Twitter at the speed of parenting
They were “unofficial” photos, meaning that an astronaut had looked out a window & happened to see something cool, & had taken a photo. Each slide had lat/long coordinates & the date it was taken written in pencil on the edge.
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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.
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But nobody really noticed. It was such new tech that everyone was just REALLY impressed that it actually (occasionally) worked.There’s that phrase - “change the world.” That’s how I thought about it at the time.
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But recently I’ve been meditating on the need to be more specific than that, when I think about the impact I want to have on the world.
@EricaJoy talked about this at@strangeloop_stl last year.https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2018/changing-the-world.html …Show this thread -
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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We wanted to “change the world.” And the djinni gave us what we asked for - vast improvements, right alongside privacy nightmares, surveillance states, and toxic work cultures. We should have been more specific. Stop “changing the world.” Start “making the world better.” [end]
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End of conversation
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