Legible To Yourself
A few weeks ago Will Manidis wrote an essay entitled “Legible to capital.” I not only very much enjoyed it, but I agreed. Building a company requires an ability to define that company for the would-be providers of capital. But a nagging in my mind remained after reading. I find that those most capable of building something I, personally, want to support as a capital provider myself, are those who first have found legibility to Themselves.
I’m currently working out the details of a Series A investment I would very much like to make. And the most exciting component of the opportunity? All three co-founders seem to have found legibility within Themselves. They are building not for the sake of enrichment, but for the sake of problem solving. Which, surprisingly, is a rarity among many of the company builders with whom I interact.
So, as a sort of soulful parody of Will’s essay about capital legibility, I wrote this adaptation as an ode to Self Legibility:
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T.S. Eliot wrote “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”
While we strive so much for the journey of exploration, we mustn’t forget that the end to which we will all eventually come is to arrive wherever we’re strived towards and realize we know ourselves for the first time.
The most underrated factor in the success of the human experience is the degree to which that human becomes legible to Themselves.
Think of a soul being legible to Themselves as being magnetically charged to their own being. Life feels attracted to you; every book, every tweet, every conversation, every opportunity revolves around enabling more of the life you’re living.
Becoming legible to Themselves is the single greatest superpower for a fledgling person. Gods in embryo.
Look at Keanu Reeves, look at Mr. Rogers, look at Patrick Collison, look at Tyler Cowen or Naval Ravikant. These are all superhumans at being legible to Themselves.
Consider the words of Henry David Thoreau: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.”
It’s worth noticing how people become legible to Themselves:
First, there is no divide between work and play. The story is NOT that of a highly productive professional and a deeply unhappy individual. You can see these kind of puff pieces; PR-speak in human form, highly praiseworthy, yet deeply unhappy; illegible to Themselves. The journey is never about PART of you.
For a person to be legible to Themselves there can be no air between their work life and home life. Their lives only matter insofar as they are building with intensity towards the purest form of Themselves.
Second, the person can be understood fundamentally as an equation. In a best sense, the most legible person has identified a function of criticalities; a formula of what they’re most passionate about. The individual is highly verbal, and can clearly articulate and understand the inputs to this equation: family, faith, mission, passions, etc.
The people who are most legible to Themselves have what feel like clockwork toys in the hand. Simply by looking at them the levers of progress and output become immediately clear.
They are immediate, smack-you-in-the-face expressions of a person who feel simple enough that can click around in your hand, but cosmically large enough the person feels True in Themselves in some sense beyond literal.
When the equation is immensely clear, every Third Party across that person’s life can immediately understand their role in that person’s life — but more importantly their ability to scale to engaging that person with 10-100-1000x the capacity of commitment into that life force as it reaches maturity.
Finally, a person becomes legible to Themselves when it is clear everyone around them (family, friends, co-workers, employers, passers by) is singing from the same song sheet, they are all living their lives in expression of the same exact idea when it comes to The Person.
Will writes of a Phin Barnes-ism; the chocolate cake problem: you can have great inputs (eggs, chocolate, flour, some beautiful icing) but different stakeholders think they’re getting different outputs; a soufflé, cupcakes, a pound cake.
Many people have great inputs (leaning, hobbies, friends) but the people around them may think they’re getting a different output (a doggedly hard-working person, willing to sacrifice anything to succeed; a morally ambiguous person who will put what wins in front of what’s right; a sensitive person who will always be there for you, despite their own needs.) The most legible to Self are legible to others. People know what they’re getting with you.
The people that are most legible to Themselves are obsessive about chasing the tolerances between competing priorities of the Self to zero.
By becoming legible to Themselves a person not only can achieve singularity in the human experience (e.g. unlimited self-acceptance forever) but more importantly, that person can unify the secret that ignites their Soul with the entire universe outside. When that secret is shared, there is truly no limit.