Since I stared sharing my writing regularly to twitter last yr my bird account grew from nothing to over 100k followers in 6 mos.

So many people told me my articles changed how they look at the world forever & I get asked a lot how I came up w/ the sh*t I write abt.

Hint: Having visionary insights is not abt intelligence or experience. It’s a lifestyle that you can learn 👇

I’d be lying if I told you making innovative ideas is easy. Obv brain work is involved & an active brain needs more calories & nutrients than even hard physical labor. I wrote abt how I keep my brain healthy a while ago.

But being visionary is mostly not abt IQ. I know & work w/ many super smart people who have no perspective on big picture outside their narrow domain of expertise. When you’re wrong, having high IQ only makes you wrong more precisely.

Being an original is abt first recognizing the truth of who you are & then developing habits & skills that’ll help you express that truth freely.

Too abstract? Let’s break it down into 7 steps.

1. Decide you’re a visionary

In all traditional societies there’s an archetype of persons whose job is to see the tribe’s future & guide the tribe towards its destiny. They’re called different names—prophets, seers, shamans, sages, depending on the tradition.

In our modern society, these are called thought leaders, innovators, trailblazers.

Some have natural aptitude for this visionary archetype— they tend to see beyond the ordinary & notice certain truth that others miss. This aptitude is usually unwelcome by parents & teachers since early life for most people is all about fitting in.

If you’re a natural visionary, you may not realize it early on or even actively try to kill this “gift” so that you can blend in w/ the tribe.

Many stories of visionaries in history involve early life difficulties. Usually their lives don’t get better until they give up being “normal”, embrace their gift & actively use it for the good of the tribe. (’Tis also what happened to yours truly. But that’s for another day.)

Let me stress there’re many archetypes each w/ unique role in society. E.g. the “marketer” archetype— often a polar opposite to the “visionary”— requires a gift of understanding the nooks & crannies of human wants & how to cater to those wants.

One archetype isn’t better than another. But you need to know what you’re made of. If you’ve read this far, the visionary/innovator archetype prob somehow speaks to you. For what reason? Only you know.

It’s up to you to figure out if being a visionary is truly your thing & if you’re willing to do what it takes to live that truth. It may not be an easy path & there’re choices that’d be confusing to make w/o that clarity (more on that in a sec).

2. Get comfortable with being alone

If you want to see what others don’t, you cannot inhabit the same consciousness that others do. That means you’ll be alone, a lot, really & metaphorically. By definition the more you fit in, the less original you are.

Prophets & seers in traditional tribes live separate lives away from the herd. Luke Skywalker found Yoda, the ultimate visionary archetype, in the backwaters of Dagobah living by himself for a reason.

I’m not suggesting you move to a mountain cave w/o electricity. What’s needed is a willingness to be separate from the tribe in your thoughts & actions, which is against human instinct since we’re social animals & w/o tribe we die.

If you have antisocial traits like Asperger’s, you have an advantage as your ability to care abt what others think is limited by your specific programming.

I don’t have that, so it’s a struggle as internal truth & social instinct collide. You resolve that conflict by, again, getting clear abt what kind of person you truly want to be. That may take time.

3. Study unrelated fields

Most “original ideas” in the world come from applying what worked in field A to field B, or connect dots btw fields A & B. That means you need to know abt both fields to create sth new.

The more unrelated fields you have knowledge in, the more innovative opportunities you have. In fact possibilities of innovation is a factorial function of the number of fields (n) you know of, O(n!). The more you know, the faster those possibilities grow.

But that’s not how most people live. Most want to get from here to there in a straight line fast— spend shortest time in school, pick most lucrative career, specialize & double down, get to next promotion quickly.

That’s the sensible strategy to earn a good living, but hardly how visionaries are made.

(BTW, like this so far? I write about ideas on investment, macro and human potential. Subscribe to my newsletter for updates.)

4. Leave some money on the table

To become the cross-disciplinary original you’re meant to be, you’d need motivations to learn abt many different fields. Becoming rich & famous prob isn’t one of them, as most of these investments don’t have immediate practical payoffs.

If all you’re asking is “what’s in it for me?”, or “how does it benefit my status & wallet?”, you’d never find a reason to wander or take detours.

If you want to allow yourself to learn stuff that doesn’t have application right away, pursue experiences that don’t seem to help you get ahead, what’s the motivation to do that?

5. Train your curiosity muscle

When you find something interesting, ’tis the best motivation.

Curiosity is a powerful natural instinct for learning & action since the nature of consciousness is to expand. Unfortunately most schools crush that instinct to learn & replace it w/ obligation to learn.

As a result most people’s curiosity muscles have atrophied by the time they hit 25. They no longer know the true meaning of something being “interesting”.

Luckily like any muscle, curiosity muscle can be trained. All it takes is you acting *deliberately* curious even if you don’t feel it. If you’re consistent the instinct’ll come back.

Your goal is to get to the state of a kid chasing butterflies in the garden all day w/o even once asking “what’s the point?”

6. Take it less seriously

If you believe something important is at stake, you become afraid even if you don’t realize it. Most people are afraid to be wrong, thus unwilling to overstep conventional assumptions and common sense.

What’s at stake if you’re wrong or fail? Reputation, self identity, money, status, love are the usual suspects.

All those things hold one back from being a trailblazer. There’s nothing wrong abt that. Most people aren’t innovators & don’t need to be.

Still, the less importance you give those things, the more freedom you have to be visionary. No need for value judgement here. It’s just there’s no free lunch. That’s why I said earlier to get clear abt who you really want to be, or choices could be confusing, remember?

At the end of day life is a metaverse & everything is a game. The more you realize that to be true, the less you’re afraid to lose.

7. Practice radical truth seeking

Humans are at a primitive evolutionary stage. We have limited foresight & processing power. Whatever opinion anybody has on xyz, no matter how much a genius they are, it’s prob not the ultimate truth.

Those’re my MO when approaching any subject. They give me 1) a humbleness to learn, 2) a healthy suspicion of any authority view, 3) a desire to always dig for deeper truth, cuz I know whatever I know now is not *it*.

If you make it a mission to always seek deeper truth, overtime you develop an intuitive taste for it. You can better tell if an idea is closer to truth or farther away from it even in fields you’re not familiar w/. This habit is a gift that keeps on giving.

TLDR: How to become a visionary w/o being smart or experienced—

1/ Decide you’re a visionary

2/ Get comfortable w/ being alone

3/ Study unrelated fields

4/ Leave some money on the table

5/ Train your curiosity muscle

6/ Take it less seriously

7/ Practice radical truth seeking

9 Comments

  1. Many thanks Tasha for sharing your insights and knowledge. Powerful wisdom for a young person! (maybe you’re an old soul ;). Really appreciate your wide range of views, demonstrates a growth mindset.

    • People often asked me how I (explorer) find oil? My answer is always “ smell test”!

  2. It’s nice to think you can teach others how to be visionary. But in reality, I think people are (for the most part) either born with visionary capacity or not. That doesn’t mean vision or insight is genetic either. And I agree it is different than IQ and more akin to wisdom. I think visionary insight comes more from the soul level (old souls have better vision because they have been around longer).

    Another analogy is the Eagle and the Wolf – both have good vision but only the Eagle can see for miles ahead. You can’t teach a Wolf to see like an Eagle. Doesn’t mean the Wolf doesn’t have valuable attributes that an Eagle doesn’t have. They are just different and no amount of teaching or training will change that. Also doesn’t mean a Wolf can’t become a “better” Wolf through training, it’s just that some people have certain knacks and talents and others don’t. Vision is more like a natural talent than a muscle anyone can develop. IMO.

    That said, I do think YOU have vision Tascha, even though I am pretty sure I have been in crypto longer than you, you have the right ideas about how to assess the opportunities. I think you are a bit overweight alts and I think alts in general could dump a lot harder this year than anyone thought. But your vision will serve you very well in the next cycle and future cycles after that, assuming you are not all in on some of these risky ventures. IMO we are at the end of a crypto cycle and it is really in the ashes of the dump that the next set of gems appear – THAT’S when you need those Eagle eyes, lol.

  3. I should add that I am NOT certain crypto markets will make new lows this year. I think the odds are higher that we will see new lows vs new highs. A truly wise visionary knows that he does NOT know the future and hedges his bets accordingly. I think it would be very unwise to be not be invested in crypto at all because it is totally possible we just saw the low for this cycle and we could 5x from here in the next 12 months – unlikely but possible.

  4. As a final point, I’d say crypto markets are far more correlated than they seem. In a bull market it looks like every coin is pumping independently of one another, so it gives the impression that each coin is responding to unique use cases or fundamental shifts in market preference, but in a bear market we see the truth when everything gets dumped indiscriminately, and the coins that go down hardest are the ones that went up the fastest.

    This time could be different of course, because there are more real users this cycle, but ETH was arguably one of the strongest coins coming out of 2018 and it dropped 95% from ath anyway.

    If you are in this market and not prepared for another 50% drop in majors at any time (80% if it is a small cap), take some money out until you are comfortable stomaching that kind of drop. And unless it is Bitcoin or ETH, there is no guarantee your coin ever bounces back. Just sayin’…

  5. Thanks Tasha. I really needed to hear this. I look forward to your emails/posts as your ideas are always well presented, helpful and interesting!

  6. Stephen Wallace Reply

    Great article Tascha, you mentioned that you don’t have Asperger syndrome. Do you experience any neuro-divergence? Like ADHD for example?

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