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 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
Big companies exert low levels of stress. But that stress is often low agency, so you often feel miserable in face of problems.
Startups exert high levels of stress. But that stress is often high agency, so you often feel energized in the face of problems.
Terrence Rohanx.comMost people understand that a forest "doesn't exist" in the sense that humans made up that word (the trees exist in a concrete way that the "forest" does not. Same with a "lake" vs water etc)
It just occurred to me that "a person" is more like a forest than a tree
Defendertwitter.comMeta on self and 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.com2020 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 good passage in continuation of the note on collective imaginations.
Responsibility that should be borne by an individual is dissolved amongst a group, who rely on the process of deliberation, passing on the responsibility to the organization.
Excerpt: “Committees are commonly used in our society because they create the illusion of avoiding risk. They are a wonderful device for avoiding responsibility while making the institution seem more rather than less accountable. Modern institutions have overloaded on actual risk while fleeing the appearance of it, especially if you count “failing at core mission” as a risk. Such aversion to the appearance of the unusual can’t be justified on economic grounds. Rather, it is a socially driven aversion.“
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Discipline is fighting yourself.
Wasted energy. Wasted creativity.
Put that instead into figuring out what you actually most want.
Solve problems in doing what you want with reason, not force.
Lulietwitter.com
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.