Design Your Work: Praxis Volume 1

by Tiago Forte

The example beliefs I listed above may seem trivial, but dealing in such constraints is playing with fire. Because there is very little, and perhaps no difference, between a genuine nugget of self-knowledge and what’s known as a “limiting belief.” A constraint that one minute helps you focus, in the next minute blinds you to an opportunity. A constraint that in one situation saves you from risk, in another situation limits your possibilities. This is why the skill of constantly formulating, discarding, testing, and refining macro-laws may be the most “meta” productivity skill of all.

Without diving too deep into this extremely complex debate, Deacon makes a daring argument that helps explain how meta-skills and macro-laws work. He argues that emergent phenomena are not more than the sum of their parts; they are less than the sum of their parts. In other words, emergence is defined by what is not there — by constraints. This seems, in fact, to be the nature of all sorts of things we have trouble explaining through simple causality — they exist primarily in relation to something not there. Purpose refers to a future goal that doesn’t yet exist; Function relates to an external mapping that is likewise immaterial; even Information seems to be distinguishable from noise only by its being “about” something else (its intentionality, in philosophical terms).