Meaningful Progress
Everything gets built twice, first in the mind and then in reality.
Align intentions and energy to exert maximum force in the direction of collective purpose to realize potential by constantly building belief and relentlessly focusing attention on delivering what truly has value.
If you wish to help people make meaningful progress you need to see life from their perspective to understand what drives them forward.
The best way to make progress is to help someone else
Related
Positive Feedback Loops
Learn to think using first principles to engineer systems that build trust by delivering the truth.
| Item | Story Arc | Mantra |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Problem | Where is the friction/waste? The Enemy |
| 02 | Intents & Purposes | What are you going to about it? Why you? (Identity & Values) |
| 03 | Perspective | What do you see that others don't? |
| 04 | Predictions | Market Trend, Opportunity vs Risk (value creation / cashflow) |
| 05 | Platform | Operating Base, Essential Assets, and Proprietary Tech |
| 06 | Protocols | Knowledge Base, Secret Sauce of Best Practices, Onboarding |
| 07 | People | Ethical, Capable, Aligned and Driven |
| 08 | Product | Design Driven by Valuable Outcomes |
| 09 | Persuasion | Rhetoric and Incentives to Grow a Community |
| 10 | Performance | Set Clear Expectations and Consequences |
| 11 | Planning | Who, What, When? Standard Protocols, Predictable Costs |
| 12 | Potential | The next evolutionary leap? Chase the impossible dream |
| 13 | Reflection | What questions should you be asking? |
Engineer systems to bet on experiments that speed run opportunities to deliver step improvements to the quality of existence.
The meta of the matter is where the true value lies
The Journey
Life is a game of making the best possible decisions and trying to influence others to follow.
From the cradle to the grave, what are the common challenges to navigate on the path to living a fulfilling life?
Flow of Consciousness
In the end all that matters is managing your state of mind.
Flow is a state of optimal experience when we are fully immersed and engaged in activities. Achieving flow leads to enhanced productivity, creativity, and satisfaction, making it a crucial outcome of making the correct decisions.
Individual Flow is characterized by intense focus, clarity of goals, a balance between challenge and skill, loss of self-consciousness, an altered sense of time, and intrinsic motivation. Achieving flow involves setting clear goals, matching challenges to skills, and minimizing distractions.
Collective Flow occurs when a group experiences flow together, often seen in team sports or collaborative projects. Key elements include shared goals, interdependence, communication, and trust. Strategies to achieve collective flow include aligning objectives and fostering communication.
- Enhanced cognitive functions: Flow boosts memory, reasoning, and creativity, allowing you to process information more efficiently, generate more alternatives, and evaluate them more critically.
- Faster subconscious processing: In a flow state, decision making shifts from conscious to subconscious processing, which is about 7 seconds faster. This allows for quicker, more intuitive decisions, especially in high-pressure situations.
- Reduced stress and emotional bias: Flow reduces stress levels and promotes positive emotions, helping you cope with uncertainty and avoid emotional biases that can negatively impact decision making.
- Increased motivation and commitment: Flow aligns your actions with your values and goals, increasing motivation to overcome obstacles and follow through on decisions.
- Improved pattern recognition: The subconscious mind activated during flow has almost unlimited capacity compared to conscious working memory, allowing for better pattern recognition and connections between ideas.
- Energy efficiency: Flow is an energy-efficient state, allowing you to think longer and harder about complex decisions without burning out.
- High-speed decision making: Flow is particularly beneficial for making rapid decisions in high-stakes situations, like in finance or sports.
In AI reasoning, engineering flow is the holy grail.
Better flow of decision making from better feedback loops, eliminates dis-ease, strengthens conviction, and frees up your imagination for making unseen connections.
Follow the Flow of Value
Map the flow of value from source, through state changes to final outcomes.
- Start with a clear expectations: Begin by defining and clarifying your expected outcomes using an Outcome Map. This helps align the team and stakeholders on the goal and contributing factors.
- Use balanced metrics: Employ a set of balanced metrics to measure both velocity and quality aspects of performance.
- Visualize the value stream: Create Value Stream Maps to visualize and measure the current, ideal, and target state workflows. This helps identify constraints and prioritize opportunities.
- Map dependencies: Use a Dependency Map to identify external factors affecting the team's performance and target dependencies to break or mitigate.
- Assess team capabilities: Create a Capability Map to understand internal factors affecting performance and identify areas for skill development or resource allocation.
- Prioritize improvements: Use the insights from all maps to create a prioritized list of initiatives, considering factors like impact and effort.
- Involve key stakeholders: Include representatives from all parts of the value stream in the mapping process to ensure diverse perspectives.
- Use collaborative tools: Leverage shared visual board tools for real-time collaboration during mapping sessions.
- Iterate regularly: Repeat the mapping process every 3-6 months to reassess progress and set new targets.
- Focus on qualitative measurement: Remember that qualitative measurement is often more valuable than purely quantitative metrics.
- Consider external facilitation: A skilled, outside facilitator can bring unbiased perspective and efficiency to the mapping process.
- Start with estimates: When beginning, relative measurements and team estimates are often sufficient to identify major bottlenecks and opportunities.
- Communicate visually: Use maps and visual representations to share understanding across different levels and departments in the organization.
- Connect improvements to outcomes: Ensure that all improvement efforts are clearly linked to the desired outcome defined in the Outcome Map.
Imagine The Critical Path
Start with a clear picture of the desired outcome and work backwards to identify the critical path to success.
Journey's need accurate maps and forecasts to ensure successful navigation.
Link your thinking so that others can improve the process
Practice Rituals for Success
Establish routines, rituals and mantra to evolve unconscious competence and leverage flow for better decision making:
- Create an environment conducive to flow by minimizing distractions and setting clear goals.
- Break down complex decisions into manageable steps.
- Engage in activities that match your skills and challenges to maintain focus.
- Practice mindfulness to stay present and prevent overthinking.
- Use flow for generating ideas and initial decision-making, but follow up with conscious evaluation and editing when out of the flow state.
Maintain a decision journal to improve thought processes and prevent reliving past mistakes.
Breakthrough ideas come from connecting with the void, not with a screen.
Systems Engineering
Engineer systems to fall into good habits under times of pressure and fatigue.
- What bets are you in the position to take?
- How effective are you at selling those positions?