BASAIRA Origins / current status
Basaira is an Arabic word with root meanings in ‘vision’, ‘clarity’ and ‘understanding’ (deep understanding). There are connotations of knowledge bestowed upon oneself through the universe, divinity etc. and ties to self through means of self-oriented development (at least that’s the way I’ve chosen to interpret it).
Context on me
This past few years I’ve been deeply routed in developing a deep understanding of myself so that I can choose to work towards goals and choose to desire a version of success which is completely self-serving.
“‘Self-serving’ may have bad connotations for you as it did me previously. We’ve come to understand self and ego as flawed beings and sometimes have attached feeling of wrongdoings. Adhering to complete self-honesty, self-accountability and removing judgment from ones hedonistic nature, it is possible to create a goal of a lifestyle, place or vision at some point in the future that is would be entirely beneficial to strive for.
This idea of ‘success’ takes different forms for different people and has different features and dimensionality for each person. I thought I had a deeply formed understanding of mine, but as you get older and change, naturally, this vision of success also evolves and changes. This past year in particular, after diligently pursuing my former idea of success, and continuing to fail without extracting meaningful fulfilment from my pursuits, I knew I needed to re-evaluate.
I know it’s so cliché and common to hear that the process / journey is much more important and rewarding than the summit of the mountain you are climbing… but that thinking framework will lead to more effective goal-setting. In order to achieve anything ‘extra-ordinary’ in nature, anything notoriously ‘difficult’ by general standards, you will have to undertake a lot of risk in diverting from the beaten path and you will have to endure much mental strain as you conflict general best practices. Even if the thing you want is not necessarily difficult or non-traditional, it will likely be a product of compounding efforts. Compounding efforts in the context of humans is a result of making bridges between concepts, ideas and experiences, whilst deepening ones knowledge in their fields of interest / expertise. As such, it is only rational to conclude that in order to effectively maximise the probability of long-term consistency in ones endeavours, it is most favourable to look to ones pre-disposed curiosities and intuition.
Naval Ravikant refers to this phenomena as ones ‘specific knowledge’. He denotes that it is a combination of ones intrinsic qualities applied to an area of deep interest over time. The two super-impose on one another and the person is left with a unique set of expertise from applying their unique DNA to an area where they naturally excel in. The key is not to explore fields or topics in a traditional, linear way, but instead to implore ones intrinsic or honed traits and apply them here in a unique way. ‘Specific knowledge is either deeply creative or deeply technical’. Creativity (in my opinion) is a persons unique outlook on everything. A transparent application layer laid upon ones environment, usually as a result of ones DNA in combination with learnings and perspectives gained from their experience. The ‘transparent application mask’ of ‘creative’ individuals would apply itself more deeply to their surroundings - than that of a ‘less creative’ individual. This application can take form in any landscape : preference towards colours, pronounced visual language, deep understanding and ability to construct abstract linguistic patterns, rationalisation in numeracy or philosophy, the texture of ones mind and thoughts, the way one perceives inter-person dynamics.
Creativity is cousin to technical proficiency. Many individuals who find themselves creative find and look to hone the beauty of a ‘skill’. Skillsets allow individuals to express themselves. The common pattern of creative individuals longing for self-expression leads me to believe that they remain in close loop with their own thoughts and feelings. This further propels my beliefs that all individuals are capable of creative expression through deep understanding of oneself.
Technical proficiency is a tool. Long ago we fastened pointed stones to wooden branches and sharpened them to create spears. Those tools served a purpose and enabled us to more effectively secure sustenance. Nowadays every area of human-work has it’s set of tools to superset the physical entities we inhabit as well as the Turing machines which sit within them (our brains). The spears were likely originally created to hunt, but after some time, we would have fastened twine to the end and set it alight to give light to our night movements. Tools are often created to serve a specific function before we find ulterior uses and applications for them. Technical proficiency can denote ones comfortability with a tool or set of tools such that the quality, speed and breadth of tasks which the wielder can span with them expands greatly.
I am 22 as of right now. I’ve consciously set aside the years of 19 through 23 of my life to learning and exploration, to self-mastery (in the most normal (non-monk level) way). I want to validate and understand what I am uniquely interested in and excel at, with limited pressures to look for a place to apply myself for societies benefit. So far I’ve found out that I’m deeply curious, easily distracted, and have started to trace-back parts of my world-view to past experiences and passed-down traits from my family tree. I’ve been focussed on seeking experiences which complete gaps in my tangible knowledge of the world without losing myself in self-destructive habits (I love nicotine too much). If I was to sum up the most important learnings I’ve had, it would be the following :
Curiosity killed the cat - but it has nine lives for a reason
You owe yourself to try and to fail in pursuit of your own curiosity. Most people become and adult and forget what it’s like to be a child. You haven’t changed, you’ve only learned things and become independent. Try things and fail.
Be a part-time artist, full-time engineer
Humans are emotive creatures. Artists learn to evoke emotion, emotion defines culture. Culture sets the tone. On a societal level, art is the most telling indicator of a time-period. We study not only the artist of a time-period, but the person who created it, and indirectly the society that produced them.
An architect is nothing without the engineer who calculates the beam loads. Engineers are systematic, systems are leverage, leverage multiplies time, time is your only truly finite resource.
If you want to make anything happen, you must be the engineer to your artistry.
Don’t try to win
Winners and losers are concepts related to games. Games have rulesets and requirements, and judges. People often refer to life as a game. Life is not a game, life is life.
There are similarities because games are derived from life - not the other way around. Everything that we know is a derivative of human and collective-human experience of the world around us. Do not confine yourself to defined rubrics which you have not scrutinised and re-moulded for yourself.
Defining winning only increases your likelihood of potentially losing by an infinite percentage.
Just play the game. Level up your interface to the game, which is you.
What is Basaira and what does any of what I’ve just talked about have to do with it?
Long-story short, learning is my current purpose in life. Everything anyone ever wants is on-the-other-side, or more likely in the middle of some form of learning process. Learning is a verb which describes the interpretation of inputs. It can be passive and it can be active. I want to learn what I want to learn most effectively and look for the connections across my learnings which tell me about myself and the world (or at least my interpretation of it).
Naturally, I started with reading and writing. Reading gives me means to study the learnings of other’s and writing helps me consolidate some of my learnings, digesting and reformulating them in my mind.
Eventually, I’m going to have to give something back to society in exchange for intermediatory tokens that we call money, so that I can exchange that ‘money’ for the things which I really want, or stash them for when I finally want something. Now I’ve never been ‘rich’ but I’ve had periods where I’ve had enough tokens to cover anything my younger brain could have possible wanted. After repeating that process enough times, I rationally came to the conclusion that all humans eventually come to which is that money doesn’t make you happy. What should I spend my life doing if I’m not going to try and accrue the most tokens I possibly can?
Well, I still want to become wealthy of-course. Having money won’t make you happy but not having enough money and becoming a slave to it won’t help you to get the things you really want. I don’t really care about being happy. There are a few different chemicals in the brain which cause a version of the emotion happiness. If I wanted to be happy, I would do M every second-weekend - it doesn’t work. You also don’t not become unhappy by trying to be happy. I just want to do more things which make me proud of myself when I look back at the version of myself which did them. I want to create - and I want to learn and become. I don’t want to try and learn and create for any other reason that the innate calling to do so.
So what about the money thing then? Well, there’s a few ways you can get these tokens. Firstly, we have to look at what they are, and how they came to be. Trade is what we’re really dealing with. Back in the school playground, if you brought a Fredo chocolate bar to school and you really wanted a Chuppa-chump lollipop, you would find the kid who normally had a Chuppa-chump lollipop and ask them if they wanted to swap with you. Ideally they would want they chocolate bare and not want their lollipop in the same ratio that you wanted the lollipop and didn’t want your Fredo. But there’s a problem, they’re kind of attached to the idea of both and don’t think the trade is equal. They bring up the fact that the lollipop lasts way longer than the Fredo does. Now you have a situation where 1 Chuppa-chump does not equal one Fredo. In comes gold star stickers. A kid exchanges a Chuppa-chump for 3 gold star stickers and takes out two of those to get a Fredo chocolate bar. Problem solved.
In the previous example, both kids brought an item (the sweets) that is standardised, they’re all relatively the same in the shop and all the kids can cry and ask their mum to get them one (with varying levels of success). What if instead of an item (sweets), a kid learned to spell before the others. Bryan and John with their candy still can’t spell their names and it would make their day to see it spelled out in blue crayon on a white A4 piece of paper, for some reason. The kid who can spell and write, let’s call her Elsa want to get more gold stars to show her mum in the car home and flex on her worthless brothers. Elsa starts her little writing business (illegally on company property with company recourses I might add) and her works are flying off the shelf. Eventually other kids learn to write and start doing the same. But Elsa has been doing this for so much longer that she can now use different colour crayons and draw a nice sun in the corner and even draw the whole family, in a line, outside their 2-D crayon house. She can now ask for even more gold stars and Bryan and John still want to come to her for their A4 paper needs.
I want to be like Elsa. She loves what she does so she does it a lot, other people like her drawings so she get’s gold stars which she can exchange for skipping clean-up time and extra snack-time. She doesn’t even like gold stars, she just wants to swap them for more time to do her little drawings. Elsa chose to trade a commodity which compounds in value with herself.
Basaira is about building around myself so that I can double, tripple down on traits and skills which I can leverage in exchange for tokens to be able to explore more shit I’m interested in and keep the flywheel going.
What does that practically look like? At the moment, I’m focussed on new technologies and my ability to leverage them to their fullest potential. ‘Technology is just something that doesn’t fully work yet’. Figuring out the new thing before someone else gives you an advantage you can charge for. The thing is, many people already know this and so you face competition. The way I want to outpace competition is to combine different areas. Curiosity and intuition are unique traits. I’m trying to build something to help me learn and build things whilst still leaning into and respecting my pre-existing unique traits.
ATM I have just set up my Obsidian Vault and build a terminal Local Agent to do some shit for me lol. But watch this space.