Levitra….

I’m no Robert Scoble or anything, but this blog has served me well. Some blog posts have spun off into other sites, some of them bring in some nice side income, some have landed me big clients. Along the way, I’ve learned web design skills, become a better writer (I never even considered myself a writer before), and come to generally understand media better.

Yes, “be yourself,” as long as “yourself” is creative, enterprising, and self-motivated – mixed in with some particular interests.

That’s my response to the part of the discussion that my caveman brain was able to process.

By concentrating on stuff such as wealth, you assume it is the greatest good. But isn’t the greatest good happiness? Many (sometimes myself included) belief that wealth brings happiness and that is why we pursue it. But it turns out, wealth or not, the thing that matters most for happiness is just being ourselves. I had the opportunity be surrounded by very wealthy people in the most wealthy city in the world (NYC), and saw that, in the end, these people were not satisfied inside. Because the work they were doing did not RESONATE with them. That is what I am trying to find.

And a favorite quote:
You were born an original. Don’t die a copy. ~John Mason

What’s BYFL? Bring Your Free Lunch? Be Your Finest Leprechaun?

This shouldn’t sound so negative. You might make me learn HTML. I mean my Spanish is mostly gone so why not pick up something else?

But finally (to return to being a prick), I wonder about this basic schism in the formula: be / yourself. I’m speaking somewhat from experience here, but I think the relevance might be broad: when one goes into one’s own field, starts engaging that “one burning passion” or what-have-you, very suddenly it happens that there is no outside any longer. Or perhaps no “time off.” Where “being yourself” had been a break from the performance of job duties, it now becomes a job in itself, and I wonder if there is something in the self (or maybe just the late-capitalist self) that rebels from this kind of use. For example, where once a party was simply a party (admittedly maybe this situation never obtained), now it is a networking opportunity. Where once your passion for the poetry of Fernando Pessoa required no justification, it now comes under scrutiny from every previously-unimaginable angle. (“You like Pessoa? But you haven’t come to terms with his incipient fascism???”)

None of these comments should be taken as rebuttals, just acts of problematizing and being a dick, generally.