Be a force of nature

Sup nerds,

Last week, 5 people told me I’m “a force of nature”.

What do you mean not everybody wills their dreams into existence by pure obsession and Red Bull??? Isn’t that normal???? If you have a dream, aren’t you going to do whatever it takes to get there???

Check the date:

This tweet was from 11th grade.

It took me a minute, but here we are. Living my dream. Running my own company and making millions of people laugh all over the world. Flying across the country with no sleep drinking Red Bulls and hustling to make shit happen.

The marathon continues, man.

I knew it 11th grade as well as I know it now.

If you’re not a force of nature, you’ll get forced by nature into living a life you don’t want to live. You literally have to force yourself past nature’s design.

• Nature wants you to sit in class and pay attention. It doesn’t want you to make $50,000 designing stickers on Photoshop in 11th grade and get yelled at by your teachers “for playing on your laptop”

• Nature wants you to give up writing online. It doesn’t want you to write your newsletter 190+ Sundays straight even when it wasn’t making money and you look like an idiot and all you want to do is sleep on a Sunday morning.

• Nature wants you to stay at your job. It doesn’t want you to quit your job to stay up all night building a meme software even though you don’t know how to code and still somehow make more than your last company 9 months later.

Late nights. No sleep. Body aches. Getting called an idiot. Getting attacked. Self-doubt. Who cares. Nature’s gonna fight back and the only way to bend nature to your reality is to push past the pain.

Startups are a fight against nature.

It makes sense the average stoner hates capitalism.

The capitalist goes against nature in every single way.

The stoner says “it’s all groovy”, the startup founder says “THIS IS NOT GROOVY MAN, LET’S FUCKING BUILD SOMETHING BETTER.”

Back in high school in bumblefuck, Pennsylvania, I didn’t have access to the ambitious startup scene so I spent a lot of time around the “it’s all groovy” stoner types. And wanna know who’s 10x happier?

The “THIS IS NOT GROOVY BRO” startup founder.

You’d think someone finding problems to solve all the time would be miserable.

But the stoner sees the problem too. They’re just saying “it’s all groovy” to escape the sense of low agency that you can’t actually do anything in the world. They gave up. They’ve accepted getting forced by nature into “whatever man”.

But when you feel like you can do anything—when you force yourself to be a force of nature—, you can admit it’s OK if things aren’t groovy because you believe you can fix it. You face reality. You see it clearly. You accept it. And you believe you can make things groovier. Then you go execute on your vision.

And honestly, that’s pretty groovy, man.

It’s a lot easier to imagine a better future, but can you build it?

No shade on John Lennon, but it’s a lot easier to get high and talk about a better future than it is to go build it (the same reason I hate “think tanks” and consultants).

Any high idiot can imagine something cool, but can you build it? I saw a lot of friends back in high school fall into this trap of yapping about their dreams instead of doing. And now they’re still trapped in Pennsylvania.

Don’t just get high on your imagination.

Go force it into reality.

Memes of the Week

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

Founder of Memelord Technologies and Creator of Silly Valley Ventures