Pathways now has a podcast – please follow it!

In the past couple of days, I’ve had the chance to speak to some very, very smart people, and it’s all the result of a weird series of coincidences. Or maybe they’re not really coincidences, and maybe they’re just fate. I don’t know what it is, but either way, I realized that every single member of Harvard’s class of 2028 and Yale’s class of 2028, as well as Stanford’s class of 2028, was watching Pathways to Excellence.

Why do I know this?

I know this because I ended up speaking to almost every single one of them, only to hear that they were aware of what I was doing, that they had watched the videos, that prepared for their Harvard interviews, or otherwise in some way, shape, or form.

It’s also been interesting to watch things play out, as I’ve secured interviews that are very different along the way, with people of rather unique backgrounds, which I’ll perhaps talk more about in the days to come.

It’s very inspiring to speak to smart people – I have no idea how that’s going to influence my future just yet, but the outlines are there, but I would have done this regardless of what had happened anyway. What is clear for sure though is that this is meaningful, something I’m honored to be a part of and a journey that I will continue to value in the days to come.

One thing I’d definitely like to do a lot more this year is make myself capable of doing large batches of work all at a time.

I don’t mean just going out there and working as hard as possible to put myself through a suffering that is inhuman, impossible to bear through, but instead the simple act of understanding how to schedule things so that you have more time in between the moments when you obtain inspiration such that you have a natural reminder to continue going out there, enter the game, and do as you will do.

Willpower of course is a very important thing, but it is limited. That is why we create systems, things that automate our labor, but of course no system can operate without the willpower in the very first place even as it is true that expecting continual, consistent, and unrelenting willpower is a recipe for burnout and self-damage to degrees unreasonable even for the most hardened of men.

In this upcoming new year, I look forward to being able to find many more systems that will continue to make work easier for me, to be able to more delicately navigate the balance between willpower effort and also attainment of actual results in the days ahead. I’m given the sense that somehow or another, that needs to be a continual part of everything that I’m doing going forward.

How exactly that is going to work out and how it will happen, I am not totally sure just yet, but ideas and intuition abound, and what I’m confident of is that in many ways, this is a knowledge thing.

By simply elevating yourself from an initial phase where no knowledge is present to one where awareness has been developed, a person can lift themselves up to heights hitherto unknown.

That has been the experience that I’ve known throughout my entire life, save for a few inconvenient lapses during which I thought it was not the case, only to realize at the end of the day, as if the proverbial ball thrown up, only to recognize that it would come down, or the message in the bottle thrown into the sea only to return to the beach to which it was destined and the eyes to whom it was fated to belong.