My favourite word in the english dictionary
What does enlightened even mean?
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, enlightened means:showing understanding, acting in a positive way, and not following old-fashioned or false beliefsknowing the truth about existenceshowing understanding and wisdom in dealing with othersopen to new ideas and facts based on reason and science rather than following old, false beliefsThis may be my favourite word in the english dictionary.
One may argue there have been more enlightened people in the past and the modern world is producing less and less enlightened people. While that may be true, I’m here to show the modern world produces them too.
At danielfalbo.com/enlightened.md I keep a small list of people from our era that I believe to be truly enlightened, as a north star of people I look up to. Here’s a handful of them and how they ended up in my list.
1. Rick Rubin
He does not know how to play any musical instrument or use any music production software. His superpowers lie in creating a setting that makes the artists feel comfortable, be themselves, and express their full potential, allowing them to produce their best work.
Rick is into meditation, killing the ego, living in the present.
In his interview with Joe Rogan, he mentioned that when his house caught fire and he was on his near-death fire escape, his thoughts were something like “Family is safe, book is out, if I die, it’s ok.”
2. Warren and Charlie
When you listen to their interviews and shareholders meetings, you can easily spot how much they trust each other, how much they always praise each other and have 0 ego for themselves.
Huge achievements, 0 ego.
Absolute legends.
3. Salvatore Sanfilippo aka antirez
Regardless of the commercial impact of Redis, he always advocated for releasing it with permissive licenses such as the BSD license, which would allow anyone else at all to re-distribute and get paid for the software. In fact, he was not the founder of Redis Labs, the company. He was just later hired as an employee. He made this choice deliberately: earlier in his life he did build a company and decided that he didn’t like the stress and lifestyle that running a company required. Instead, he opted for a more flexible lifestyle, living in Catania, Sicily, rather than Silicon Valley.
The story of Redis is much more complicated than this, and Salvatore recently launched a youtube channel where, among other things, he also talks about it.
In one of his recent livestreams, he mentioned something like:
It doesn’t matter how good of a programmer you are, what car you drive, or how much money you have in your bank account. All that matters in life is being a good person to the few who are closest to you.He also recently organized an event, which I attended. No fancy company headquarters location or anything. The event took place in Campobello di Licata where he did a talk to start a conversation about Artificial Intelligence.
Huge achievements, 0 ego, huge generous heart.
Absolute legend.