There comes a time in the life of any intelligent, successful person where the delta between them and the people around them becomes so wide that they can no longer really relate to each other in the same way
This was always the case to some degree, but eventually you reach a critical point where the experiences you’ve accumulated, the patterns you’ve recognized, and the competence you’ve developed are so far removed from those of your peers that even people who were relatively close to you early on can no longer really understand your perspective
I see this as both a good and a bad thing. You ofc have a degree of freedom and a way of seeing the world that you probably wouldn’t trade, but there’s also a growing lack of relatability
You can see people making decisions that you feel relatively certain aren’t going to work out, because you’ve already experienced the downstream consequences of similar decisions, or you’ve seen the pattern play out enough times to understand where it’s heading
Yet trying to explain this to them often makes you sound delusional. They haven’t had the experiences necessary to understand why you see things the way you do, and from their perspective, you’re the one who’s detached from reality
The main problem with this is that you eventually start questioning whether you’re actually delusional
Because you look around and everybody is doing something different. They’re following conventional paths and making decisions that seem perfectly reasonable to them. Meanwhile, you’ve developed a very different model of how things work, and you can see the flaws in a lot of what they’re doing
But what if you’re wrong? What if you’ve just constructed an elaborate narrative around your own experiences and convinced yourself that you see something other people don’t?
The irony is that the ability to question yourself is part of what allowed you to get here in the first place. You had to be sufficiently self-aware to recognize when something wasn’t working and continually update your model of reality
So then you find yourself caught between two things: the recognition that your own way of seeing things has repeatedly produced results, and the fact that almost everyone around you seems to be operating according to a different set of assumptions
And I think the best answer is to continue leaning into what got you here, while remaining sufficiently self-aware to recognize when you’re wrong
Because if you’re going to do anything meaningfully different, there will inevitably be periods where the evidence available to you makes sense before it makes sense to anyone else
A lot of talented, intelligent guys figure out how to play games really well from an early age
This transitions pretty naturally into business later on. Depending on the type of intelligence they have, they start to see patterns earlier than other people, make better decisions + accumulate the compounding benefits of doing so over time
They experience a lot of success because they’re innately good at taking objective reality, figuring out what’s working and what isn’t, and pivoting accordingly
The interesting thing is that this becomes progressively more fine-tuned throughout their life. The more they do it, the better they get at it, and the more the game itself reinforces the underlying behavior
The fundamental feedback loop is pretty straightforward. You look at reality objectively, identify what’s wrong or what could be improved, adjust your behavior, and get a better result. Repeat this enough times and you become exceptionally good at it
The problem is that the game itself starts to become your model for life
And how you perceive reality quite literally becomes your reality
The game isn’t just economics either, although it certainly attracts extremes in this category. It’s everything you’ve learned to do well, everything that has rewarded you for being this way
At a certain point, you start to realize that there are other dimensions of life that don’t operate according to the same rules. Relationships, love, internal peace, actually feeling things, being present, having a sense of self that isn’t entirely contingent on what you’re doing or how well you’re doing it
And the really interesting part is that some of the traits that got you here can actively get in the way of developing those other dimensions
Because you simply CANNOT approach everything as a problem to solve
In fact, some of the most important things in life seem to require almost the opposite of what made you successful
This is a particularly difficult transition for anyone who has spent their entire life being rewarded for the ability to adapt and make things happen
The real challenge is learning when the thing that makes you exceptionally good at one game is no longer the thing that will get you where you want to go in another
And being intelligent enough to recognize that isn’t necessarily the same as being able to do it
At some point, you have to develop an entirely different relationship with reality
It requires a big leap of faith into the unknown, which feels like death at first
There is no other option tho, unless you want to continuing living a life of illusion