If I had to criticize my subscribers it’d be that too many of you think you need “unlearning” when really you need, e.g., 1–2 years of financial runway.
I get a lot of dms from people making this error:
But if you have anxiety while you’re broke and living with your parents, yea it’s probably protecting you and tbh somewhat risky to attempt to remove.
Honestly I’m not sure I’ve seen “unlearning” be (lastingly) useful when someone’s life situation is ~objectively ~bad.
Financial runway can ofc be substituted with community you trust—eg friends, family, monasteries.
Mentorship is probably still useful too, but that’s *learning* not *unlearning*; not something I do or have experience with.
It’s a tough situation, i’m sorry. I hope you can find guidance from support that has successfully helped with this, because I have only failed.
For this reason, I’ve learned not to work with anyone 1:1 if they have external bottlenecks:
I’m not sure there’s much point in attempting to remove internal bottlenecks when big external bottlenecks are present.
Besides, resolving external bottlenecks makes purportedly “internal” bottlenecks immediately disappear, or at least significantly easier to remove:
Are you targeting your primary bottleneck?
View this post as a thread on twitter.
Related threads:
How @Pear_with_legs mitigated his external bottlenecks
In yesterday’s post, I featured @Pear_with_legs’s success story:
About | Twitter | Finding bottlenecks for people helping superintelligence go well
I’m dying finally a materialist view of self improvement
Highest impact post you’ve written Chris, most people have a long triage tree and they’re starting by trying to fix stuff too deep into it