The reason why we create a chain of command is so we can create layers of insulation.
“Who’s responsible for this mess?”
It makes it difficult to take blame (or credit) when you don’t have your name written on the project.
If you are going to put your finger prints on something, be proud of it.
The more layers we create, the less responsible we feel.
Don’t assume what you know is what everyone else in the room is thinking.
Quit assuming that you know more than everyone else.
There is no one answer to fix complex problems.
We don’t see what you see. We don’t think the way you think.
Your contributions are important. Vital! We need you to jump in. The key is contribution. However, anything else is just taking.
The story we tell ourselves about our place in the world are rooted in fiction.
Because we can’t possibly take in everyone’s point of view, we accept ours as fact.
Our narrative works overtime to protect ourselves.
That narration that protects us also betray us from seeing the world as it really is.
Democracy can rally around a candidate and vote someone into office.
That doesn’t mean that person is the right choice.
Juxtapose this to science and mathematics, where we can make calculations to get a correct answer.
That’s the difference our narration makes. We can misuse agency in the face of truth.
Every hero’s journey must go through a dark chapter to prevail. There must be adversity, a gauntlet that must be ran through.
If you’re in the middle of the slog or the dip or the darkest moment of your life, this is the way. You’re a hero and you have the ability to overcome.
Peaking behind the curtain to see what it takes to pull off a magic trick, sure there will be disappointment.
If you knew what I knew, would you act differently?
If the answer is Yes, then the customer is not informed.
Look, we all know magic is not real but it doesn’t mean we don’t want to believe in it.
Real power means real responisbility.
Many of us are beginning to go back to the office for the first time.
Considering the average commute time of 26 minutes, that is 52 minutes a day that you will now need to fit back in your schedule.
How?
Up to this point, it is almost certain that you have been “too busy” to do honey-do projects, or to take your kids on that special day trip or to start that book you always wanted write.
“Not enough time” is a myth. A story we tell ourselves about staying busy, all the while remaining not as productive as we could be.
A month ago, adding almost an hour to be in your car seemed unreasonable and now you will do it.
Because we make time what we prioritize.
What is it?
What is the self?
Is it my thoughts? Emotions?
Is it what decisions I make or the things I do?
We have to be clear:
Who we are isn’t what we do.
But what we do can change who we are.
We make mistakes that doesn’t make us a mistake.
And sometimes, we do something great and daring and it changes the very person we are to become.
We treat our identity and ideology as fixed. Something that rarely changes. But our identity is much more plastic than we give it credit for.
In the last 200 years, we are the first humans ever to go shopping for fun.
Before, shopping was stressful. When you bought something, you had to be sure it was used. If bought eggs and broke them, someone might go hungry at home.
Take a look at a list of other firsts in the last 200 years:
And on, and on, and on. Contrast through the first 200,000 years of human history. And you have the painfully slow process of domestication of food and animals. With a more sedentary lifestyle, populations grow (and with it more food and animals). And now, with a population sitting around, you have the development of technologies. Trade develops and you see an evolution of germs.
Most of us have a hard time grasping what it means to grow a population from 320 million people in the 17th century to 1 billion in the 18th to 7 billion of today. The ratchet of capitalism: from moving to hunters to the fields to factories to skyscrapers to uncertainty and the internet, the network effect and globalization that ties us all together.
Those decisions people made over the last several centuries have held so much more significance than we realize. Our lives are so unrecognizable from previous generations, we forget that while change is scary, we also never want to go back to the way things used to be either.
Stepping onto an escalator, you don’t step for the stair that is present. No, you step for the stair that is coming.
Once you recognize a pattern, it’s easier to predict the future.
As a result, we spend a lot of time looking for patterns. We look for what is out of place and it turns out, it has kept us alive for so long. If I hear a stick break and can predict that is a sabertooth tiger, I have a better chance to survive.
These types of decisions cause all sorts of problems.
For one, we don’t have to run from sabertooth tigers anymore, even though our brain thinks we do. Humans are also story-telling creatures. That we can create meaning out of the meaningless while ignoring statistics and probabilities and chance.
There is a theory that if you knew all the information in the universe you could predict the future. It’s safe to say, we are no where close to knowing what happens next.
The bottom line, life is more complicated than an escalator. We like to think we are good lie detectors, that we can sense things about to happen. A “spidey sense” or gut feeling. Any veteran Vegas player knows that this isn’t true. Because we are not just trying to predict what is happening in our environment, but we are also trying to understand our own thought patterns, our shortcuts and heuristics. Trying to recognize someone else’s is impossible. We sometimes just guess right but much like playing roulette, someone sometimes wins.
Josh Allred's Blog 