On Practice by Mao, Blueprints, and the limits of the conscious mind
Peace. In the (crucial) process of review, I’ve seen the evolution of my thought. It galvanized me!! Building systems is not just hard work, it is where instant gratification goes to die. I’ve tasked myself in 2025 with building internal and external systems that are capable of running without me as soon as feasible (or by 2028). I wanted to share this evolution of thought with you all in order to tackle some FAQs.
Two of my most frequently asked questions:
(1) ismatu, how are you doing what you are doing?
(2) ismatu, are you keeping good track of your methodology so that your ecosystems are replicable?
Answers: I build systems, feel overwhelmed in the process of building, and then continue despite feelings of overwhelm. And then I make videos about them.
A significant amount of success can be attributed to shaping your mind to tolerate fear, risk and uncertainty. Generating systems requires new skills. The difficulty in learning new skills is not the learning itself; humans are made to learn. We’re great at learning. The difficulty comes in tolerating the emotional peaks and valleys that come with skill acquisition and honing. See here the emotional cycle of change (graph from The Twelve Week Year).
Lots of success, beyond the logistics, is a mental game. You have to be willing to tolerate a profound sense (feeling) of failure, and then endure to the finished product anyhow, knowing that you will only start this cycle over again when the system you’re building requires another new skill. Sigh. But also– is it not so great to be alive? To feel yourself expand?
Relevant: the Blueprints community (who I affectionately call The Architects) are working on On Practice by Mao. I’ll link the PDF here in case anyone is interested in reading it. There’s also an audio version with commentary done by Socialism For All. While reading about executive function and how to build personal systems that allow for optimal execution, I found this reading to be necessary. When do you stop learning and start doing? How do you recognize when you’re learning to comprehend vs. learning to act? How does this relate to revolutionary systems? You feel me? Great read for that.
I document my processes of systems building (and mental fortitude) at ismatu.fm (with videos that go up on my second YouTube channel). This endeavor is called Blueprints, and it’s been going on for months!
Sorry for neglecting to tell you about it!! I write here to provide some examples (as a prelude to the upcoming essays on money, which close out themes of class traitorship we have been exploring for pretty much all of 2025.
Blueprints acts as a reflection and study on the genesis, maintenance, costs and benefits of creating sovereign systems. They are available for free (unabridged! in full!) after one quarter has passed. If you want to keep up with them live, it’s $10/month. The money I get from Blueprints (and all the monies you give me) create and sustain these projects we all like so much.
Here is the Blueprints that was just made free. It is the 11th installment in the series (so if this is the first you’re hearing about this, happy binging!)
Here's the link to the transcript: https://www.ismatu.fm/blueprintsxi/
Below the paywall is the Blueprints that went out just a few days ago. It talks about the mental reframes I have and repeat to myself to get through this particular valley in the emotional cycle of change. I like the juxtaposition of these two videos because the top one sees me incredibly exhausted, uncomfortable, unsure of myself… and the bottom one has me in the exact same emotional state, just with a different sense of surety. I am sure of my successes, even when my emotional state is telling me to change back into my onesie and return to eating vegan chocolate chip cookies and watching Phineas and Ferb. It also has notes on On Practice by Mao, which has themes about the first and second wave of knowledge (the first time you learn, you are in the observational phase of knowledge acquisition, whereas the second time you learn, you are able to identify connections, themes and relationships between the elements). Please remember: this same video will be made free, in full, in just a few weeks!!! You do not have to pay if you don’t want to!! Really, the paywall is just to say thank you to the people that voluntarily pay for work that is overall free, and to have a basic amount of safety for me (as the up to date stuff has way more details on my projects and whereabouts. You do need to have a financial investment in these projects to be privy to that information).
The topic of this week was discipline; what does discipline actually mean? How do we know when it’s time to act on the things we have learned? How do we push ourselves without breaking ourselves?
IG