The Power of Systems

Before this system, I thought writing had a lot to do with me (the writer). After this system, I saw that writing is about writing, and the less me, the better.

R. Buckminster Fuller says, “People never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship approaching.”

“willpower”—which I usually refer to as “willforce” since we often use it to force ourselves to do something we don’t want to do. That’s as absurd as picking yourself up by your own bootstraps or trying to raise a sinking ship by pulling up on the railings while standing on the deck.

Much of the workability and simplicity in the paradigm arises from taking the focus off of I/me/mine and everything those imply—mindset, attitude, personality, psychology, etc.—and putting it on the system.

The systems paradigm we are proposing in this book gets its power from recognizing the interdependent, interconnected, dynamic, ever-flowing nature of this Universe—and of us as part of it.

tried the culturally approved system I call “cause and effect” (psychology). In that system we ask, “Why?” and then attempt to find the cause and remove it. But that system took him further away from the present and into the past. Cause and effect can work well with linear, mechanical systems (for example, machines), but it turns out that the Unive

We always have an existing system. It isn’t possible to be outside of a system or to have no system. But most of the time our systems are unexamined, and we often don’t call them systems—or even recognize them as such. And sometimes the existing systems don’t work.

That turned out to be the heart of their system. Just for today. Forget the past and forget the future. Today is the only day you’ll ever live in, so it’s where we access the system.

He woke me up to a distinction called “systems, not psychology.” His passion was to always look for workability. And he made me laugh out loud when he joked that choosing a system over psychology was “like choosing Wikipedia over a Ouija Board.”