Verbs Over Substantives

Life should be exciting. Period.

I’m writing this as I head to a hackathon in Madrid, full of positive emotions and hungry for the thrill. I can’t fully articulate how I feel; it’s just this sense that things are going to be good and that so much adventure and so many new opportunities lie ahead of me.

I don’t know what to expect, but I am quite content with myself. I know I’m making the right decisions: going to hackathons, meeting new people, doing what I love most.

While waiting for my flight, I wondered, why don’t we all live life this way? Why don’t we chase more exciting experiences? As someone (I think it was Elon Musk) put it, everyone is trying to maximize their “ass covering,” which was probably wise in 3000 BC but not in the twenty first century.

In an ever changing world, trying to stay the same is the most guaranteed way to fail, and you can’t differentiate yourself much from others unless you gather experiences that no one else has.

I think we place too much emphasis on the idea of the “individual” as a fixed entity. First, I like Tom Chi’s argument that substantives inhibit thinking because they set frameworks in place imaginary outlines that define what is and what isn’t—and you simply accept them. There’s no point in thinking when you use substantives; you just accept things as they are.

Verbs, on the other hand, have nothing to do with frameworks; they are just observations. As initial states or parameters change, so do the observations and, by extension, our definitions of certain things (if we describe those things through verbs). That won’t happen with substantives.

You won’t argue about how a chair should function. You might tweak its design, but overall its function, use, and underlying technology will remain the same. If, on the other hand, you look at a chair through verbs only, you question what it does, why it needs to do it, and how we can do it better (if we need to do it at all).

We’ve gone off track a bit, but that’s the point: you should try to see yourself less as an individual and more as an ever changing being—defining yourself through verbs and actions rather than substantives and attributes.

Because although we understand why this makes sense, we rarely think in this framework of “thinking in verbs,” so nothing really changes in the way we live. Most people underestimate by orders of magnitude how much a new experience will impact their neural networks.

These were my thoughts on experiencing life to the fullest. Start by defining yourself as a set of verbs, and then begin acquiring the experiences your best self would require to become the best.