Software engineer & founder of @RailsBridge and @LivableCode. Currently stirring the pot at @SalesforceUX. She/her. 
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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.
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]
I fucked up hard with that once. Asked the universe for a specific $ sum. I got a call 1 wk later from a woman who wanted to place her child with me for adoption. Agency we worked through charged that exact sum. Never "manifested" anything again.
FYI: that child is my life and I adore him endlessly. Just freaked me out a bit.
The $ came from then-fil who was thrilled about the adoption and wrote a check for the full amount. So I got the check I visualized. Just not how I imagined.
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But nobody really noticed. It was such new tech that everyone was just REALLY impressed that it actually (occasionally) worked.