
Dwelling in Possibility - ivank
https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/05/18/dwelling-in-possibility/
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smacktoward

       The ancient Masters were profound and subtle.
       Their wisdom was unfathomable.
       There is no way to describe it;
       all we can describe is their appearance.
       
       They were careful
       as someone crossing an iced-over stream.
       Alert as a warrior in enemy territory.
       Courteous as a guest.
       Fluid as melting ice.
       Shapable as a block of wood.
       Receptive as a valley.
       Clear as a glass of water.
       
       Do you have the patience to wait
       till your mud settles and the water is clear?
       Can you remain unmoving
       till the right action arises by itself?
       
       The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.
       Not seeking, not expecting,
       she is present, and can welcome all things.
    

\-- _Tao Te Ching_ , Stephen Mitchell translation.
[http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.h...](http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#15)

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leggomylibro
I think this makes a lot of sense if you tilt your head a little and look at
"business-ing" as a creative position. What the author describes sounds a lot
like an ordinary iterative design process.

You have some idea of what you want to do/make, but you aren't completely
clear on 100% of the nitty-gritty specifics. You don't necessarily know if
every little bit of your plan will work from the get-go, but you'll learn more
as you move forwards and ferret out those loose ends. If your original idea
does turn out to be untenable, there are likely going to be changes that you
can make in order to take things in a new, more plausible direction.

The author says that they have trouble thinking like this, but I wouldn't be
surprised if they did so naturally with their hobbies; writing, learning to
play an instrument, software projects, hardware hacking...you face the same
sort of cycle of vague direction, experimentation, validation or failure, and
repeat. Ultimately, it comes down to confidence in your ability to be able to
find a path forward and keep moving when you do run into issues; I think that
just sort of comes naturally when you're doing something for fun.

One of my favorite quotes springs to mind, by Bill Gates: "We always
overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and
underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself
be lulled into inaction."

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eli_gottlieb
>All of them share a view that the principled or systematic person — the
person who believes in one truth according to one set of principles — is
weaker or less spiritually advanced than the person who sees things through
multiple points of view.

If your own principles and views are coherent, tied down to observations and
causal mechanisms, then you can imagine counterfactuals. If you can't imagine
counterfactuals, and what would draw other people to believe those
counterfactuals hold in real life, you don't fully understand your own point
of view.

>Is it possible to love something, or pursue something, without freaking out
about it?

Ever been married? You can't stay married if you're freaking out about your
spouse, nor if you can't acknowledge flaws. You don't keep your cool about
your spouse. You commit to loving them as the person they really are, rather
than as your fantasy of them.

>I’ve had occasions myself when I deliberately “took myself out of the
picture” in order to hold space for others — and it worked pretty well, and
was fun in its own way, and people responded well to it, but I had a strong
intuition that this wasn’t what I wanted to spend the majority of my life
doing. I have a self, and it’s not going to like being cooped up forever.

Yeaaaah... I've definitely been in this situation. It's kinda been boiling at
the back of my mind whenever I have to do work with a strictly political group
rather than a technical one, or with technical ones where I want to work on
some other problem.

These kinds of things take long-term planning to fix. It's not just a matter
of working "on your own": you need to get in the right environment where your
self can come out.

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abandonliberty
Many people have a need to be right all the time. This leads to very low
comfort with a risk. Moving up the chain requires facing greater uncertainty,
ambiguity, and chance of failure.

A very easy test: How do you feel when you get something wrong or make a
mistake?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>A very easy test: How do you feel when you get something wrong or make a
mistake?

Time to figure out what went wrong, and what to learn from it.

~~~
abandonliberty
Yeah, me too.

What if nothing went wrong? What if you just did something really hard with a
stochastic 60% chance of success?

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draw_down
If a car almost hits me and I feel scared, that's an understandable reaction.
But if I'm scared by the idea of thinking a different way than I'm used to, or
doing something differently than I've always done it, that's less likely to be
an understandable reaction, therefore worth interrogating.

If we stop at "it makes me scared", without asking why, how can we grow? If we
don't know what part of ourselves we are protecting by avoiding change, how do
we change?

