One day you will get hurtful news that would have infuriated you a year ago.
Today, you shrug it off.
Your old priorities have been displaced over time. You can intentionally speed it up or hold on tightly, but physics will win.
Tag: gain-and-loss
- Theme: Growth
when the measure becomes the target
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1–2 minutesAchievement is hitting the mark, which requires us to incrementally measure and adjust.
Soon, we are successful: we have reached and superseded the goal.
We have become excellent at increasing the measurement and manipulating the scorecard metric, but have we displaced the goal with a measure?
Strathern’s law states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
This replacement can become a subversion, such as when NYC police needed to maintain high crime numbers for funding, they implemented a “stop-and-frisk” policy that infringed on citizens’ rights. Instead of “protect and serve” to inflate the measure it required harassment.
This is similar to a simulacra, where the original motivation is lost, yet the real-world effects are amplified and out of control
- Theme: Growth
Achieving is not the achievement
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1–2 minutesMuch of our fear (that produces laziness and impatience) derives from results orientation.
Rather than focus on the “quality of doing,” which will generate its results over time, we fixate on an endpoint that must be measured, prompting not only anxiety over failure or success but also requiring you to pick another point afterward.
Focusing on the quality of the process and steadily doing the work is achieved with the achievements bestowed as an afterthought.
- Theme: Growth
Marginal error
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1–2 minutesIn optimizing health and efficiency, “marginal gains” assert that a 1% daily benefit triples your effectiveness by the end of the year.
The opposite is equally true, where “marginal error” slowly migrates off course.
Consider a building, and as each story is built, it is only 1% off in each measurement, but without correction over time, the building will topple sideways. This is also the tipping point, not of success but destruction.
- Theme: Growth
our idiocy repeats history
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1–2 minutesThere is an ouroboros of history: we create the very errors we attempt to solve with our knowledge of history.
Not only is history “written by the victors,” but in attempting to learn and apply our lessons we misdiagnose (fall prey to confirmation bias) allowing us to recreate the idiocy we attempt to avoid.
In an ultimate irony, we recreate the circular cliche “history repeats itself” by applying the incorrect past lessons to current problems.
- Theme: Self
short term mean
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1–2 minutesShort-term meanness can lead to long-term benefits: not every restriction is cruelty, it can be kindness for your future.
If we cannot accept some “harm” early, we will suffer much more later.
This arrives as broken idealism seen as harsh injustice, instead of as the complicated functioning of a complex reality.
- Theme: Growth
toxicity as survival
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1–2 minutesWe assume people are toxic, yet perhaps the creation of toxicity is the environment: toxicity is a reactive survival mechanism.
However, not all people are toxic, even though raised and abused in the same system.
There are alternate survival mechanisms: merging, stoicism, resilience, community, kindness, and adaptation.
Do not accept the system as an excuse for poison.
- Theme: Self
Overload cycles
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1–2 minutesWhen we are content and peaceful we begin looking for an additional challenge: some tension, hopefully, constructive and growth-oriented.
We take on the challenge and become stressed, this is when things start to break in our lives.
How we handle ourselves during these moments is vital, because being under stress creates a narrow focus of our attention, which leans towards analytical efficiency and rationality, not towards empathy.
Understanding and witnessing this cycle allows us to keep from overreacting, which prevents us from having to clean up a mess we made with apologies and self-recrimination. The trick is to ride the highs of overload without creating the inverse lows.
- Theme: Growth
Harboring magnanimity
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1–2 minutesWhen the storm (trauma) has passed, you can move on: you can forgive -and stay wary of another storm- but remain civil and enjoy the journey.
After redirecting your course, some will relive the storm repeatedly, unable to get past their role as a witness, perhaps feeling guilty for staying in the harbor while you suffered.
They will reel you into their harbor of reliving the past: it is a generous myopic safety, perhaps a safe harbor, but more likely it is the next challenge to your growth.
- Theme: Growth
Recognition vs responsibility
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1–2 minutesWe are always complicit, but owning our part is vital.
Simplistically, there are two paths: Recognition of complicity and a lack of action, motivation, or change. This assumes you are either okay with the status quo or unmotivated to prioritize change. The other path is to be aware of your part and take responsibility: you act and practice altering your behavior patterns.
Some paradigms are so significant, such as climate change or wealth aristocracy, that change seems improbable, so we focus on what we can change: ourselves.The goal is to become a model of possibility (people can change) and to grow internally secure enough to reverse stability and radiate outward, positively affecting global conditions.