Sarah MeiVerified account

The earlier photo was pretty, but unremarkable. The later one, though, showed clear, long scars, like claw marks through the forest, where loggers had clear-cut. So big that they were visible from space.

This scientist had used these two photos - official US government photos, so difficult to dismiss as fakes - to help convince some of the ministers in the government that clear-cutting was actually happening - despite the logging industry’s assurances to the contrary.

That was what hooked me on software - this idea that surfacing information to a wider audience could change the world. I switched majors to computer science and haven’t looked back.

There’s that phrase - “change the world.” That’s how I thought about it at the time.

You might reasonably ask, what’s the real difference between “changing the world” and “making the world better”? Isn’t this just arguing syntax? They can mean the same thing. And yes - they CAN. But they don’t, always.

Ever read one of those new-agey self help books that’s all like, “tell the universe what you want & THE UNIVERSE will manifest it for you”? I read a few at various points in my life & always sorta rolled my eyes at the idea that anything in the universe was looking out for me.

But it turns out that the new agers were largely correct. One significant proponent of manifesting what you want was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who put it this way: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

In other words - to be successful, you must be very intentional about what you want. Just don’t expect it to actually, uh, manifest the way you expect.

There’s some really cool research backing this up. The most interesting one, for me, dealt with the concept of luck. As it turns out, people are about as lucky as they think they are. And increasing how lucky they think they are ACTUALLY makes them luckier.

The reason for this? Only a small fraction of our motivation for doing things comes from our conscious minds. The rest comes from our subconscious mind - which you can sorta think of as all the things we know, but we aren’t consciously thinking about right now.

Your ideas about ‘who you are’ & ‘what you are here for’ guide hundreds of thousands of microdecisions, even when you aren’t consciously thinking about anything so philosophical. Collectively, the outcome of those microdecisions changes - when your ideas about yourself change.

What all this adds up to is that you need to set the right intentions in order to make the right decisions. And like a djinni who grants you a wish - the more specific you can be, the higher the chance that your microdecisions will add up to what you wanted.