Become all you can become with Sophie

Are you a nerd or a floater?

One description I found on the internet is this: a NERD is an individual of vast intelligence and curiosity coupled with a natural knack for academics and discovery.

You not only appreciate technology, biology, and all the other ‘ology’s – you know what they mean and how they work, too! While Geeks are busy flooding comic-cons and using the internet while pretending to know how it works, you are busy coding the damn internet and earning your Masters or Doctorate (if you don’t already have it/both).

Of course the terms Nerd, Geek, and Dork will always have some overlap, but your test results show an innately intelligent individual with the drive and know-how to put you behind the classic horn-rimmed glasses and pocket protector of a well-educated, deeply intellectual N-E-R-D!

I prefer to say: a nerd is someone who has a vision, a path, and skills and knowledge to follow that path faithfully, and diligently.

You can be an engineer, an artist, an architect, a cook, a restaurateur, an actor, a furniture maker… and be a nerd… Am I misusing the term? Probably…. I mean, more like the hero of the movie Gattaca… where your natural abilities are magnified by your will and your diligence.

Floaters

Floaters are people who don’t do anything with their lives, or at least they don’t try to. When at work, do you notice anybody that sits around or acts like they are busy? That’s a Floater. When your girlfriend or wife complains about how nobody does anything around the house and carries on doing whatever, sorry honey you’re a Floater.

If the complainers would actually stand up and put some effort into what they are doing and try to change how they are living, then they might actually spread their wings and take flight.

Hate me? Thank you. I take it as a compliment.

In life you are either a nerd or you are a floater.

The two most important characteristics of a nerd is that they know what is most important to them, and they love it.

I always wanted to be Renaissance man, because for me, choosing, committing was the hardest. I even picked architecture because I had the illusion that architects needed to know everything. And that may be true, that they need to know everything, but it is also true, that they don’t.

And especially they don’t use words to express, and I am a words person.

So I went through five years of university and suffered through 17 years of working as an architect… until I chose and committed to a profession that needed my words…

When you know what is important to you, then it is easier to organize a life around it. Then your life becomes a workshop.

What prevents a lot of people from living a life worth living is that they don’t choose their priorities, they are chosen for them.

By other people.

You become the toothbrush, toilet brush, entertainer, janitor, shopper, dildo: a service provider for other people.

You don’t notice it until there is a conflict. Conflict of interest. Between what other people want you to be, and you want to be.

Holidays are a good time to notice: what you want from your life, doesn’t much matter around holiday time… only what you have to do, expected to do, asked to do, ought to do.

It’s not a special time: it is just easier to notice because pretty much nothing that is important to you, nothing that serves you on the long run, has room in your life around the holidays… whatever holidays, by the way… Be them state holidays or religious holidays. At holidays you find out how much control and say you have about your own life. For most that is mighty little…

Nothing wrong, they should not cancel holidays, I just want you to be awake.

Floaters have never chosen what is important to them. They don’t know. They are just thrown around by circumstances, for them there is no path holidays are trying to take them off… they have no path, no purpose, no rhyme and no reason to live.

They wake up in the morning because they didn’t die the night before.

Now, you may think that I am talking against family, and honestly a month ago I would have. But sometimes you get guided to the perfect Netflix series…

I am watching Blue Bloods, about an Irish family, top cops. Every single adult in that family knows what they are about, and yet, every Sunday they go to church together, eat together, protect each other, support each other.

I didn’t know it was possible, because I had never seen anything like that. My family surely wasn’t like it. In my own family closeness wasn’t present. Family wasn’t a priority at all. It was at the very bottom of priorities. And so it was in all families I have observed…

Or if family was important, it was important from top down, not to each person. In this type of family each person was required to give up what they individually were about, and get no support or respect if in spite of that pressure they were up to something… i.e. they were nerds.

It’s rare, or non-existent, but if they could make a series about it, then it’s possible.

I can even imagine being part of a family like that.

Now, how is a family like that is born and formed?

I think that it all comes from top down…

One person, the patriarch, I guess, was up to something, had the generosity to share what he was about, the principles, the idealism, the struggles, and it became attractive, and the ambition of the children to choose their own path, and share it.

Among people I know, sharing with their parents what you are about, and getting support is unheard of.

People get married without ever completely know and share what they are about, and then the marriage is a power struggle…

Inside my parents’ marriage that power struggle never happened, but family, love, was never present.

Somehow, my older brother and me, got infected with my father’s purposeful living… my little brother, who was still little when my father left the family, is a floater. Not up to anything.

I have been working with adults.

The results are disappointing. More often than not, the person I am working with is pulled down, pulled back to being a floater by the family.

I see that I can work till I die and not make a difference if I continue to work with adults.

So I am setting my eyes at children.

Children have more freedom, and they have a good and politically correct excuse: their school grades, their future, their future earnings, their future success.

Parents want that for their children, even if they want it for the wrong reason. And they do… they have no choice about it: unevolved parents don’t really want their children to evolve, but by the time they notice, I hope, it will be irreversible.

The goal is to create nerds, children whose first priority is what they are up to (vertical), and their second priority is a loving relationship (horizontal).

What format will I choose? I am not sure yet. What age group? I haven’t decided.

I welcome your input. Especially if you have children. Children that you’d allow to get smarter, happier, so they can have a life they love, a life where they grow.

Would you allow your child to be more than you? More evolved?

Or would you like them to be just like you but get better grades?

Please comment below, or send me an email. I’d really like to hear what you have to say.

And please don’t lie. I’ll know.

PS: I just finished reading a long nerd article that you do want to read if you don’t have your life’s purpose, if you are ambiguous about your life purpose… here it is… enjoy: https://www.mynotetakingnerd.com/blog/personal-improvement-secret-to-steve-jobs-success/