The metric for success is reality

the best game ever

Today, I had the type of meta-realization that made scared I’d forget it; as soon as I had it, I drove back home as quickly as possible to start typing this up. Meta-realization as in a realization that unites and gives direction to all the mini-realizations and observations I’ve had these past few months.

First, some caveats: I was only able to have this thought as a result of reducing my distractions to the point where I could only hear my mind. Where, given silence, the default reaction of my mind was to start looking around, to start thinking, instead of to pull up instagram—a huge shift from before.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will continue to rule you, and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung

This realization I’m having was previously unconscious, and it previously did rule me; I didn’t understand why my work wasn’t as fulfilling as I had hoped, I didn’t understand why I would have these intense urges to start side projects, I didn’t understand why when I thought about starting those projects I would immediately get sad, I didn’t understand how to evaluate which projects to pursue vs not, I didn’t understand how to evaluate joining the Optimus team vs the robotaxi team, I couldn’t respond well to Adrian’s question: “but you’re not building the death star, you’re building a panel on the death star”, I couldn’t answer Chinmay’s question: “what’s your five year plan?” And before this realization, my response to failing to understand these questions was slowly but surely giving up. I could feel myself stop asking the questions and beginning to accept in my head that this is simply how the world works.

**“**For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.” - Viktor Frankl

The world isn’t a game—it’s real. Changing the world isn’t some mystical side quest to pursue by dreamers that “just don’t understand the way the world works”—it’s in effect the only thing that matters, because it’s the only thing that is real, and only real things matter.

Viktor is right—it is necessary to pursue causes greater than oneself. Necessary because ultimately, you are simply not enough. In this way, the question: “how do I do work I love?” puts the cart before the horse; the right question should be “what do I care about most.”

There are a few different causes greater than oneself—the pursuit of truth, the pursuit of change, the pursuit of love. But ultimately, all are grounded in reality. I currently do not know of a great cause that does not operate at this level. This is because causes are consequential. If your cause did not have a real consequence, then it would not be a great one: you could simply run around in your own mind playing out your own cause without ever having to test it against the harsh brutality of the world. This is the sacrifice necessary to achieve anything of substantive consequence in the world—you must risk something of consequence, you ground yourself in reality.

The reason I wasn’t happy at work is because I was unconsciously realizing that I wasn’t having an impact on the world—which is why I came here in the first place. I came here on the whim that the problems that Tesla was trying to solve were substantive, important problems, and that I wanted to try having a part in solving some of those problems. That is not what has been happening. I work on a small engineering problem that any competent engineer could solve. If I died tomorrow, Tesla, and the rest of the world, would not change one bit.

“99% of your effort is waste” - Sam Altman

There are a very small, select people that create change in the world. Everyone else is a bystander, or at most at stepping stone for these people. These people are incredibly competent, courageous souls that are also working on the most important problems of their time that are also working on problems that only they could solve that are also at the exact right point in history and time. All work that people do outside of this is, at least on the scale of humanity, utterly and completely useless. In order to have effect, you must be indispensable, working indispensable problems.

On the scale of humanity’s consequence, working at Tesla has brought my contribution from 0, to 0.000001—I’m probably at least serving as a very tiny stepping stone for some stepping stone for some stepping stone that Elon is jumping on top of. In effect, a negligible difference.

This unconscious realization ultimately drove me to start considering my list of projects I’d been meaning to start. But how to choose which one? The only metric thus far which I had measured these ideas to was one of pleasure and enjoyment. I had watched “BenNBuilds college files”, a youtube episode of an incredible engineer that spent his whole youth pursuing ideas that simply delighted his curiosity, and come away with it with the idea that I should pick whatever idea seemed the most fun, or I was the most interested in. But after long hours of indecision, I felt trapped; was this really all there was to it? Just doing things that made me, Blake Dee, feel happy? Surely there was more.

The answer is that I must pursue ideas that align closely with one of my deepest values—pursuing reality. It’s abundantly clear to me that if all I wanted to do was satisfy my own happiness, I probably could get pretty close; America has so much wealth and so many incredible builders that I could easily get by on a cushy, well-paid job, and spend the rest of my time entertaining myself in my own, egotistical games in which I was always the winner. But I desire to test the limits of this world. I desire to know where truth and reality lies. I want to know exactly what it is that makes this world tick. I want to pursue the true answers to my curiosity. This is why the Blue pill matters—because it’s a contract you sign with your life that says I care more about the world than myself. To be “of the world” and not “in the world”. To realize that you are not enough.

“You waste years by not being able to waste hours” - Amos Tversky

Curiosity is ultimately the key to find the problems and tools that really have an impact. I have immense respect for people that make this curiosity - the pursuit of truth - their entire lives. I’m thinking specifically of these incredible noble prize scientists I’ve been listening to—many note specifically that they achieved their findings not by thinking about how it my change the world, but instead out of pure curiosity. But there is greater nuance. In Nobel Prize conversations, Mougi Bawendi describes how the job of a scientist is to ask better questions, and through this discover truth. The implication of this is that there is a better curiosity and a worse curiosity, and that the metric for evaluation is reality—whatever discovers the most truth. If you’re immensely curious and ask all sorts of questions about something that is foundationally delusional, and you place that delightful curiosity itself over what really matters - if it’s correct - then you’ve essentially contributed nothing to the world.

This is where my past diverges from today’s realization. It’s not enough to ask questions—I must be asking good questions. The more the question uncovers reality, or contributes to its actualization, the better the question is.

I’m going to quickly tie up a sad mini-realizations I’d mentioned before: “but you’re not working on the death star, you’re working on a panel”. Well maybe YOU are, but that doesn’t mean EVERYONE is. There actually are people who are building the full death star, who are the driving people making it happen, whom the death star’s consequences are owned entirely by, whom the death star’s existence solely depends upon. The goal is there. The goal is to be one of those people.

I digress. What am I going to do about it?

In my head there are a few futures that excite me:

• Intergalactic humanity, or at least interplanetary

• Quasi-infinite, highly accessible and cheap energy

• Life-editing—solving aging, gene editing super-humans and changing what it means to be human

→ [Part 2]