The past few years have been hard. Not only for me, but for almost everyone I know. Change is accelerating, and as a result, we have to do more work to reach a stable place in our lives. Still, growth is the body's natural response to challenge. One of my mother's favorite sayings to get through the hard times was a Winston Churchill original: "if you're going through hell, keep going." Let's reflect on that idea a bit - the recognition that the path is hard is often one of the most difficult parts of the process. Understanding that is often one of the most important steps toward recovery, regeneration, and regrowth.
My hardships are mostly couched in my personal life choices to overextend myself in the services of a few different ideas. I've been building things my whole life, but I've never been challenged like I have over the period beginning in about 2017, when I decided to leave academia and begin building businesses.
Building is a slow process. If I had known how slow it would need to be, I may have done a few things a bit differently back in 2021-22. If I had known the pandemic was coming in 2020, I may have done things differently in 2018 and 2019. Nothing would have prevented the fallout we’ve seen over the past five years, just as nothing can take us back to that wonderful place we left behind when everything changed. And that's why it's important to understand the past in addition to surrendering it; you can't live there anymore but you definitely don't want to keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
As Joe Strummer said, “the future is unwritten” – it isn’t that nobody knows it, it’s that it is fundamentally unknowable. And as the United States is once again plunged into a hangover-like state of anxiety and regret following another bad decision at the ballot box, it is important to remember that the unwritten future is what matters the most.
Building that future is, was, and will be the activity that we want to be involved with if we aim to grow. Mitigating risk, maximizing coordination, and collaborating with others are the strategies that will help us succeed this time, at whatever task we’re faced with.
Openness, self-control, and respect for the ocean of complexity that surrounds us – these are the tools that help to ensure we align effectively and create impact with our actions.
In Web3, AI, research, and beyond, challenges are part of the process; they’re built into the dreams that motivate us at the foundation level. That means it’s pointless to think about what could or should have happened. We can reflect on the past to temper our vision for the future, to steel ourselves and build our resolve as we move forward, and to remind ourselves of the magnitude of the challenges we face as we work to build the world we want to live in—but we must never make the mistake of believing that the world is wrong.
We can like events, dislike them, predict them successfully or fail to do so - but in the end, all events need to be met with our acceptance or we will be crushed beneath them.
The things that happen – all of them – happen for a reason. Causes aren't always clear, and they aren't usually simple, but the work we do to understand them yields benefits when we see the patterns repeat.
Accepting this is the first step toward an internal state of mind that can allow us to comprehend our own little slice of the world truly, and this clear-eyed observation is the bedrock upon which success may be constructed.
To get where you want to go, you need to know two things: a destination and a current location. This short note is intended only as a reminder of this basic fact. When we know where we have come from, it becomes possible to chart a course to where we want to be. The challenges of our time are driven by rapidly-increasing complexity that makes it very difficult to predict the future, which makes it harder and harder to make good decisions. As my book, INEVITABLE: Distributed Cognition & Network Superintelligence argues, the valuable skills moving forward are going to increasingly include flexibility, awareness, adaptability, and resilience.
To grow, we must begin by building our awareness.
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Thanks to The Gardeners and PageDAO for soliciting this article! I haven't had near enough time to write lately.
