Ever since I saw the Top Gear review of the BMW E60 M5, I instantly knew it was a car I’d hope to own at some point in my life. I didn’t know how I’d get there but I just knew that I would figure it out.

cue moving to San Francisco with a lot of ambition and no money and a steadfast desire to “make it”, a lot of long nights grinding, failing, grinding, failing, grinding, until eventually something worked then a lot of things worked. If you’re in this cycle then my advice is to keep grinding but be open to what grinding is. You can be successful but you have to be open with how you get there.

When things started to work I didn’t do that many “nice” things for myself. In fact, I super-funded my kids 529 college savings plan and got some thoughtful gifts for those around me. But I didn’t indulge nearly as much as I thought I would.

as an aside, I think the true prize is being able to spend your time doing what you love. Toys are nice, but at best, they’re mile markers in the race of you against yourself

But I followed through and got my M5. I went for the X5M Competition spec.

The X5m competition spec is stupidly fast. 640 brake horsepower. 0-60 in I don’t even know, but that thing is a monster. Bought it, drove it off the lot, checked the box.

A few weeks later I noticed something. Hm, I’m going to gas stations a lot more than I did before in my little 2-series. I knew this from the spec sheet, but I was doing 13 miles to the gallon. My old car would do at least 25.

One day I spent a good 20 minutes looking around the iDrive for how to enable eco mode. But guess what:

There is no eco mode.

I didn’t really have any buyer’s remorse, no cognitive dissonance, no regrets. I live in California and we pay $5.80/gal at the pump. And the X5m is not fuel efficient but most importantly, it does not try to be efficient.

Read that again: it’s like a $100k+ performance SUV and it has a billion options but it does not offer an eco mode. At first I thought it was weird, but then I realized that I was looking at something beautiful.

If it had an eco mode, it would be compromising on its essence.

If it had eco mode, it would let you drive it in a way that doesn’t use all 8 cylinders.

If you want eco mode you shouldn’t be driving an X5m.

If you worry about depreciation, look elsewhere.

If you want low auto insurance premiums, look elsewhere.

Get an X5m if and only if you want something that feels like a tank, sits high off the ground, and can go so fast it almost feels uncomfortable.

As I built Center (now 3.is), I thought a lot about that. It’s really hard to make something that everybody loves. Taylor Swift is an exception. But I think that pleasing everybody is an anti-virtue. Trying to mean something to everybody means you mean nothing to somebody, because you have no information content. There’s beauty in your spikes and in your imperfections. The things that make you un-economical, inefficient, terrible fuel consumption, depreciate quickly, those might also be the things that make you beautiful.

There is no virtue is trying to please everybody. Trying to appeal to everyone is the fastest way to lose the war against chaos.

vim is like this. If you’re not comfortable reading the docs, vim is not for you. Use somehting else.

It’s so easy to create new things these days, so we’re moving towards a world where the perfect tool for you exists or it will exist soon. It might not be the tool for everybody. But maybe picking things that are controversial is the way to increasing beauty into your life.