Archives January 2021

What drives evolution and/or complexity? Our genes or our cells disposition?

Since we share almost 100% of our DNA with several species not as developed as ourselves, then it appears to be that the answer to our evolution and complexity is the result of our cells disposition.

But we can’t evolve any more since the size of our brains is limited by the birth canal. So unless we start growing all of our descendants in vitro, we would stagnate in evolutive terms.

As our cells determine our evolution, we as individuals, are part of a bigger organism: society. Civilizations behave like living organisms and it is more accurate for us to think about our society as an arrangement of cells.

We are one, together, we are all connected. But we are a huge mess.

Now, the question is: how do 500 trillion cells live in harmony in our bodies?

Nature is the model. Let us watch and learn.

In today’s world, if you have a question, you can ask anything and get an answer in an instant. For free.

You can also have at your disposal any song, movie, book, tutorial, for no money or almost no money at all.

What will you do with all that power?

You could become the most acknowledged person as far as series and celebrities is concerned. Or you could acquire a cluster of critical skills to perform at your area of expertise.

That kind of power is something unimaginable for people just 20 years ago.

And now, almost anybody have access to the power that comes with free education, free resources, free communications.

Those who harness that power are the ones shaping the future.

It is your dreamed gig: you, sharing the stage with your idols. Thousands of people cheering and chanting the chorus of that song you composed.

Then you wake up.

And you find yourself longing for that moment when someone comes out of nowhere and realizes all your potential, all your skills, all you can give.

Well you can choose to wait forever for somebody to call you up to play at woodstock, or you can take control and create your own waynestock.

There is no perfect gig out there, unless you create it.

If you are an actor and no one is hiring you, produce your own movie. Then hire yourself.

If you are a web developer and have no projects, create the most amazing webpage.

If you are a space enthusiast and no space agency is doing what you dream, build your own rockets or create a contest with other people’s money.

Now you can have party time, excellent.

That is my parents use to tell me when I was little.

It was kind of an excuse when something didn’t work just as I expected.

I wanted to put the jam in its place but it fell and crashed? Well, intention is everything. I tried to help but made things worse? Well intention is everything.

Then I ran into Chade Meng Tan’s book Search Inside Yourself and found fascinating how he sets an intention prior to any meeting or social interaction: the intention of making everyone in front of him happy.

Regardless if it is a business meeting, a social gathering or any other interaction.

He claims he has amazing results so I started recently exercising his suggestion (even though I read the book a few years back).

I can’t tell you yet if the unexpectedly positive outcomes are directly correlated or not, but definitely something is different. Good different.

And detach yourself from it.

Whether it be something to take care about yourself, your business or almost anything, really.

Any problem you encounter you could reframe it as an engineering problem, as a failure in the system.

So, when you view everything as a system, then you are not the problem, you are not a failure. It is only the system which failed temporarily. So it must be fixed.

It is kind of a lifehack more than a method, but hey, if things are getting fixed who can complain?

Fix and move on.

Once you give an order about a determinate matter, you will have to give an order about that matter ALWAYS.

It is better to ask for an outcome and let people decide for themselves how they will reach the goal.

And as long as they have some basic ethical and cultural guidelines, they will know what is right and what is not.

Who knows, you might get a nice surprise.

Remember that, most likely, you can’t possibly know each and every path to a solution and, the more you try to control people, the less they will grow.

How many different games can make up a group of kids in a sandbox? And how about a whole playground?

They will come up with thousands of games with thousands of variations.

That is a laboratory of life. They experiment with inputs, processes, rules and even players.

They experiment and experiment, and they don’t feel bad if a game didn’t come as expected, they just say: let’s play something else.

Imagine if you could see you life, and yourself, as a kid in a playground. How many things you would have given yourself permission to try?

How much fun you would have had?

Take it to your organization. Turn it into a playground. The markets need those amazing products and services result of minds set free.

Welcome to the state of play.

It feels like a warm, gentle wave washing your feet at the beach. Acceptance is the ocean cleansing and caressing your soul.

Having a distorted perception of the reality is like swimming upstream. You create friction between yourself and the world. It is exhausting to create a screen with filters and projections between your eyes and the universe.

Acceptance means the struggle just came to an end.

But hey, acceptance doesn’t mean conformity. Acceptance means fresh eyes and clear vision. It means you can finally set things on course.

That useless struggle have finished, yes, but now you may start a new kind of struggle: a truly meaningful one. A struggle (let’s call it quest) to forge that accepted reality into a better, more fulfilled, transformed reality.

A few years ago, while I was mapping the processes for a consulting client.

I found some people within the company, including the CEO, described to me the processes inside the company in a completely different manner than what i had observed to be the actual process.

I made my ppt presentation to display the findings and they couldn’t beleive the gap between what they thought was happening to what was actually happening.

Even after I showed them the evidence, they were reluctant to believe the facts, and their distorted reality, even though it didn’t produced the desired outcomes, was a prefered view of their particular world.

How hard it is to see reality as it is.

I tried several ways to bring them around to a more objective perception without any success. Their commitment to dysfunctionality was so deeply rooted that no other version of the reality was allowed.

Sounds stupid, right? But we all do the same in some way or another.

The thing is, all the bias that govern our perception of reality and our perception of ourselves will never seem stupid to us.

And no, do not kid yourself: it is not how quirky or eccentric we are. It is plain and simple dysfunctionality.

Certain breakthroughs are the consequence of a particular type of personal network. That network prompted an exceptional individual creativity.

You’ll see, networks deliver three unique advantages: private information, access to diverse skill sets, and power. And the combination of those advantages compound into high impact, shielded, warped movement.

So, do you want to have greater impact? Do you want to see your ideas implemented? Do you want to achieve more? Maybe the state of your network could be the single most important task you should focus next.

Networks determine which ideas become breakthroughs.

https://hbr.org/2005/12/how-to-build-your-network

Go take a look at the article. The authors will even tell you how to diagnose and manage your network.