Dhruvik Parikh

Superhumanism

This essay is mostly a truism. I don't intend to make any particularly compelling or novel point here, but I'm writing it anyway because it's unfortunately too often ignored and almost everyone could use some updates to their priors on this topic.

My first claim is that you can be superhuman. That is to say, you are capable of far more than you currently think you are.

A few years ago I was living in a group house in Brooklyn with some friends. There was a high school track across the street from the house, and it being peak COVID at the time, it was generally deserted. We started running miles around the track and recording our times on a piece of paper taped to the fridge. I think the initial idea was so you could track your progress, but being a group of 20-something hotshots, we quickly turned it into a competition. This guy Will was on top, he was pretty good. But then a few weeks into it, someone new joined the house, a younger guy named Liam. Liam crushed Will's time by something like a minute. Keep in mind, a minute is a solid chunk of a mile time, so it didn't really seem like there was any contest left. But Will would not have it. He put his headphones in and turned the music (The Dark Knight soundtrack) up, and started running. Will beat Liam's mile time. That's insane! You should not be able to cut your mile time by a minute if you've already been training hard. But this is how we generally live our lives. We are coasting along, pushing ourselves slightly here and there, unaware of or unwilling to switch into high gear.

My second claim is that you will accomplish just about as much as you genuinely believe you will.

This follows naturally from the former. Will handily beat Liam's time, but had Liam beat him by only 15 seconds, I think we can all agree that Will wouldn't have run as fast as he did. All he needed was to see something, in this case someone, to adjust his prior of what he himself was capable of. Once that happens, the body simply fulfills the expectation.

One of my favorite YouTube videos is the Wim Hof documentary by Yes Theory. You should really give it a watch if you haven't already. In it, we see this insane Dutch guy demonstrate all kinds of physical feats like holding his breath for several minutes or withstanding extreme cold for hours. If the video only showed this man, though, it would not be terribly inspiring. The excellence of the video comes from the fact that it shows fairly regular, relatable people doing many of the same things with very little training. After seeing this, I tried the breath hold technique and easily tripled my previous record. For the expectation to hold, you have to genuinely believe that you can and will get there.

Given these two claims—that you can achieve more than your current expectation, and that you will reach approximately the level you set—it follows that you should raise your expectations. This isn't as easy as just saying, "this is my new expectation," though. We all know brute goal-setting doesn't really work. No, you need to somehow convince yourself in your heart of hearts that you can accomplish this. Of course, you'll need to put in quite a bit of effort—it's not manifestation. But so long as the belief is strong, the mind is surprisingly good at materializing it.

There's a tweet I keep revisiting that summarizes a great practical example of this:

I couldn't have said it better myself. What makes Stanford—or any other weighty badge—so powerful is the way it lifts your ambition. The majority of Stanford graduates genuinely believe they are going to change the world or do something of great magnitude. If you're pre-college, you should try to go to a place like that, primarily for this reason. But if you're post-college age, you're in a tough spot because society doesn't really maintain any ambition elevating opportunities for you on a silver platter. You're going to have to really search for alternative ways of challenging your ambition, whether it's the people you surround yourself with, the content you consume, etc. I'm still figuring this out myself and may share once I understand it better.

I'll also note the reverse role here. You can have an incredibly positive impact on someone's life by just updating their priors on what they are capable of. I truly believe that the best thing you can do for someone who's early in their life and career is expand their aperture. The best part is that you don't even have to be particularly confident yourself to do this. In fact, it's actually more effective if you're perceived as relatable and normal, so that they can more easily believe they too can do xyz.