Ricardo Salta

I often talk about big ideas. Actually, I get immensely bored of talking about small ideas, unless they have a specific, relevant, tendentially measurable application to a big idea in which I am interested in.

This is me, take it or leave it. Don’t expect me to be interested in spending my time on small stuff. It’s not that I have anything against it — everything has its importance. But I don’t like to do what I don’t like to do. Does that sound strange?

If it sounds strange and you believe people should do what they don’t like, then let me tell you: I am not an absolutist and if you are, then we probably don’t have much interaction to do because I get absurdly annoyed with absolutist people.

I will agree with you if you tell me that we can’t do only what we love. But here’s the thing: I actually rarely do what I love! So there. If not doing what we love is the path to success, then I should already be very successful.

No, that’s not the question. The question is about the merits or the lack of them, about acting on megalomanic ideas.

I have a grand vision for the future which is composed of plenty more subvisions that complement each other.

And even if it involves me going through something which I certainly do not love which is being rejected most of the time because people simply don’t take me serious enough and even when they do, my attention deficit leads me astray, the truth is that I really only care to be taken serious by those few who will be able to really understand me and help me, which means, people who will be able to successfully deal with the least easy side of me, if you understand what I mean.

So, yes, call me megalomanic. Because I’m not going to change my ways anytime soon.

Upon starting to write about this, it occurs to me that “having my own place” can apply to having my own home just as much as it can apply to the idea of having my own place in life. Because, to be the frankest, I don’t feel like I have any of these. Yet. I am not making any money, I am back at Mom’s after having been in so many places already, never really sustained by my own income, which I have already had, but never stable enough to secure my independence.

Yeah, in times past I had the motivation to do things that at the time excited me because they were new and that happened to give me a decent chunk of money. If I had sustained that motivation somehow, I would be pretty well-off by now. But I wouldn’t be myself anyway.

As for space… well, I dream (wide awake) of having a massive place where I will live and at the same time lots of amazing projects are happening all the time. This will become real sooner rather than later, by the way.

When I was little my mother and stepfather decided to do an extreme makeover to my room and basically before I realized it, I found myself in a room with totally custom furniture that couldn’t move an inch. Paradoxically though, I’ve always been very fond of tinkering with stuff, and had I ever had the chance, I would certainly have changed my room many times every year, but the fact is that I never could.

This story of my solid room, I don’t really know how much it may or may not have shaped me, but the fact is that I always silently resented the way my growing up lacked the ability to move furniture around. Sure, of course I was lucky and priviledged to have furniture. In hindsight though, I can’t see how it may have helped me… I always longed to move stuff around, in a “nomadism inside my own world”… and I never could.

Now, we’re living in times of rising homelessness. And I have grown sincerely concerned with it, namely because I’ve found out the origins of the phenomenon, and most importantly, how to strike at the root of the injustice, solve it for good, and bring about a bright future. As Thomas Paine said,

Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.

This reform is not only possible but essential. And it takes a new attitude in terms of what we can dare to achieve as communities. As my friend Edward Miller said recently,

Centralization and command economies are a step backward, not a step forward. There are inherent informational complexity issues which are insolvable by centralized systems. Only decentralized systems can achieve resilience, promote freedom, and scale indefinitely.

If you want to know, this is what moves me… bringing about a sane, prosperous society. Feel free to learn more about Geolibertarianism. I will share much more about this, pretty soon, so stay tuned.

And of course, I totally must advance my money-making ideas too, because I need to sustain myself, I must stop being a burden on my parents, and if for nothing else, having money will be the most powerful accelerator of my planet-saving visions. More about money making in next posts… and also, certainly, about having my own place.

Being me comes with some specificities. One that comes from birth is that I always want to keep going, as long as I like what I’m doing, even if it’s just being awake. Another is the fact that I have no breaks.

For countless times I have failed commitments and appointments of all sorts simply because the previous day I went to sleep at sunrise. Sometimes, like last night, it’s no big deal because I didn’t have any specific ultra-crucial deadline, and it was actually a constructive all-nighter because I was writing blog posts that I consider pretty prioritary. Other times though, it can be pretty disruptive, because I mess with other people’s lives and just plain waste interesting opportunities and often further damage the trust people may still have in me.

This flawed performance is not fun and it doesn’t even really seem to benefit my life in any way. At most, the fact that my case is so extreme puts me in a position of wanting pretty bad to solve this in some way. And I also think about the millions of brilliant people all over the world that must suffer from the exact same difficulties and certainly long for a sustainable way of overcoming this massive hindrance to one’s personal and social success.

There’s disappointing and there’s disappointing. We have no responsibility about other people’s expectations of ourselves that they created by themselves. To go anywhere in life we have to disappoint many people’s illusions, and that’s just the way life is.

But for me there’s this thing about disappointing others that really hurts. It’s when I meet great people, create a connection and actually create expectations about something, believing what I am saying, and then I crash and burn. People are suddenly confronted with the paradox of that nice person that they just met having suddenly disappeared from the map, leaving behind a trail of discomfort and inconvenience which could have easily been avoided and that often I am even conscious of, but just couldn’t avoid.

There is absolutely no need of specifying what I may be talking about in particular, namely because it’s already happened so many times, actually I even manage to still disappoint my family again and again and after all these years they still believe me somewhat, which is amazing. In personal matters as in professional matters, I only step forward in what I believe. But a problem is that I often get overly enthusiastic with opportunities that even if they really have a lot of worth and potential, I do not have the structure to seize them, so I end up providing negative value, which is terrible.

I know for a fact these days that all this stems from my oddly-wired brain, that repeatedly allows me to believe that everything is possible in this very instant. But there is a certain feeling of guilt even if I know why this happens, because I know that I still have in me what it takes to find a definitive solution. Beyond the guilt there is also a sadness because I really wanted to see whatever opportunity come through, and this is yet one more reason to find a solution.

The phenomenon is totally recurring, and I’ve fooled myself for too many times into believing I can handle it alone, which happens because I lack executive function in the brain (true story). So to round it up, I must strongly focus on finding, at the very least, an executive assistant, to cover my executive dysfunction. Then things will be okay.

It’s on t-shirts that say “I’ll stop procrastinating. Tomorrow.” and it is on my mind all the time. Because with so much that I want to do, I end up always procrastinating something with something else. But apparently the key is to procrastinate extremely important stuff with stuff that is still important, so here I am writing about procrastination, something that, in my case, is important.

I mean, the key is not losing track of continuously doing important stuff, and I was reading about the US 2012 election, and realized it doesn’t add anything to what I need to hurry up in doing. Then I came here to write about procrastination and to get back to writing some more posts. And I also found this link that talks about Good and Bad Procrastination which you might find interesting.

I’m here writing a few posts for this very blog, and I haven’t even written the third, and I’m already feeling tempted to go see who’s online that I can ask for their opinion on what I’ve done so far. But is it any use at this point to go ask for feedback? Is it going to get me any further any faster?

Psychology is something that I really love and have studied a lot, and even in non-psychology publications I’ve already read a lot about this very issue of caring too much about what others think. It is less useful the more you are an authority on what you’re talking about. And I’m writing about myself!

We all have a need for approval, even those that don’t admit or realize it. If nothing else, unless we’re suicidal we need enough approval that we’re not killed or imprisoned or destroyed in some other way. But it is very risky to worry about the wrong things, the wrong approval, so to say. We may be risking a great future.

Apparently I’ve finally gotten to the point when I am now using this blog to transparently expose my real self to the world so I can move on to higher ground. With all loving respect, but in what concerns talking about me and myself only, I am not going to mimic anyone’s self-consciousness anymore. Not even those of my parents.

I am on a mission to do some very uncommon stuff, and I have been having a hard time doing what it takes to find and engage the right people. I know that I need to build up a very uncommon team of rare people and that those people want to know with the most clarity who they are dealing with. Even if’s cathartic to be opening up to the world like this, this is still about approval, which is fun.

In all honesty, I feel like that’s fine, totally awesome. I am focusing on doing the right thing in regards to presenting myself to the right demographic that I most care about impressing, because if I do, they will be the ones to help me become the best self that I can possibly be, with spectacular benefits for us all.

Update: Interestingly enough, I just read this article, 10 Rules For Brilliant Women, that I think merits the link here, namely because of rule #4.

I must have been in the seventh grade or something like that, around 1995/96. I had just discovered, and become in love with, the Internet. What, it was already an endless library of everything and it worked both ways! I couldn’t be more amazed.

I don’t know what got into me… but I know that one day I wondered how many of my peers were already getting online. And with utmost excitement, I decided to make a school-wide survey.

So I opened up Word (or was it Powerpoint?) and I crafted a one-page survey. It contained a lot of interesting questions about what kids were doing online and so on. Happy with it, I printed it out and brought it to school.

At school I had the interest of teachers. I had the green light to go photocopy the survey and leave it in each teacher’s locker so they would administer it to the class. And then, apparently, nothing more happened.

I really do not remember details. I must have been distracted by something else that caught my attention. And there I went, leaving behind something that, not being world-changing, could have been interesting.

I have the diagnosed condition of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. If you give any credence to pseudoscientific definitions, you can also say I’m an “indigo child“. And I’m a waking dreamer.

It’s been nearly 29 years and never ever have I been normal, even if sometimes I may appear to be. You may be wondering what do I mean with “normal”. I’ve been reflecting about that for all my life.

I could go look up some dictionary’s definition of “normal”. But it would not mean the same. So I’m going to give it my own go and say that for me normal is whatever/whoever doesn’t raise eyebrows.

So I became aware of myself growing up as the class clown that just couldn’t stay still. In my first day of school I pretended to be a scary lion. And for years I didn’t have a single birthday party invitation.

One thing I never seemed to have trouble with was interacting with grown-ups, so I would spend more time talking to them than with my peers, or else I would often be by myself. Yes, a significant part of my early life has been a little bit painful, but the fact is that I have grown up to be very optimistic and happy to be alive.

When I was little, Mom subscribed some insurance in case I broke anything in a store. It was never really actually necessary, though. And I later discovered that kids that do that kind of stuff have ODD (Oppositional-Defiant Disorder), not the ADHD that I have.

Anyway, the fact is that I would climb everything I could, fearlessly following my impulses. Dad always told me that I had to test every limit, and I had to test every limit indeed, even Dad’s own authority and limits, of course. I always questioned everything.

And today, more than ever before, I am questioning my fear of exposure and my perfectionism. With this post I am just now starting to post openly about myself and not obsessing about writing the perfect post, so I’m publishing this one and moving on to more. In a way I am going back to the best of the kid I once was, so, enjoy.