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Taking action that works with the world is more effective, less stressful, and ultimately more rewarding. We don’t waste our time fighting to accomplish the impossible.
The theory of relativity is founded on empathy. Not empathy in the ordinary emotional sense; empathy in a rigorous scientific sense. The crucial idea is to imagine how things would appear to someone who’s moving in a different way than you are.»
When you see someone doing something that doesn’t make sense to you, ask yourself what the world would have to look like to you for those actions to make sense.
How other people frame something is their vantage point. It’s not an unobstructed description of reality, but rather their individual perspective. Making efforts to understand someone’s view helps you understand their frame, their set of beliefs and biases that guide how they see their world.
Reciprocity can be summed up like this: when you act on things, they act on you.
In a paper on the health benefits of volunteering in adults, the authors explain, “The beneficial effects of volunteering on health outcomes have been well documented. Research has found that participation in voluntary services is significantly predictive of better mental and physical health, life satisfaction, self-esteem, happiness, lower depressive symptoms, psychological distress, and mortality and functional inability.”
Life is an iterative and compounding game. In the words of Peter Kaufman, it pays to “go positive and go first.” Also, remember that people make mistakes. Assuming there is no maliciousness, it pays to forgive.
Loss Aversion
Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.2 When it comes to reciprocity, we need to understand, “We are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains.”
The trick is to start looking at outcomes in the aggregate instead of focusing on each unique situation.
Become what you want to see in the world and it will be so. If you want an amazing relationship with your partner, be an amazing partner. If you want people to be thoughtful and kind, be thoughtful and kind. If you want people to listen to you, listen to them. The best way to achieve success is to deserve success. Small changes in your actions change your entire world.
Two different states, whether of matter or people, will be impacted by what they are exposed to. An ice cube will undergo a temperature change if left outside in warmer air, and similarly a group of people will undergo changes in custom based on who they interact with outside their group.
The Value of Contrast The problem of equilibrium. Writing in Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche says of politics, “Almost every party grasps that it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the opposing party should not decay in strength.”1 This is pointing out that there is value in contrast. If all the forces are balanced, a true state of equilibrium, there is no change, no growth, no movement. It is contrast that drives development.
In Into The Woods, John Yorke suggests that the way we tell stories is indicative of our desire to find order in the world. Stories are an attempt to tame the terrifying randomness that surrounds us. As we go through life, we are constantly absorbing chaotic information that we make sense of through narratives. Yorke writes that “every act of perception is an attempt to impose order, to make sense of a chaotic universe. Storytelling, at one level, is a manifestation of this process.”
There are two important aspects to using friction and viscosity as a model. First, what is easy in one environment might be harder in another. For instance, what we can accomplish in times of peace is different than what we can accomplish in times of war. Second, we also learn that the main forces relevant to a particular situation depend on the scale you are operating at.
The concept that underpins using velocity as a model is displacement in a direction. If we take a step forward, we have velocity. If we run in place, we just have speed. Thus, our progress in a given area is not about how fast we are moving now but is best measured by how far we’ve moved relative to where we started. To get to a goal, we cannot just focus on being fast, but need to be aware of the direction we want to go.
In chemistry, activation energy is the energy that must be delivered to a chemical system in order to initiate a reaction, breaking bonds so that new ones can form. Molecules must collide to react, and movement speeds up when temperature increases.
The alloy that is knowledge can further be conceptualized with more complexity. Aristotle* discussed five components of knowledge. “They are what we today would call science or scientific knowledge (episteme), art or craft knowledge (techne), prudence or practical knowledge (phronesis), intellect or intuitive apprehension (nous) and wisdom (sophia).”
No matter how long a species has survived, a failure to adapt can result in extinction. There is no plateau a species can reach when it gets to say, “Okay, the hard work is done. I can coast now, getting by on what I have.” Because all species are continually adapting, the pressure is constant.
Don’t reinvent the wheel, repurpose it There is a lot of opportunity that already exists in your world. You don’t have to start from scratch with adaptation. In evolutionary biology, making use of things you already have is sometimes referred to as an exaptation.
what exaptation is fundamentally about is flexibility. We cannot know the exact pressures we will face in the future. So what we need is a box of diverse tools that can be used and combined in almost a limitless number of ways to meet the challenges we face. Some of these pieces will never have any use, and some will be complete game changers. But no one can divine this ahead of time. Survival of a business often depends on being able to change quickly. You can’t do that if you have to start from a blank slate every time environmental pressures push you to develop and innovate.
How do you allow for adaptability and innovation without sacrificing your goals, values, or vision?
the leader becomes dominant because of skills displayed in the competitive process of becoming leader—strength, smarts, etc. This means that the leader is just the most powerful competitor, like Robespierre or Napoleon. His or her skills are exemplary for winning the competition of dominance. They are not necessarily the most skilled for actually running the show.
“The great captains lowered themselves in relation to the group whenever possible in order to earn the moral authority to drive them forward in tough moments. The person at the back, feeding the ball to others, may look like a servant—but that person is actually creating dependency. The easiest way to lead, it turns out, is to serve.”
Psychologists have a word for the efficiency mechanism in how we think: heuristics. When we’re thinking of making a decision, large or small, we use shortcuts developed from our long experience in the world; in chess terms, we do not consider 10 million different moves, but instead rapidly choose the two or three that are most likely to work.
Experience doesn’t become learning without reflection, and reflection is an energy expenditure. If we want to develop our thinking and get the most out of our environments, then we have to be aware of the natural tendency to minimize energy output and correct for it where doing so creates value.
