Stop Asking What to Read

When someone asks you for suggested reading or some list of philosophers, after witnessing some piece of your creativity, they are telling you the type of person they are.

The type of person who cannot comprehend how an unknown could receive and craft profound truths or pieces of wisdom. For surely it must have come from one of the greats, the geniuses, the towering figures of antiquity.

Do not denigrate my experience, my endless toil, my spirit, just because you never risked becoming something. Do not soil my words with your chosen inexperience. It is YOU who never risked the realization that ALL truth exists inside the struggle to create.

We are ALL nobodies, scraping our way through nature. Some of us do more than just exist. Some of us turn observations into words, theories and art. Some of us compress entropy down into things awaiting existence.

Get away from me with your hero worship and sycophantic love affair of history’s notables. Of course there are overlaps in our philosophies, how could there not be? The greats were as insignificant as I am, poking and prodding nature to find what is.

Nature is the only author. If you really wanted to learn you would have asked her by now.

Go build something and stop wasting my time with your dull, imperceptive and unoriginal take on “genius.”

Pick up the damn hammer and swing already. And just maybe you’ll become something more notable than your bookshelf.