Agency
Everything in our world is there because someone decided it needed to exist. We all have things we know need to exist. What stops us from making them exist?
Agency
To go with the flow is to seek equilibrium.
Excerpt from a remarkable final shareholder letter:
“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – and that is what it is when it dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings.”
The opposite to reflexive agency is prompted agency - agency which only becomes available given some prompt to action. “That does seem like a problem. Have you tried solving it?” is my only-half-joking prompt I use with people: It’s something that highlights the failure of agency, in a way that makes people aware that action is an option available
... See moreDavid R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
the first time you do something that everyone in your social environment tells you is a bad idea, and it turns out you were right, is more psychoactive than any drug
Visakan Veerasamyx.com
1/ It's very interesting and useful I think to apply the MVP model of product development to personal development.
Perpetual motion starts with motion
Shorten your feedback loops
Iterate faster
Increase clockspeed (circle back faster)
fast forward a year from now. your life is the best it's ever been, entirely as a result of your own choices.
what choices did you make now and in the coming months that created that reality for you?
Love Pilgrimx.comProfound. I'll have to return to this one.
It strikes me a higher-level decomposition of that Naval thread.
The objective severity of our histories may be of little importance when compared to the subjective hold they appear to have on us.
To paraphrase physician and author Gabor Maté, we are not what happened to us but what happened inside of us as a result of what happened to us. https://t.co/RhbUWBtYCv
First, we must gather information, and collect our puzzle pieces. Then we must assemble the edges, building the container for our work. In this way, action is the precursor to creativity. Not the other way around.
We must act our way into creativity, not think our way in.
I need to come back to this.
Four ways this ailment [of not doing things] shows up as:
Learning Syndrome - “one more tutorial”
Tool Syndrome - “one more library”
Process Syndrome - “I just need the right framework”
Maintenance Syndrome - “let me take care of this first”