EVERYTHING IS A SIGN!!!

...said the crazy girl

Last year, I saw a podcast episode about setting 30-year goals, which sounded interesting.¹ It was an a16z crypto interview with Sreeram Kannan, the founder of Eigenlayer, and to be honest, I don't really know or use Eigenlayer, but I thought the title of the episode was interesting so I decided to give it a listen. I wanted to pull out one of my favorite ideas that he shared.

Sreeram mentioned how he initially asked many great investors for funding for the first iteration of his project, but their team kept getting rejected. The investors gave him very direct feedback,² and over time, this “negative” feedback allowed him to think more long-term about the project, and his takeaway is that signal inputs should be taken seriously, even when he disagrees with them, even when they are criticisms.

Early on in my schizophrenia diagnosis, I believed that my episodes were bouts of hallucinations where I had to tell myself that none of it was real. Over time, I realized that when I start to feel an episode coming on, it means I felt unsafe in my environment, and it becomes a signaling tool for me to know to leave a situation or to get to a place where I’ll feel better. So, even though I felt really negatively when I had an episode, it was actually a way for my nervous system to communicate with me that I needed to gtfo. That’s probably why in recent years, I’ve been leaning into the idea of how everything around us can be a type of signal, and also as some kind of coping mechanism for myself.

I believe everyone has their own ways to process the signals around them. Some people talk about separating noise from signals, but in my experience so far, even things I would normally dismiss as noise have ended up like signals for me. What I mean by this is what people usually consider “noise” to me still counts as a signal; I just classify it as a negative one, so it’s also highly specific to individual people.

This doesn’t mean that each signal has equal weight or that I need to take action on every signal I encounter. If I notice it, then what it tells me is that it might be worth thinking about later, especially if it affected me in some way. If it makes me feel negatively, like criticism, or it’s people treating me inconsiderately, I will feel hurt, but I can overcome the painful feelings if I decide I can learn from it. It tells me what I care about, or it reveals something about the people involved, or it shifts how I see the broader situation. Then, I can decide if I want to do something about it, whether it’s to adjust myself or adjust what I can control in the situation.

I talk about this like it’s a simple matter, but the truth is that it’s a constant battle for me. I’m a sensitive person, so whenever I get negative feedback, I take it quite personally and my immediate thought is a fight vs flight reaction. I usually need some distance (and more often than not, a good night’s sleep) before I can even begin to place it in context.³ Even then, I’m not always sure whether I’m interpreting the signal correctly, only that reacting immediately isn’t usually a helpful move.

1. You can listen to the full episode here » https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/podcast/eigen-labs-sreeram-kannan/

2. For example, some VCs asked him why he was building on Cardano instead of Ethereum, implying he should change directions.

3. Sleep also really helps with schizophrenia.