Magician Supreme
Immature Ambition, The Supreme What, and Stumbling to Magic
Timothée Chalamet said that the creator of Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie, told him it was really a movie about being an idiot in your 20s.
I saw it this weekend and loved it. Now, whether that’s because I was an idiot in my 20s—for which I have one more year to prove the case—or because I found the ambitious hunger of Marty Mouser enthralling, is up for debate.
The movie for me wasn’t quite about being an idiot in your 20s. It was more about being an ambitious idiot in your 20s.
That I can get behind.
It’s one of the reasons I found myself captivated by the movie; I had—and still have—a fierce sense of ambition.
Ambition is a lovely, life-affirming energy that drives you toward success through discipline, determination, and hard work. With ambition, the how of getting something done is mostly a matter of time.
But how does one take idiotic, or rather, immature ambition, and bring it into a state of greater maturity?
The Supreme What
Alberto Romero recently dropped his notes on AI agents in a piece titled You Spent Your Whole Life Getting Good at the Wrong Thing.
My main takeaway from this piece is: given the fact that “the most powerful AI tools today collapsed the process of doing things inside a computer into basically a wish,” we won’t need to worry about the how of doing things anymore and can focus our time and efforts on determining the what.
This is a subtle yet massive reorientation in how tasks are traditionally approached.
It’s crazy to reflect on, but I took little time contemplating what I would spend four years studying at college. I knew the first week of accounting 101 that the only accounting I’d do in my career was accounting for the years I lost studying it.
It’s of course easy to say that in hindsight. At the time, I was lost, with no clue of what I wanted. I kept moving forward because I knew I could make a living, and that with that living, I could find what I wanted from my life. I think spending time honing curiosity and interest to find what matters to you, will become more important than ever and will be step one, rather than an afterthought.
Once I finished school and the remaining goals attached to the degree I didn’t want, I made the choice to find the vocation I wanted to dedicate my life to: my Supreme What.
This is where ambition served a great purpose.
I was working a demanding job and had started developing the greatest relationship of my life. With the little time I had left, I could wield the fire of my ambition to pursue my career side quest—which was really the main quest—to figure out my Supreme What.
Finding it was not easy.
I would ask myself a question about what I should try, and there came an answer from within! So, I gave that thing a try. After all, it was the best answer that came at that moment.
The fierce ambition said: “Time to become #1!”
And after one month of trying to stream video games, I said: “Yeah bro… this ain’t it.”
Finding what took years, because finding what is not a job search, it’s a soul-search. If it wasn’t for the individuation journey, I would not be who I am today. It was the self-discovery that made finding the vocation a matter of effort, for which my newly matured ambition was ready.
I think this is why many shy away from ambition, because for something to become mature it must first become. There’s no doing away with the immaturity before there is maturity, and those beginning phases of ambition can be cringe, embarrassing, and shameful when reflected on by future-you (especially if you’re a ruthless self-critic).
I needed to stumble through constant responses to the question: “Okay, where are we headed next?”
Through answering that question many times over, I honed not only the discovery of the vocation, but more importantly, myself.
When I ask myself that question now, all of my responses are acutely focused on projects within the vocation. The responses are not things like: let’s try to become a professional basketball player (Fear not, NBA players. I have given that one up and will not be a force that you will have to recon with).
I found my Supreme What.
Wielding idiotic ambition—although embarrassing—is necessary to wield mature ambition.
Part of maturing that ambition, too, is making room for the important parts of your life which are not solely the vocation (another point Marty Supreme touched on). Falling in love right as I finished school forced me to see this, and through that, I learned how to hone my ambition in a disciplined manner, while still making the time to start building a family.
With sights on the Supreme What, and the ambition no longer immature; it is not only a fire that fuels, but it is now something that can be used to burn away the apprentice, and leave the craftsmen standing.
Now, it’s time to transform.
The Kwisatz Haderach
I hate to admit this publicly, but I’ll do it anyways. I think I love Timothée Chalamet.
My first bout of admiration came after his infamous award speech in which he walked up on the stage and in a humble bow, said: “I know we’re in a subjective business, but the truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats…”
Here’s the full speech.
It’s an archetype of person I haven’t seen represented in the pop culture in a long time, or ever, really. Someone with that energy who wasn’t also arrogant or terribly self-delusional. Just an extremely high aiming ambition, with a belief that you can do something big.
What’s wrong with aiming so high? Why is it so rare? Is it a fear of failure? A fear of being truthful as to how high you really aim?
I don’t know what it is, fully1—and I’m sure it’s many things—but I wonder if it was always that way. When you know where to look, and you find yourself looking on a clear day, you can see the top. So, why not aim as high as you can see?
Marty Supreme was a great exploration of that question. Truth be told, there are a lot of sacrifices that come with the top.
So it is said.
I, on the other hand, think that mature ambition can help you aim high, and not destroy everyone’s life around you. I’ve seen it do the opposite.
You start to morph and become something other, something magical.
In another interview, when asked about the speech, Timothée said that he may have had some of the energy and tone of the character with him as he gave the speech because they had finished filming Mary Supreme two months prior. What’s more interesting to me isn’t his answer to that question, but that he’s been asked about that speech so many times. It’s as if others are so perplexed as to how he could have said such a thing up on that stage (as opposed to the other great things said on award show stages).
I think people realized in that moment, that Timothée was no longer just the kid from Interstellar, but that he was indeed the Kwisatz Haderach.
The Magician
“The practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner.”
~ Carl Jung
I read a blog post over the weekend written by one of the world’s greatest body painters2.
Talk about someone who aimed high and achieved.
She was making a living from her art, had a partner, friends, weekly dinner parties where those friends would bring strangers for her to meet, and she even travelled to Austria for several years to compete in the bodypainting World Championship, frequently placing in the top four or five.
For her, getting first place and being number one was conceivable. She knew that she could do it with incremental improvements: speed, more detailed realism, a competent assistant, and an element of luck. A combination of those things, and one year, she could achieve number one.
The was until Sanatan Dinda came along.
He practiced the art in an appallingly different way. The frame of which he approached bodypainting was so utterly different that it mystified her.
She already knew that “not only is any sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic; any sufficiently advanced technologist seems like a magician.”
Wielding mature ambition and knowing your Supreme What might give you the path, but to mature that growth to a point of magic, you need to surround yourself with magicians.
As the body painter reflected: “The way to extraordinary growth and changes often involves a fundamental ontological or ‘lens’ shift in how you see the world. Magicians are wearing not just better, but fundamentally differently shaped lenses to the rest of us.”
The magicians of writing story make the mysterious impossibility of writing a work of fiction, a mere matter of how.
When I started the craft of writing fiction and wanted to draft my first novel, Brandon Sanderson was my magician. He paved the path for me so that I could understand how to move from nothing to The End in a satisfying way. Through his lessons, I took his magic and learned not just how he made magic, but how I could cast my own spells.
Whatever pursuit you find yourself after, magicians are always around.
Lucky for those of us who aren’t yet in the upper echelons, those magicians write books, post lectures on YouTube, and have social media accounts where they give away most of the material in their spell books.
It makes the stumbling around a lot easier when the magician for the magic you seek to understand, awaits you at the next corner.
And maybe one day, through all of your stumbling, people will look at you aghast because you have stumbled so much and so often, that you’ve become a magician yourself.
The best part of all of this is that you don’t need to run a furious race like Marty Mouser, hurting nearly everyone you encounter.
You just need to wield ambition and keep stumbling forward, reorienting along the way.
I think that’s the secret to it all.
Magicians have stumbled around so much, that they’ve managed their way to the top of some mountain that others cannot understand how in the world they could have climbed. Little do they know that they were at one point also an idiot, also in their 20s, and also stumbling around without a clue.
To fellow practitioners of the stumble, and to those of you who wield magic, this was for you.
Dom
After years of prancing around ambitiously in my 20s, I have come to find that there is a danger in ambition, though it is certainly not the reason that people stray from it and why it’s not so prevalent in the popular culture. This is a danger that comes with an ambitious pursuit. The dangers are twofold: A ballooning ego-inflation, or a spiraling ego-deflation. There are tactics to avoid both, tactics that should be deployed. Humility rituals for an ego-inflation (can be simple—mine is golf…). For ego deflation, the path is individuation—which inevitably leads to a reminder that within lies the Self (the imago dei). When one realizes such an image lives within, the danger of deflation is all but solved.
I couldn’t find her name, and her blog seems pseudonymous so I’m not going to go to lengths to find who she is given that it seems she would like that level of pseudonymity. The blog name is Autotranslucence.