Life in itself has no meaning.

Nietzsche and Camus were right. The world is neutral. Meaning is not something life is born with. It is something we assign to it afterward, and metaphysically.

A life without meaning is nothing but the wretched survival of one day after another. I was thrown into this world without regard for my will, but how to live is something I must decide, continuously, for myself.

So the question follows naturally. Why do I not kill myself?¹

The desire to carry my will through — that is my only reason for living.

I am a creature of my own will. The trajectory of my life is the imprint of that will. In the end all of us have this desire to carry our will through. Only the range and the intensity differ. Most people project their will onto a narrow, bounded range, at an intensity too shallow to remain anywhere, and then they leave. A few heroes pursue greatness and draw a trajectory equal to it before they leave. That is how a name survives in history.

Seen from a distance, a life is far too short; seen up close, it is long enough. So one must live a life with a mission. I want to become great. I want to achieve something great. I want to leave my name in history, and to accomplish goals that ordinary people cannot even imagine — goals they can only look up at. It is a posture toward life that puts the values of the spirit first.²

Life is a shuttling back and forth between pain and boredom.³ I will gladly choose pain over boredom. Pain can be endured; boredom cannot be overcome.

This is my answer to why I do not kill myself.

There is a gravity toward the mean. I resist it.

To achieve greatness, to carry my will through vastly and deeply, I have to repudiate the ordinary. Because the world tells me to become ordinary.

The world is designed to run along its own inertia. Human beings, as social animals, pull at one another. In the end each of us as an individual is drawn toward all the rest as a mass. We fall to the ground, pulled by gravity.

This is why most lives trace a linear trajectory. It is the result of fearing pain and choosing boredom instead.

Only those who overcome that gravity can achieve the extraordinary.

Non-inertial, non-linear. This is the shape of life I have chosen.

A few exceptional people produce all exceptional results. I narrow my engagement to them.

Gravity is so hard to resist that most people are not exceptional. The Pareto principle describes reality with a precision that is almost merciless. No — if anything, it understates it. The structure of the world is not 20:80 but 1:99. One percent of people, the great ones, produce ninety-nine percent of the achievement.

There is only one condition for greatness: to refuse compromise and to give the whole of oneself. Everything has to be staked. One who stakes half gets not half but nothing. Greatness never comes to one who has not staked everything.

Greatness is therefore, by its nature, solitary and set apart.

With most people it is better to keep relations superficial. The closer you stay to those who stay close to the ground, the harder it becomes to leave gravity behind. What matters is to hold very deep relations with the few exceptional people who have escaped gravity and swim freely.

Seek out groups with the highest possible talent density and the fewest possible members. Best is to work one-on-one with a hero who will change the world; next is to work with a handful of geniuses; worst is to belong to an organization full of countless ordinary people. Talent density and organizational size are inversely proportional to a startling degree.

Excellence is not easy to recognize.

Excellence is not intelligence, nor material or social achievement. It is where the person is headed. Is every muscle in your body aligned to hurl you forward? Is this someone who dreams without a ceiling and has the hard will to execute that dream?

What values did this person hold at the decisive moments of their life, and what did they decide? Does this person refuse to compromise? Why do they live? These are the invisible things.

The only thing to trust is how a person has acted and how they have lived. Not words, not vision. The trajectory of my life shouts me aloud.

Greatness requires alignment and conviction.

How is greatness achieved? The vector toward greatness has a direction and a magnitude. The direction is alignment; the magnitude is conviction.

Alignment is knowing where I am going. On a coordinate plane, $n$ random steps carry you only $\sqrt{n}$ from where you began, but $n$ steps in a single direction carry you a distance proportional to $n$.⁴ You do not have to know everything. It matters just as much to know where to draw the line around what is known, and how much to leave dim, in the region of the uncertain. So alignment is also balance, and a sum. The sum of the person I am and the position I have chosen. It matters to advance without losing confidence, but it matters equally, when failure inevitably comes, to take the lesson and forgive myself.⁵ I ask myself: is every muscle of mine aligned toward the direction I mean to go?

Conviction is the intensity with which I move in the direction I have set. Opportunity does not come many times in a life, and not everyone is able to throw themselves at it when it does. First you need the wisdom to recognize that this chance is the one that comes once in a thousand years, and then the nerve to stake everything on it. Conviction does not arrive by sitting still. It does not appear on its own because I decide in my head that I ought to have it. Conviction comes only from experience intense enough, embodied enough, to be engraved across the whole body. That is why one must keep attempting, without pause. Conviction is what makes a person act. Achievement is given to those who act. Being smart and working hard is a given. The world is full of such people. There are plenty who have a rough sense of the right direction, too. That only a few achieve greatness anyway comes down to conviction.

Alignment and conviction feed each other. Alignment is born inside conviction, and once aligned, I strengthen conviction further.

In the end, greatness is not an answer I found but an answer I assigned.

There was no ground for it, and there will not be. That is exactly what makes the choice wholly mine. I stake everything on it. So this document is not evidence but a promise not yet paid, and the judgment will be made by the trajectory of my life.

Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus ↩
Lee Dae-hwan, Park Tae-joon ↩
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation ↩
Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering ↩
Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong ↩