Building things of worth in a shallow world

To a defeated soul:

Accept that most people are not good at what they do, nor interested in becoming good at what they do. Most are just looking at their work as a means to an end. A way to pay the bills. Take the family on a vacation. Save a little more towards that boat.

But very few actually seek to attain competency (let alone mastery) in their line of work.

As a result, what you're most likely to be met with—in respect to your own work—is indifference.

Not because your work is bad or wrong, but because the very people you're giving it to lack the understanding and experience to truly understand its value.

The machine will tell you that you just have to go a bit further. It will tell you to post more. To run ads. To do SEO. Just do more. Those things of course don't work for most people by any reliable measure, and so, the likely outcome of following that path is despair.

If instead you take your eyes off of the ends and focus solely on your craft: you are by no means guaranteeing or inviting external validation, but if done honestly, you are absolutely guaranteeing an internal wellspring rising up—solving your own problems, getting better, and making things that you view as valuable is the elixir of gods.

No "audience" or "follower" can take that from you. If you're serious about your work, protecting this internal light is your most important task.

I can promise you that along the way, many will say and do things that try to reduce this light.

Passive aggression. Backhanded compliments. General weasel-esque behavior. All with the intent of stopping you—not because you're doing anything wrong, but because your pursuit of mastery and slowly but surely working towards achieving excellence is a threat to the person who refuses to do the same thing themselves.

Label this group how you see fit—but from my humble perch, I can tell you that it's far closer to being the majority than it is to being the minority.

So what is one to do? Just keep working. Keep improving. Recognize the process as a life long sine wave, oscillating between joy and struggle.

If your ends are not exclusively material wealth or status, but instead, dedicating your life to becoming the best at what you do, even if you die poor in a material sense, you will die happy in the spiritual sense knowing that you stayed the course and didn't get swallowed whole by the trivia and ephemera of society and its countless platitudes like your peers did.

That may not be what you want to hear, but if you're serious about staying true to your craft: you have to internalize it.

The friction you will feel as you progress is not some failing of yourself. No, it's a reflection of what others truly value in this life: distraction, entertainment, and anything that will numb the realization that one is not fulfilling their life's task.

From your perspective, this won't make sense because you will have done nothing wrong. But it's not about you; it's about them.

That "attack" (if we want to ascribe it the hostility it tends to emit) has nothing to do with you. It's a person who sees (through you) that it is possible, however, they allow the conditioning of the world to snuff their own internal light.

As such, this leads to aggression that's projected onto people like you who aren't ensnared by the shallowness of the world.

I hate to say it, but: this is the trade off you make when you dedicate your life to perfecting your craft.

It's lonely. It can be sad. But when you finally slide that puzzle piece you've been looking for into place and your idea or vision finally comes into focus: you will laugh at any and every detractor, because you will have realized that what you ultimately needed was never external—it was always inside of you; guiding you towards that rare, peak human experience of having attained real control over yourself and your work.

Stay frosty,
Ryan