ok so I’m going to take my own advice and just machine gun tweet about my book until I find a riff that I feel really hits the spot.

The book is called Introspect https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1380526554707492865

A phrase that I currently tend to use is “inner narrative troubleshooting”.

We are all born in the middle of many narratives - national, cultural, ethnic, historical, gender, etc - we inherit most of them, we choose some of them, and some of us experiment with them, edit them

The idea here is that it’s extremely unlikely that you sort of magically have the set of narratives that’s perfectly right for you. Most narratives really exist for the convenience of others. People tell us who we are and we believe them. I’m not saying we have to go tinfoil hat,

But it’s extremely worthwhile to identify and investigate the narratives that constitute your life.

This is not a purely intellectual or mental exercise. Our actions inform our narratives. Our contexts inform our narratives. It’s very tricky business

What is the story you tell yourself about who you are, what you’re about, what it’s all about, what it’s all for? What do you value, what do you cherish, what will you make sacrifices for?

You can articulate all of this stuff and then hit “inspect element” on it.

I have no doubt about my own personal journey in terms of questioning & investigating *my* personal narratives. I’ve done many versions of this throughout my life and it’s a powerful source of all that is good about me. What’s hard is relating this stuff meaningfully to other ppl

I wouldn’t feel like I had “the right” to write this book if not for many, many conversations I’ve had with people, helping them get unstuck with their personal issues. In a way, Introspect is a sort of catalogue of these conversations I’ve had with people figuring themselves out

Sometimes I say, Introspect is abt improving the relationship you have with the most important person in your life: you.

From this frame we can talk about a lot of r/ship stuff, & it also alludes to the “boss fight” or “core conflict” of the book: confronting the tyrant ego

addressing the boss fight in the book has been a huge ordeal for me. I can tell u about my own experience and point to other people’s, some research etc, but it feels like a fundamentally scary-dangerous thing to attempt and so I’ve been really taking my time with this one

I use phrases here like “the narcissism of self-loathing”. And like... this is TOUCHY stuff. Something here makes me uncomfortable still and I won’t publish until I resolve this discomfort. But you *could* call this book “unlearning narcissism”... soooo much to explain there tho

But yea this is why the book is taking so long. It’s like a guide to brain “surgery”, conducted from inside the brain. I know it can be done. I’ve seen it work. If you’ve followed me long enough you may have seen how a mild version of this has worked on others, thru exposure

thing is, when I worked thru "unlearning narcissism" for myself inside my own head, it was hard, but I got it done. in retrospect, kinda straightforward. I can condense that. but if I want to share this with the world, I have to consider all the ways it will be (mis)interpreted

at some level I should probably just accept some amount of misunderstanding – it'll probably be like... 2 people out of 1000 who have a problem with it, and I can address their concerns in a blogpost and a v1.1 update

when I did an ii salon about Introspect, the phrase that resonated with people was the question, "does your inner life feel more like a playground, or a prison?"

you could also riff off of this with "is your life more of an adventure or an ordeal?"

another riff I mentioned in conversation is the idea of an inner authoritarian, who rises to power the way all authoritarians do – fear-mongering, promising results, glory, finding someone to blame (yourself, subsets of yourself, etc) and generally being a douchestick fuckface

so maybe we could say "introspect is about dismantling your inner authoritarian" – that's pretty good. I think it helps me sidesteps some of the messier bits around the loaded connotations of "narcissism". though also like... I don't necessarily want to be so upfront about this

like while this book will walk you through fixing some problems, I don't necessarily want to SELL it as a solution to your problems. that feels like a kind of overfitting. I know as a marketer I would make more sales that way but it's important to me that I enjoy the *vibe*

so having been on a bit of a journey I think I still like "inner narrative troubleshooting" because it gives me this mental image of some nerd sort of tinkering in a garage, like a mechanic, with oil stains and spark plugs and stuff all over the place

the thing I want people to take away from the book is really not a particular solution to a particular problem, but rather this entire way of being, this tinkering mindset. now we get to some interesting territory – I didn't realize I could make that a part of THIS book. hm!

I like that. that's a new thing that just happened that I didn't have before this thread. I didn't realize that Introspect is about tinkering mindset. Tinkering mindset while tinkering with your mindset. Hahaha. I like it!!!

I just went to update the ebook landing page on gumroad and I found one of the earliest riffs of the book: "introspect is about figuring out what you want". i hardly seem to use this phrase anymore, even though it IS still a significant part of the book

ok I'm excited about this I think this is the final stretch!

http://gum.co/introspect