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
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
Ask culture and guess culture are vastly different in behavior and expectations. Here are some highlights:
Ask culture expectations
Ask culture expectations
- Ask for what you want, even if it seems out of reach or like a big unreasonable request
- Take care of your own needs, and others will take care of theirs
- It’s fine to make requests that people will probably say no to
- People
Jean Hsu • Ask vs Guess Culture
There's obviously a balance to be had here. But it you want to accomplish things that are hard, you should lean towards ask.
Why is this?
Hard things require overcoming a lot of obstacles. It requires diligence and time. If you're going to hear a lot of no’s, it's better to hear them upfront than hope there's a yes lurking around the corner. There usually isn't.
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)
2020 Letter to Shareholders
aboutamazon.com
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.”
A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.
People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching a... See more
People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching a... See more
Sam Altman • How to Be Successful
The “scrub” believes that by learning to play the game the proper way, they will come out on top in the long run—that exploiting cheapness is shortsighted and doesn’t build skill.
Scrubs play for an imaginary version of “mastery”, while top players Play to Win.
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.
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”
In my experience, the way you end up doing good in the world has very little to do with how good your initial plan was.