If you’re one of the sepupz who frequently pops by here, you probably know already that the site has a new design; I commissioned it from my web designer, Imran, just to make a few things cleaner. 

There are a few small changes, but not really visible ones for the most part except for the gigantic header that’s now on the top (whoops, guess that makes a difference?) and also a change in the check-out process. 

Basically, it went from this…

…Over to this, with a simple check-out process that doesn’t require a whole lot of data.

Why do this?

Because I don’t actually need your address and other personal data, and I figured our address, and because I don’t really want your address or other details for this purpose – what I care about is that if you want to read what I create and you want to purchase it, you can do so with no hassle and no fuss, and next thing you know, you’re done 😀

A little more broadly, I understand that if you’re buying just an eBook, you don’t need to have it delivered and I also want to respect your privacy if possible, because that’s a concern that I have as well; it cost a little bit of money to make this redesign possible, but I thought it was necessary as an idealistic step, which I hope you’ll find reassuring!

There are a few other things that I did to make the site a little easier to navigate, and I think some of you saw some of the hints of my other projects as I was completing the scaffolding, but things are a little more settled now, so I hope you’ll enjoy the new look!

My mother recently asked me a perplexing question as part of a joke I no longer remember the other day, and I thought to share it with you.

It goes: “Are you smart?”

It’s not a very complex question and it’s one that I’ve heard many many times over the course of time, but for some reason or another, when I heard it this time I processed it a bit differently. 

The child’s standard response is to say “yes!” and then offer up any number of different things.

“I got 9A’s for SPM ma!” she goes and in the midway of life’s sliding scale it becomes, in somewhat chronological order:”I got into X college da! This many scholarships and people threw money at me qa!”

Over time though, I’ve come to realize that none of these responses really work.

I worked hard for sure, but I will always remember freezing up and writing incoherent paragraphs on my BM and Sejarah papers before I walked away with A+’s in both subjects yet only to momentarily ever forget how that happened – I will remember how I shamelessly sold myself and learned the good graces of social dynamics in group situations – I will always remember, partly from personal experience and partly from observations, that someone could go to a great college but then end up receiving a great measure of high idiocy built on paper tiger sense of false superiority as a reward.

If there is something that I got from these different experiences though, it’s definitely at least a sense that calling myself ‘smart’ on the basis of this constellation of documents and proofs is not something I can really accept, even if sociologically and societally speaking that is actually how it works, even if your personal estimation of your own abilities doesn’t match up with the observed reality; even if the world sees you one way and you see yourself another. 

Naval Ravikant maintains a simple and singular idea of what it means to be smart: Are you getting what you want out of life? 

It sounds intuitive and I agree with it, maybe because being ‘smart’ is always a contextual thing, in the sense that you are only ‘smart’ if what you do brings you more of what you want in life = but I feel that given the possible scope of what a person could want in life, that definition can be both too broad and too narrow at the same time, because do you want your time? Money? Happiness? You could pursue all of those things in a zeroing in of consciousness upon these Northern Stars, but what’s the solution to the puzzle that unlocks the constellation of your human wants at the end of the day really? 

So yes, I like Naval’s insight, but to it I would add this:

A dumb person may *feel* that they’re smart, but feeling smart and being smart? There is a difference. I don’t have the irreverence to say that I stand amongst the smart ones, but I think it would be an insult to say that I’m dumb or to presume over the range of universes what you consider as smart or not smart, dear reader.

So I ask you a question in reply to the question I was asked, then.

Even if you thought that you were smart, would it matter? 

I thought a little more about the ‘influencer’ question, and it brought me down some interesting pathways – and I have to agree: It does take a little bit of delusion to feel that you influence people, that you completely change their ideas.

But that doesn’t mean that influence doesn’t exist.

I mean if you think about it, surely it does.

As we know, people are related to one another – we shape one another’s behavior and experiences.

Even right now, as you think about every one of the words that come off the tip of my fingers as I write it out seconds, minutes, or hours after I wrote, these words are shaping a small part of your day as you think about what’s in front of you and ask yourself:”What is he trying to get at?” amongst other things.

But you know, that’s like toy level influence – it’s trivial.

It’s kind of like how if you wanted to, you could move your right hand or your left leg upon reading this sentence (or not at all, or both at once).

You have some choice at some specific moment of what you’re going to do – I’m sure you could think of it cognitively for a moment before you actually take the action. In a moment when you choose to make the choice (maybe in a couple of seconds, in a minute or so), you could possibly plan out what you would like to do.

Not super controversial.

But could you have controlled the very first impulse, the very first thought that came to your mind? That is doubtful.

Now imagine that you are attacked by a rabid flesh eating bee (or wasp. I don’t know lol), it just attacks you and specifically attacks your right hand, then your left leg at the same time.

At that point, faced with the pain, movement for 99% of you becomes a forced choice; there is only one real choice in that scenario which is to move, to do anything to address the pain.

So yeah no, you don’t even have complete mastery of how you react to things.

So why should you say that other people are unable to influence you?

Now, I don’t think that this means that there is a silver bullet to so-called influence people, and I would maintain that if you were to believe that you can actually influence people’s actions to the point of say brainwashing them, that would be a delusion of the highest order.

If you are like David Chase Taylor, as I shared in my podcast with Tim Tiah, perhaps it plays out in your head and then because you can’t disconfirm it, and it then ends up ringing out to you as what you call reality as you end up in infinite rationalization regress.

Here is an example of this, brought to you by the keyboard of David Chase Taylor.

I may write a post dedicated to this man a little later because I think he deserves at least that much. But here’s the basic point:

There are a lot of people out there who believe that they have massive influence over events and will state their names and reputations on their beliefs; David, for one, writes these posts almost daily and has been doing so ever since I first saw him in Switzerland in 2016.

It is remarkable consistency and a shocking amount of work and time that this man has put into what he has written for no apparent reward because he believes that he shapes the course of events.

There are plenty of delusional people like that, and in fact there is a Wikipedia article dedicated to the subject of messiah claimants – people who go out saying that they are the new messiah, that they’ve come to save the world, influencing themselves more effectively than they ever could influence anyone else to travel in the general direction of oblivion.

But you know, even as you read about that, there’s a good chance that I was influencing you in the direction of feeling that David is delusional and he’s not a truth-bearer in his universe.

But if we think about it, I am just a separate human being.

Why should my opinion that he is delusional hold sway over his opinion that he is eminently rational?

You could argue that maybe I’m just speaking a little more persuasively, but if that’s the case, then implicitly, I suppose, you already admit that influence is a possibility.

Now, there are all sorts of other complicated things out there to think about and that we could also think about in the context of this blog.

Why did you find this post, for example? Was it because Google revealed something to you? Did a friend send the link to you? “Check out this guy”. Was that friend cynical, serious, a raving fan, poor, rich? Do they have buying intent or none?

Did something that was said here increase, decrease, or leave unchanged with nothing but a ‘lol’ as residue your inclination to either work with me as a student and get past the friction of emailing, or did something else happen?

All of those different things aren’t really captured in the simple whole numerical measure of daily visitor statistics.

Let’s refine our thoughts here.

At heart, I am agnostic, skeptical, yet leaning constantly on the edge of believing that influence is both real and possible.

In my mind, it would be delusional to say that we are influential over others on every level in every way – It would take an act of immense human arrogance to assert that you really are in control of things around you.

But I think it would take also an act of immense human arrogance to say that we definitively do not influence the people around us. Or for that matter, that it is not a skill that we can refine over the course of time—whether for good or for bad.