Good advice from my best friend Steve Jobs:
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Physiological hunger?
First thought:
- what if we thought of hunger as a physiological and literal thing?
We all know that ‘stay hungry’ is a metaphorical notion. But what if we took this notion to the extremely literal?
This means:
- during the day, continue to intermittent fast, and don’t eat until dinner.
why stay hungry?
When we eat a big meal, we fall victim to ‘food coma’. We essentially have no more motivation to do anything for the next few hours.
What is hunger? hunger is the desire to appropriate more nutrition to augment your body.
To stay hungry means:
- always have a burning desire to BECOME MORE, to CREATE MORE, and to become hyper-human.
foolishness
To be a fool isn’t to be a jester or clown. To be a fool as being ‘mad’ or ‘insane’ [‘fol’ in old French].
Thus to be foolish means to
- pursue ends in life which seem crazy or insane to others.
Truth be told, name one genius who ain’t crazy?
‘there is no great genius without some touch of madness’. – Aristotle
Or more accurately:
διὸ εὐφυοῦς ἡ ποιητική ἐστιν ἢ μανικοῦ. Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.
My theory:
To have some ‘madness’ or craziness in us is to harness our inner-Dionysian genius (Nietzsche). To make this genius intelligible, we must harness the Apollonian (rationality).
Then the thought is this:
- how can we harness our own inner-madness and inner-craziness in a generative manner in our artistic output, without going truly insane?
ERIC KIM
