding. Cheap dopamine is easy to spot and easy to get consumed by. Time spent reading about how serious people work, comparing which book to start with, or rebuilding the system toward a goal is not as easy to spot, but the outcome is the same. You get a similar release while staying in the same place. The vault, a grand plan with everything you need to know in it and no action behind it, is the biggest example. You can go to bed thinking you are closer than you were yesterday because of what you planned, but the plan gives you a false feeling of progress.
- Effort is not the same as pursuit. There was a stretch where I worked somewhere between fifty and sixty-five hours a week while carrying a full course load. Whatever my problem is, it is not that I cannot work hard. What that period trained was getting through a week. It did not train anything I actually wanted to be good at, and I could have kept doing it for years and arrived nowhere.
- The vehicle can change without the pursuit changing. I was going to do cyberwarfare in the Air Force, waited seven months on it, and went to school instead. I started in cybersecurity and moved to computer engineering when the coursework I was taking turned out to be certifications and sysadmin material. Those look like four different plans from up close. From further back they are the same thing, which is getting under the comfortable layer of a machine. Leaving a vehicle is allowed. Leaving because the work got hard or boring is not, and that is the only version of leaving I have to watch for.
- Don’t run from the boring version. I have two settings. One is all in, everything at once, like the stretch in rule seven, until it ends. The other is a clean quit. Neither is the problem by itself. The problem is the middle, a normal amount on a normal day, kept up long enough that it stops feeling like anything. I have never run that one. What usually happens instead is I get ahead, decide that means I have earned a break, and the relaxing turns into complacency and being lenient with my own rules. The eight rules above this one assume the middle mode exists. It mostly does not yet.
What I want out of it
In the end, the only thing that truly matters to me is living a life in pursuit of something you yourself deem worthy. That is the part I would argue for. What follows is one person’s route to it.
At the center of it I want to be absorbed by something completely enough that the mundane cannot reach me. That is a feeling and not a target. It cannot tell me what to open at night, which is what the other two are for, but it is the honest answer to why any of this matters to me.
When you have no way of seeing the world that is geared toward analysis, you lose yourself to the material one. I do not wish for more things, I wish for more understanding. If tools get me there, great. If not, I will find another way.
I am putting this up because saying a thing publicly, with a date on it, is the only kind of self-imposed commitment that has ever held for me. Ones other people impose, like school, hold fine. It is mine that need a witness. This is the third site I have built. The first two are gone, and neither of them had a date attached to anything. That is the actual reason to believe this one means something, and also the reason to withhold judgment on it.
So here is the check, and it has two parts because a two-year test is useless on its own. I have historically left well before the two-year mark, which means the long one only reports after the point where I would already be gone. The short one is that the domain becomes the subject of the weekly post rather than something I add on top of it, starting within six weeks. That one costs me the option of writing about whatever was easiest that week, which is the point. The long one is whether I am still in the same domain in two years. If the first one does not show up, none of the rest of this is worth reading.
Also published on substack.