Talent Stacking and Career Changes

You can just do things

Before we Begin-

Neurovolt, the nootropic brain energy and stress resilience formula I had in the pipeline for a year, its finally available.

Get yourself a bottle or two (standard serving size is 3 capsules).

Recently I was on Wall St Papis new podcast, talking about Athanor and the journey of starting the company. It was one of the most enjoyable podcasts Ive done, and we managed to cover the entire timeline of when I started personal training in college to today.

Near the end of the interview, I touch on the role of mimetics, Rene Girard, and how I never wanted to live an “imitable life”. Ive always pursued things that I find personally meaningfully, and engaging in short term status games or following conventional expectations is simply not how I operate.

I was this way when I was very young, and Ive never changed.

In my late 20s, I would read “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World” by Rene Girard.

René Girard’s philosophy centers on the claim that humans learn what to want by imitating the desires of others. This imitation creates our personalities and psyche.

No one is truly “original”. We learn a language, all have the same base desires, and we assemble ourselves through experiences.

We can be original in what we build, discover, or create, but also recognize that this originality is assembled from imitative raw material.

Im not the first person to start a chemical company, attempt to onshore a supply chain, and take a risk. But I am doing something unique thats never been done before in this way.

Models exist for everything, but how they are expressed and combined and live IS highly individual.

Overall, the reaction from my following has been immensely positive. That said, when Ive described the journey Im on, it has broken peoples brains at times, there is a current theme of incredulity.

You are REALLY doing this??! How?!

This is not discouragement from, more pure surprise as to how one can simply pivot towards something else.

Personally, I found the “status game” of being a creator to be hollow.

Its simply not fulfilling. I have faith I am a useful person with purpose, but the trajectory of online life is assessed by likes, shares, impression.

Im good at this. I don’t denigrate marketing, storytelling, and advertising as skills and abilities. If you have these powers, you possess something akin to magic. Use it for good.

But it also became a game that I simply did not want to play for forever is my primary game. I did not want the path of my life to be defined by how many views I could get as a fitness personality.

I wanted to solve problems that were more critical, more important, more essential to the infrastructure of civilisation, and success was not contingent purely on traffic generated and conversions.

There is a model of what a health influencer is, and what an influencer does.

Ive always been aware of this model, Ive lived it after all. Im supposed to post, talk about a certain set of subjects, and stay within particular lanes. Ive done this better than most, but there is still a formula.

But I decided to change and pursue something I see as a higher, more meaningful mission.

What I want to tell all of you,

Do not ever be constrained by your identity and expectations

There is no such phenomenon as having “no identity”. To be a fully formed individual, we need concrete beliefs, virtues, and orientation.

But an identity can constrain which models and paths feel available or legitimate to you. If you see yourself as a particular kind of person, you limit yourself models that reinforce this, and reject desires that would threaten the internal narrative (“people like me don’t do X”).

Your internal loci can gradually become more external over time, and the “identity crisis” people sometimes experience is this awareness that fate has guided them and they never made their own individual choices. Their choices were decided for them by others. Family, the group they belong to, the profession, the social world they inhabit.

This is NOT automatically a bad thing. But its not always good either. It can become a cage.

But you have the keys, and the locks are on the inside.

You can change. You can redefine yourself. You can take your skills and stack them with another one.

The 20th century mental model of a definable and linear “career” is dead anyway. The most successful people of the 21st century are intelligent, adaptable, and have unique talent stacks.

(The concept of skill/talent stacking I credit to Scott Adams. Get good at enough things, and you can carve out an incredibly unique life path).

You can just do things.