The Happiness Goat
Softness, Digital Artisans & Leadership
🥂 Appetiser: Where is the Happiness Goat?
We’re all stupid in our own ways. Some of us can build multi-million dollar companies but lack the emotional capacity to communicate our feelings. Others can run an endless number of marathons and yet struggle to find peace while sharing a meal with friends. It doesn’t matter your age, your background or your story, you are just like everyone else. A lost kid trying to make your way in a maze of never-ending choices.
The older we get, the deeper into the maze we end up. Caught on overgrown hedges and old maps that our younger selves convinced us would lead to success. Now, not simply navigating the choices ahead of us, but simultaneously trying to contextualise those choices in relationship to every choice we have made before and the potential future choices we will one day have to make, we are stuck in the goo of humanity.
Stagnation and overwhelm ooze out of this ambiguous in-betweeness. The inevitable liminality of growing up and discovering that while you are now by all outward accounts an “adult”, your internal compass is just as confused, naive and insecure as it was when you were 14. The more you learn, the more you realise how much more there is to learn.
Life very quickly becomes a cluster fuck of continuity issues. Some people say speed up, others say slow down. Last week you wanted to be an architect and this week your thinking that maybe politics is the only way to leave a positive impact on this world. People die and others are born. Friends become strangers and enemies become inspirations. The maze expands and contracts as the frequency of your outside and inside world reverberate against one another like a series of conscious tectonic plates.
You are becoming something new and at the same time grappling with the death of who you once were. All while navigating the fact that our lives are speeding up at an exponential rate, wars are being waged and technology is being injected into our bloodstream as a cure for boredom. You wonder why boredom is such a bad thing, while scrolling deep into the phone realm, where memes and pornography perform an exorcism of your dopamine system and dance vigorously with your self control like an ecstasy dealer who promises “this stuff won’t give you a comedown.”
And then all of a sudden, at a moment of complete randomness you stumble upon a door. You open said door out of instinct. A strange concoction of serendipity and bubbling self confidence.
Behind the door there’s a goat. He’s magnificent. Soft, and warm with an aura of blissful awareness. The goat simply chews on some grass, smiles and waddles over to you. He rubs his cute head along your leg and you smile. The smile radiates through your body like the hug you used to get from your mother. A gentle fire burns inside of you and you take a breath that feels like the first breath you ever took on this chaotic planet. You feel it all. A kind of awe-inspiring oneness. An inarticulatable sensation of fullness. You exclaim “wow” with an authentic honesty that makes the simplicity of two w’s and an o feel like one of the most profound statements you have ever uttered.
But then he’s gone. The goat disappears back into the maze. You chase him for a while but eventually you realise that you can’t outrun a goat. Especially not this goat, for the more you speak to others about this experience, the more you realise that you have in fact just encountered the happiness goat. A manifestation of metaphorical significance.
For some he appears during a moment of intimacy with oneself. For others he dances into your life on the back of your first taste of love. Sometimes he finds you in the darkness, and other times he appears in the light. He is an obscure creature that all of us learn to know at one point or another on our journey through this maze.
The challenge is that once you find the goat, your first impulse is to chase him. You want to trap him. Catch him. Hold him down and extract his essence so that your path through the maze doesn’t feel so fucking overwhelming. But alas, the goat is a metaphor and metaphors cannot be captured and worn like clothing. They float in and out of our lives like esoteric wind.
In fact, it would seem that the more you actively search for the goat, the less likely you are to find him. He doesn’t like to be controlled nor does he enjoy being forced. The happiness goat is often found by those who don’t think of him at all. He is in this sense the by-product of something much bigger. A mere zit on the face of happiness itself.
As you continue to walk through the maze and make choices, slowly but surely progressing through time. Growing older. Changing. Being and becoming. You start to realise that the goat and the maze are intricately linked. That the more you learn to enjoy the maze the more likely you are to stumble upon the goat. That every choice is an opportunity, an adventure, a chance to see what hides behind the next corner.
You start to realise that the maze and the goat are nothing more than a game. A pseudo-intellectual, interculturally philosophical exercise in learning to become a functional human being. The goat is always there, as is the maze. Every moment is like a page in a Where’s Wally (Waldo in the US) book. Except the goal is not to find Wally but to trust that Wally is there and that if you keep playing the game, you’ll inevitably run into him again.
Happiness in this sense, is less of thing or a state of being, and more of a game. An instinct to play. A child-like sensitivity to awe and discovery. An adventure that we all get to engage with.
🥗 Starter — Field Notes from the Future
🧠 We need Digital Artisan’s
The digital world is full of waste. Low quality products and content have become so easy to produce that we are entering a new wave of saturation. A digital ocean full of plastic straws and styrofoam boxes. The future will demand a new era of creators. A network of digital artisans that curate taste and creative expression in a way that is deeply human and impact focussed. We have an opportunity to share our slice of life with the world, but we also have a responsibility to ensure that the ways in which we share this slice of life remain productive, useful and inspiring.🧠 Life is meant to be lived
It’s okay, you’re doing everything correctly. The whole point of this existence is to live. When you wake up, you have already delivered on what you are here to do.🧠 Inputs and outputs
Curate your information diet carefully. Your inputs are more important than ever before. Read, listen and watch in that order. Take time to consume consciously and be aware when certain forms of information become ways of coping.
When you are stuck write. When you are overwhelmed walk. When you are feeling weighed down by the weight of the world, eat a nourishing meal and get a good sleep.
🍝 Main — Build Log:
Umm so why should I follow you?
Human society relies on leaders. Individuals who pave a path through the maze that others can follow. The future of our economy is increasingly built around digital goods, services and content. This means that we need strong leaders working in these fields. Not just leaders that can scale companies and orchestrate 7-8 figure exits that fill the pockets of shareholders, but leaders that can imagine new futures and illustrate to everyday people what role they play in this future.
We are slowly building the capacity of our toolboxes. We have resources and access that our ancestors could not even dream of. And yet we are still so focussed on small scale problems and short term solutions.
The future demands better, more inspiring leadership. Leaders that take big risks and showcase the process of their ideation, prototyping and scaling. The ethos of the underdog, the mad scientist, the creative genius, these are all frameworks for incredible leaders. Not because they predetermine greatness, but because they are interesting, and the future is built on interesting stories that people want to follow.
🍷 Side Pairings — This Week’s Creative Stack
Video – Modern Wisdom x Naval Ravikant — One of my all time favourite podcasts on happiness, life philosophy and the nature of reality.
Article – Why We Want Robots at Work but Humans in Art by Chris Paik — “The elegance of the future is not in man versus machine but in their division of labor: silicon sanding the rough edges of necessity so carbon can ascend to meaning. We will abolish baristas and canonize chefs, silence agents and encore actors. It is the same selfish instinct in both arenas—purge friction, preserve narrative—driving a world where the driest chores are done by circuits and the juiciest stories are told by people who bleed.”
Quote – “The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world. Through this, I know the advantage of taking no action.” — Lao Tzu
🍮 Dessert — Something to Think About
What makes you weird and how could you use that weirdness to improve the lives of others?
That’s all from us this week - Let us know how we can make Brilliant Bytes more valuable for you by replying to this email.
Thanks for being Brilliant,
Zed