Famous 5s

Albert Einstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Andy Warhol, Bill Gates, Blaise Pascal, Bobby Fischer, Eckhart Tolle, Glenn Gould, Kurt Vonnegut, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Cage, Mark Zuckerberg, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Meredith Monk, Rene Descarte, Stephen King, Stephen Hawking, Tim Burton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Tobi Lutke

Levels of Consciousness

Creative: curious, scrutinizing 

Controlling: eccentric, reclusive

Destructive: caustic, doomsaying

Shock point fear (the fear that causes the slip from Creative to Controlling consciousness) 

I have not mastered enough to feel confident to be in the world

Examples of shock point fears

• Someone found a flaw in my code… Are there people smarter than me??

• The leading research expert on armadillos’ dietary preferences has just disproved my exquisitely elaborate theory of leprosy contraction as it relates to armadillos, and now life as I know it has lost its inherent meaning

• My wife wants me to be an expert in understanding her emotions and giving love… I’m completely stumped.

• I predicted global warming but no one believed me…

Why I get provoked Illuminating my ignorance, questioning my unemotional perception of reality, or bringing me in touch with emotions and personal obligations that I don’t understand and don’t want to understand because I’m all about unsentimental, unbiased discovery

How I cope with fear I become The Hermit. I pull out of the world to live immersed in my cave of facts that I study and study and study until I become an expert, since data is the only thing I can trust in life; definitely not humans who (unless they’re like me) are, by definition, a curiously odd, feelings-driven species i.e. an irrational creature

My Emotions are puzzling – a strange, sentient anomaly