I'm not a *fan* of divvying people up arbitrarily into winners and losers – one should never be gleeful about this – but I do have a subconscious subroutine that does it for me, and it's very useful mental machinery, even accounting for some small % of error rate (5-10%?) https://twitter.com/nosilverv/status/1324264526343229440
I am being sincere with my explicit utterances when I say: it is good to be kind, be gentle, be soft, be nourishing, be supportive. I mean every one of those things

IME, as a guy: to sustainably do those things, you have to be sensitive, smart and strong, and you have to win
in finite/infinite terms:

one shouldn't be entirely obsessed with winning to the point where it consumes you like an addiction. the point is to keep playing. but you do have to win in order to keep playing. you can't keep losing indefinitely
"wait, winning? win at what?"

[gestures around] everything. I mean this in the broadest sense. it ranges from little things like "doing what you want" to big things like "living in accordance with your values". it's very contextual and every person has 100s of things going on
part of why i'm vague here is bc I don't particularly subscribe to any 1 ideology or aesthetic. there are as many ways to win as there are different kinds of music genres or art styles. you get to decide and define for yourself what winning means to you https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1160746630838009856
there are children of billionaires who are absolute failsons, dyed-in-the-wool losers

there are people born in poverty who will sadly never be able to rise above it because of systemic factors, and yet in tiny little ways they are winners

yes I am channeling Invictus here
you could build a worldview from this sort of thing... good times weak men blah blah

not really interested in that sort of grandiosity

what I try to do is to win at games I personally deem worthy, and to associate with winners that I respect and admire https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1323921818059706368
I DON'T think that non-winners are "lesser" people, or that they deserve scorn, or pity, or anything of the sort. nor do I think that winners should be glorified and pedestalized. all of those things I think are actually distractions from the real thing
I DO think that winning gives you resources – attention, money, social capital, etc – that you can then subsequently choose to direct towards things that you deem good and worthy. as patio11 once said (I paraphrase) every dollar spent is a vote for how you want the world to be
I won't be making a habit of talking about this stuff explicitly, because I think it's something best conveyed implicitly 95% of the time. otherwise it can become a sort of weird farce. I don't actively evaluate "how can I win?!?!" in every interaction – I just live my life
but I win, and I talk about it openly because I promised my younger self that I would, because nobody else said these things to me. I taught myself how to do it. You can probably do too. Winning feels good. You can use your wins to help and serve others, that they might win too
I don't think anybody is ever 100% a loser all the way through. everyone has some assets, some small victories, some experience, something. think of yourself as inheriting a city, or a company, or a sports team, etc that's largely dysfunctional https://twitter.com/Morgan_Anastasi/status/1324274451001782273
the first thing to do is to take an inventory of everything. you want to face the full reality of who you are. your successes and failures, your assets and liabilities. what have been the mistakes you've made in life? list them out; literally write them down
from here on it's basically a video game, but the challenge is that you have to always be as clearly honest with yourself as you can. how can you repeat the successes? how can you diminish the failures? what are the contexts in which the failures happen, how do you avoid them?
the early stages of transition are the hardest, because early progress will often force you to face your own incompetence more starkly than if you chose to try to be ignorant of them. like how going for a jog when you're unfit *hurts* a lot more than eating junk and watching TV
there isn't any globally correct method for how to approach this. it really is "choose your own adventure". do you want to start with more/bigger wins, or do you want to start by diminishing your fails/losses?

important: do NOT obsess about researching this. choose, & act
the most foundational elements of this can feel silly to state out loud, but some people might have to do this:

- you have to believe that winning is POSSIBLE
- you have to believe that losers *can* BECOME winners, through the magic of incremental growth and change, and framing
if you don't currently believe these things, or your belief in these things is kinda flimsy, I recommend psyops-ing yourself to strengthen these beliefs. I have a whole database of things that reaffirm my most powerful beliefs, it's a thing winners do: https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1084024604836868096
I could go on and on and on. My ebook is titled FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD, but you could just as easily read it as "HOW TO WIN". (I deliberately avoided that sort of title, because it selects for a kind of audience that I do not want) https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1255774156307623936
so with all of that in mind, and with utmost love and support:
You can follow @visakanv.
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