You can go out and be set to change the world only to be disappointed it didn’t happen.
The easier change is to change yourself.
You can’t change the whole world but you can change your part in it.
The thing about Eddison is that he didn’t discover electricity; he invented the first long-lasting incandescent lightbulb.
Columbus certainly didn’t discover America when so many had previously inhabited it.
The Wright Bros. didn’t invent physics but were able to create a vehicle that harnessed aeronautical engineering.
Inventing is to discover. And to discover is to invent.
The interesting thing is that when we discover something in ourselves, we also need to invent ourselves going forward. It also works the other way around.
One of humans’ unique characteristics is their ability to anticipate the future. This ability is what keeps humans alive on the Savvanah. If we could predict if a sabertooth tiger was around the corner, we would increase our chances of survival.
Today, we certainly do the same. Instead of focusing on animals, we look at people and situations similarly. As a result, lump danger all together in one category. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing until we are looking at Twitter from the comforts of our own homes or looking at a name on a resume.
These snap judgments are riddled with bias. And while it can still keep us alive when driving down the freeway, it isn’t that valuable in extending the benefit of the doubt when talking about conflicting ideas.
It’s easy to find in others because look how someone is behaving compared to you.
It’s easy to find fault in ourselves because we look at all our mistakes.
It’s easy to find fault in the world. Because everyone knows its not perfect.
The bottom line is that it’s always easy to find fault in people or situations. It’s not easy to be patient in casting judgment, especially when we don’t have all the facts or context.
People will believe anything once cemented in a narrative.
Whether it’s true or not, what matters here is understanding that people’s desire for a specific outcome will trump a more objective reality.
The speed at which information can be received today is truly a miracle.
What hasn’t changed is people’s patience.
We look for the shortcut of information if we are not patient to see it play out.
Too often, we can fall into this trap of appearing too busy or stressed to accomplish something.
You can see this with hiking, where people push themselves until they are out of breath and are not enjoying the experience. They get to the top only a few minutes faster than the other person, who is going at a steady pace.
The same happens when completing an assignment from the boss or paying bills. Breakneck speed and the associated stress aren’t a strategy to run your life.
Half the stress and yet the same results.
The gift stops once we stop circulating it.
Once we hoard it, it no longer becomes a gift. Instead, we turn it into a commodity. Something we have and that no one else does.
The power of gifts is that they bring us closer together. Commodities, on the other, remind us what is missing.
What I am talking about here is the truth. That is not the total truth, of course. But most don’t want to hear something closer to the truth than the narration we tell ourselves.
That’s why it is so difficult to invoke change. Not because we don’t have the capacity. It’s way more to do with what we say about ourselves and our beliefs.
The internet is broken. Not completely. Because you have crowd-sourced projects like Wikipedia and the ability to look up recently published papers from MIT, but when you search on Google, the algorithm tells us what we want to hear for clicks. It moves to the top of the marketer that paid for that spot, not what is best. It’s not just Google but how social media is designed.
The point is, the internet, in some ways, is better than ever, and yet the parts that don’t work are the worst it has ever been. They are making it unusable at times. We can see this during political cycles.
Of course, there are some programs and devices that break that model. But the question I keep returning is: How is this improving humanity? And the answer doesn’t feel intuitively reasonable. I hope that AI will break it so we can start over and, in the process, create a better internet.
Josh Allred's Blog 