Adaptive thought patterns
Seemingly every weekday morning, at the mouth of the 34th street station in Hudson Yards, there’s a snack-selling orator. To the streams of peoples riding the escalators, he repeats one of the following messages:
“What are you feeding your brain for breakfast?”
“Are you reflecting and improving on yesterday?”
“Would you marry yourself? Do you exemplify the qualities of someone you’d want to spend the rest of your life with?”
“You must avoid negative people at all costs. They will only drag you down.”
His delivery is far pithier than what I can reproduce here. He is mostly ignored, but what he says is incredibly important for any sort of productive life – that you must, at all costs, avoid God’s worst idiot.
God’s worst idiot is self-pitying, reflexively critical, inactionable, responsibility-deflecting, and absolutely refuses to even conceive of solutions to any of their life’s problems. God’s worst idiot is most certainly your friend that mocks at your ambitions, big or small, while having none of their own. This idiot could also be your friend that is addicted to their nicotine delivery vehicle or comparable vice and excuses their lack of exercise as it is ‘painful’. Despite my overwhelming hatred towards these idiots, I believe with full conviction, that every single one of God’s terrible idiots, is materially capable of anything. Thousands of years ago, an odd group of stonemasons and carpenters, without computers, Tsinghua engineering degrees, or Caterpillar excavators, built something that still stands today. If this garum-eating, likely illiterate, group of guys, just guys, designed and built aqueducts that provided water and irrigation to a million – why couldn’t God’s worst idiot?