is

The act of clarifying and generating thought.

Of choosing between many possibilities.

The act of speaking reality into existence,

to orchestrate attention.

Telepathy.

Moving.

Powerful.

Persuasive.

An asymmetric bet, expanding surface area for luck.

Art.

Magic.

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It is one thing to write to describe in detail, the colors of a picturesque scene and the emotions that resonates.

One that will never be seen again,

But for that moment.

It is another to write for a cause, to influence, to move, to persuade.

Like when the many times that try men’s souls.

That is when it is most needed.

It becomes more important now.

Maybe the biggest moat and skill that compounds.

When AI can write in a day many more times than humans have written since the first word was written.

But it doesn’t give it meaning, unique experience, and intention.

And when something is abundant, like air, people take it for granted.

Unless it is consciously moulded and put to use.

Like a cup, the value of it is the container, the gap - what it can hold.

The word is the code of our civilisation.

The operating system of the new age.

How great companies are built.

And by mastering it we can transfer it to re-writing our civilisation.

It is a base layer that supports anything else.

While being something fun, too.

Especially when it flows.

I love the idea of combining ideas, of making the complex simple, and presenting an original position.

To write something only I can write.

So how do we become so great, to learn to yield this powerful tool?

Just as every craft.

By reading a lot and writing a lot.

Especially from the greats.

And mimicking them.

To absorb from them, and what they absorbed from others, and make it a part of you.

To combine the parts and aspects of writing that give it its power and depth, exploring all aspects of the tool.

The beauty, the effectiveness, the simplicity, in your own style.

Shakespeare for his range.

To give shape to the brief candle of the ideas of our lives.

Orwell for his influence, to strip it to its point, to make an argument obvious and inevitable.

Tolstoy, Homer, Austen and Joyce.

Rumi, Borges, and Montaigne.

Study the great texts that shaped us.

And all those that you resonate with.

Become the fusion, synthesis,

and

Emergence.

And then reduce and simplify it to make something better.

Learn the principles, of what works.

And then toss them away into the wind

So experiment, do it badly, and make it your own.

Like how the Chinese emperors used to create new characters just for fun.

Because Every word was originally made by someone.

Like a Szegemon.

Converge two or more seemingly contradictory or unrelated fields or ideas.

Solve problems for people,

Combine and advance.

Or just make art.

And the real output is not what shows up on the paper.

It’s how it changes you.

And makes you become more YOU.

Like the greats from Franklin, Caeser, Napoleon and Churchill,

Their speeches and thought, success, and influence, was built by writing.

It lets you think clearly.

And like Buffet, do it every day.

Get 1% better each day.

And let that sh*t compound.

And that is why, whenever I wake.

I find the urge to write.

Whenever I want to think.

To solve.

Whenever I have a thousand ideas.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth.

Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul.

Whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing, stuck between errands, void of flow; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately steering off course, when my finger starts to scroll, I diverge in a million directions, or feel the urge to punch a wall.

I account it high time to write as soon as I can.

Hi,

My name is Richard,

And I’m a writer.

In the following article I share more about how defining words helped me to become a clearer thinker.

Because It Co-creates Reality - So learn how to harness it

1. Principles from Every layer of reality apply at each one above them

2. This includes quantum physics

3. The particpatory principle also applies at every layer upward - How you perceive reality shapes it

My grandma had her first child at 17 and raised four. I asked her recently how she thinks about family differently to our generation - she told me she didn’t think about it - it just happened. It was expected.

What struck me is how different our life is at university campus. Thousands of people at peak health, peak energy, peak fertility - and almost no children anywhere.

We treat that as natural.

It isn’t.

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Universities evolved from cathedral schools and monastic schools - institutions built by and for celibate men.

The architecture, the housing, the rhythm of academic life all assumed students without families.

When higher education went mass-market and opened to women, we scaled the model without ever asking whether the celibate-monk template still made sense.

So today, a student who wants a family faces a system designed to make it impossible. Dorms built for singles. No campus childcare. Timetables and funding that assume zero dependents.

The message is: family comes after.

But after keeps moving.

After the degree.

After the master’s.

After the PhD - which finishes at 31 or 32.

After the job is stable,

After the house is bought,

After the career is established.

Governments are now spending billions trying to reverse the demographic crisis this perpetual “after” helped create - a crisis that is, ironically, now hitting university enrollment and finances directly.

But students can’t afford children?

But when exactly does a family become affordable?

The economics of having children at university could be arguably better than at 30 - abundant flexible time, communal living, shared resources, and daycare that an institution could provide at marginal cost.

What students lack isn’t capacity.

It’s permission and infrastructure.

I’m not arguing everyone at university should have kids.

I’m arguing that we should question childless universities being the norm.

And for some people it might be the perfect time.

And the reason is not that it’s not possible - it’s that the culture is not set up for it to exist.

It should be a real option rather than a structural impossibility - family housing, campus nurseries, leave for students, funding that doesn’t penalize dependents.

We’re training our most capable people to see children as a trade-off.

While universities sit on an answer to their own enrollment crisis.

I first came to China in 2007

I’ve been working in the study in China market since 2010 having founded China Admissions online platform.

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I’ve been speaking to many students and understanding their reasons for studying in China.

China is an incredible country and I’m hugely grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, how I’ve been treated and to have experienced such an incredible boom and development of human - probably the biggest period of economic growth in the period of the world.

Looking back on it now, I recognised two key phases:

• Phase 1: Between 2007 and 2019 - this was the time when China was booming.

  • Careers, Language and Opportunity.

• Phase 2: 2020-Now - Research, Credential & Low-Cost Launch Base

In Phase 1 - the energy was very much - study in China - the future is China. Many students were coming to study in China to learn Chinese and build a career in the fastest growing major economy.

In 2020, the market shifted - for a couple of reasons, COVID, and part of it is housing market in China which meant the forces of gravity hit the Chinese market.

It wasn’t obvious at the time, I thought it was a temporary issue, but it’s clear in retrospect that things had changed permanently in some ways.

Part of that is because housing is limited, and international talent is usually transient compared to other countries.

What this means is that while you will build relationships in China with students from multiple countries, very few of them, or you, will end up staying - because of fewer long term career opportunities. This is quite different to other countries like Germany, UK, Australia for example, or those where there are more career opportunities.

Of course part of this is up to each student.

Right now China is a great destination for students who:

• Are looking at high quality research - China is one of the best places for that.

• Are looking to save money and get a great education - but launch their careers elsewhere. International students can’t easily get work permission in China after graduation. The job market is tighter, China’s youth unemployment is high, and post-graduation work access for foreigners is restricted.

• Are connected with China, from overseas Chinese family, or looking to learn Chinese.

• Some of the good opportunities are top ranked universities such as Peking or Tsinghua and international universities in China, such as XJTLU or UNNC where you can often get two or more degrees, at a lower cost.

• Are interested to travel and explore China.

• Students interested in hardware, robotics or tech companies can choose Shenzhen.

• Students who are outgoing and looking to network and go to events and meet people.

Who shouldn’t choose studying in China?

• Students looking for a career in China - students need to do the career planning themselves actively - online and in their home country to set up career opportunities for themselves.

• Students unwilling to engage with the language and culture.

• Students who already know what kind of career they want in their home country or another country, and studying in China might not be a worthwhile investment of time (which is the most valuable form of investment)

Advice for students

• It is more important to take your education into your own hands. Use the facilities and resources available to you - the community, the internet, resources online, mentors, AI and get involved in your own projects. If possible try to start working as soon as possible to get experience and build proof of work online. Network and get to know more people who can help in your career.

• Also think about family early. There is no reason why you can’t have a family young.

If you are looking to study in China, I explore more in this article about scholarships here.

You can also explore more about the programs on China Admissions and globally on
Global Admissions.

I also write more about China on this blog - consider subscribing.

Hi, I’m Rich

Originally from UK, and founder of China Admissions and Global Admissions. We’ve helped thousands of students study abroad.

Most students miss out for one reason: they start too late and don’t know the system.

Here’s how it actually works.

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The main scholarships you can apply for

• Chinese Government Scholarship (CSC) - the main one. Covers tuition, accommodation, and a monthly stipend. You can apply two ways: through the Chinese embassy in your country (Type A), or directly to a university (Type B).

• University scholarships - most universities offer their own, separate from the CSC. Often easier to get and less competitive.

• Provincial / city government scholarships - e.g. Shanghai, Beijing. Usually applied for through the university.

• Confucius Institute Scholarship - if you’re studying Chinese language or teaching.

The timeline (this is where most people go wrong)

• December–January: start preparing your documents. Don’t wait.

• For bachelor’s applicants: you now need to take the CSCA test (China Scholastic Competency Assessment) before the deadline - this is new, and many students don’t realise it exists. Check dates at csca.cn.

• Application window: opens around Spring Festival and most deadlines fall late February to March. University and provincial deadlines can run into June.

• Results: usually announced in July.

The single biggest mistake is starting in spring - by then the best scholarships are already closing.

What makes a strong application

• Understand what they want - they don’t give free scholarships for nothing - they want to build international influence, and attract talented students to learn about China and build ambassadors who understand will connect China with your home country.

• A clear study plan that connects your background to the program and show your China interest. Learning some Chinese is a big advantage.

• Strong reference letters and well presented documents with good English.

• Applying to the right level of university for your profile and showing that you’ve done research - eg., reached out to others and understand their culture.

• Getting your language certificates sorted early (HSK for Chinese-taught programs; or IELTS/TOEFL for English-taught).

• Because each country, and agency has a certain quota, applying early and making a connection at the embassy or university can give you a big advantage.

• Make sure to present your application documents perfectly, because usually they won’t give any feedback - they’ll just put it aside and you’ll never know. With the number of applications they have, they usually don’t have the resources to give you feedback and help you refine your documents.

• If you can present it to them in person it can be a big advantage - either in person at the embassy, or at a university, or ask a friend to hand it in - so you can watch them review it and then update it if theres an issue. You can also get their contact so you can follow up on the status.

Go deeper

• Our full written guide: Scholarships to study in China

• My video tutorial on applying

• Browse open programs and university scholarships: China Admissions

• Explore and apply to other global scholarships on Global Admissions

  

Want help?

Applications for 2027 open right after Spring Festival - the best time to start preparing is now.

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Subscribe for more content about mindset, and opportunities for the future.

For students interested in studying in China, I wrote more about my experiences and who I think studying in China is for and who it isn’t for

Any questions? Let me know

I run platforms that help international students choose where to study. Over the past decade I’ve watched hundreds of thousands of young people from Seoul, Shanghai, Mumbai, Lagos and Hanoi make the most consequential decision of their early lives.

I now long to realize I was also watching, in real time, the machinery of the fertility crisis.

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Let me describe a student I’ve seen a thousand times. She’s 24, from a good family in Seoul or Shanghai. Her parents have spent fifteen years and a meaningful fraction of their lifetime income optimizing her credentials tutors, test prep, the right schools. She’s now choosing a master’s program abroad, because a bachelor’s degree no longer clears the bar. Marriage is just not something we discuss. She has simply filed them under a category called “later,” but watching their journeys, that later has a habit of receding at exactly the speed she approaches it - unless they are an outlier and do something quite different.

Multiply her by a generation and you get the demographic charts everyone is panicking about. South Korea’s fertility rate is around 0.7 - the lowest ever recorded by a nation in peacetime. China, Taiwan, Singapore and Japan are not far behind. And here is the pattern that my industry sits on top of: the societies sending the most students per capita into the global education race are precisely the societies with the lowest birth rates in human history.

That is not a coincidence. They are the same phenomenon.

The arms race

when the cost of raising one child to a competitive standard explodes, families respond by having one child, or none. But “cost” makes it sound like a price tag, and it’s more like a war. Education in East Asia - and increasingly everywhere - is a positional arms race. What matters is not how educated your child is, but how educated they are *relative to everyone else’s child*. And like all arms races, it has no natural stopping point, because every escalation by one family forces escalation by all. And in this arms race, a masters is not a nice to have, it’s the new bar.

What sets the intensity of the race is one variable: the gap between winning and losing. Korea’s race is the world’s fiercest because its prize gap is the steepest - a job at a chaebol versus a job at a small firm is not a different salary, it is a different life, a different marriage market, a different future for your own children. Where losing is survivable, the race stays mild. Where losing means a visibly diminished life, parents rationally go to war, and the war consumes everything: money, time, attention, and eventually the willingness to enroll a second soldier.

I used to think this was a story about tiger parents. It isn’t. Every family I’ve met is behaving rationally inside a structure none of them chose. The structure is the problem. And the structure has a headquarters that almost nobody examines.

The monastery we never left

Here is a piece of history that changed how I see my own industry. The university - the institution through which we now route the majority of every generation in the developed world - descends directly from the medieval monastery. Its first scholars were clergy. Its residential colleges were cloisters. Celibacy wasn’t a side effect; it was the rule. Fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges were legally forbidden to marry until 1877.

We secularized everything about the university except its life-script. We kept the cloister and dropped the chastity: campus life is famously not celibate, but it remains childless by design. The dorms assume no dependents. The financing assumes no dependents. Can I bring children with me? Students sometimes ask. The schedules, the visas, the degree structures - all of it prices in a person with zero family obligations. And for most of the twentieth century, under the doctrine of in loco parentis, the university literally acted as the student’s parent. You cannot become a parent inside an institution whose premise is that you are still the child.

Then we scaled it. Tertiary education went from an elite minority experience to the majority experience in two generations. The master’s degree became the new bachelor’s. For ambitious young people the kind I meet every day - formal education now stretches comfortably to 28 or 30. Which means a 900-year-old monastic default, never deliberately revisited by anyone, now sits directly on top of the entire window human biology allocated for something else.

Demographers have long known that educational expansion, especially for women, is among the strongest predictors of fertility decline anywhere in the world. The standard explanation is opportunity cost and choice: educated women choose later and fewer. Both are real. But there’s an assumption hiding inside that account - that the institution doing the educating is neutral, a fixed backdrop against which free choices are made. It isn’t. The institution was engineered, a millennium ago, for celibate monks, and it has never been re-engineered. When every structural feature of someone’s twenties makes parenthood impossible - academically, financially ruinous, we should be careful about calling the resulting childlessness a preference.

The trap has three walls

What the evidence actually supports is an interlocking trap with three walls.

The first wall is the credential arms race described above, which sets the durationof pre-adult life and the per-child cost of competing.

The second wall is the institution: a university system that occupies ages 18 to 30 while structurally penalizing family formation, converting the arms race’s duration into enforced childlessness.

The third wall is what waits at the exit. In most Anglophone countries, restricted housing supply means two incomes get capitalized into house prices - the second salary doesn’t become surplus, it becomes the entry ticket, bid against every other two-income couple for the same fixed stock of homes. Add the quiet inflation of what “ready for children” means - own home, completed credentials, established career, the full arms-race victory aand the responsible life-script doesn’t finish until 35, in a biological window that closes regardless of how responsible you’ve been.

Three walls, one trap. A young person can do everything right inside it and still find that “later” has become “never.” Most of the people my industry serves are doing everything right.

Why the checks don’t work

Once you see the trap, the policy failures stop being mysterious. South Korea has spent more than $200 billion on pro-natal incentives and its birth rate fell while the money flowed. Hungary spends a reported five percent of GDP. Even the Nordic countries -cheap childcare, long parental leave, the model everyone cited a have slid below 1.5 in the past decade, quietly breaking the academic consensus that generous family policy restores fertility.

The reason is simple: subsidies don’t disarm an arms race, they just raise the bar. Paying families to have children does nothing about what those children will be raised into - another round of the same competition, run through the same monastic institution, exiting into the same housing auction. You cannot compensate people for obeying a life-script that is itself the problem. You have to change the script.

The cheapest lever nobody discusses

Which brings me to the most unfashionable idea I’ve arrived at, and the one I’d ask you to actually sit with: the bottleneck institution in the fertility crisis is the university, and it is also the cheapest place to intervene.

Universities concentrate every generation’s young people at peak health and peak partner-availability - medically, the early-to-mid twenties is the safest decade for pregnancy, before the years medicine labels “geriatric” - and then structurally forbid acting on it. The fix is not exhortation. Nobody should be nudging 20-year-olds toward parenthood; the genuine risks of early partnership are real and don’t vanish with better childcare. The fix is removing the penalty: family housing on campus, childcare as standard infrastructure, leave-and-return rights for student parents, financing that doesn’t assume zero dependents. Make student parenthood viable and let people choose. An option that wont be right for everyone, but might be for some, and should at least be an option. We have proofs of concept - the GI Bill generation studied married with children in their millions; Soviet universities ran kindergartens - it could be one of the best environments to raise a child; a handful of universities today treat married students as a normal category rather than an anomaly.

Compared to Korea’s $200 billion, this is institutional plumbing. And unlike the checks, it attacks the script itself: it breaks the assumption - installed by monks, scaled without questioning it - family is what begins after the credentials race ends.

A confession

I’ll end with the uncomfortable part. Every trend in my industry points in one direction: more credentials, later study, career-pathway migration. Students now choose destinations almost entirely on work outcomes - Japan and Korea are booming as study destinations precisely because they offer jobs at the end, and nobody, anywhere, chooses a country for its compatibility with starting a family. International education profits from the arms race I’ve just described. It’s the incentive of the industry.

I don’t think the answer is for ambitious young people to compete less. But those of us who run the machinery owe it some honesty about what the machinery does. We have built a civilization that routes its entire young population through an institution designed for celibate monks, auctions them a house at the exit, and then stands amazed at the empty maternity wards - writing ever-larger checks to solve a mystery that isn’t one.

It impacts every other part of emergence

The core principle is that the act of observation is not separate from reality - it participates in it.

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These are some of the different layers of emergence. Observation in all these parts has different impacts.

Biology Life is chemistry that learned to copy itself and adapt. The core principle is evolution by natural selection — things that reproduce better, survive. Everything in biology, from cells to ecosystems, is the result of billions of years of that single filter.

Chemistry Matter wants to reach its lowest energy state. Atoms combine, break, and rearrange to do that — and those rearrangements are chemical reactions. The core principle is that electrons are shared or transferred between atoms, and that determines almost everything about how substances behave.

Physics Reality follows mathematical laws, and those laws are the same everywhere in the universe. The core principle is that matter, energy, space, and time are all interconnected and governed by rules that don’t change — from a falling apple to a collapsing star.

Economics People make choices under scarcity. The core principle is that incentives drive behavior, and markets are the collective result of millions of individual decisions about what things are worth. Everything in economics flows from that tension between unlimited wants and limited resources.

Quantum Physics At the smallest scales, reality is fundamentally probabilistic and discrete. Things don’t have definite properties until measured, energy comes in chunks, and particles behave like waves. The core principle is that the act of observation is not separate from reality — it participates in it.

Politics Power is the ability to make others do what you want. The core principle is that humans must organize collective decisions, and politics is the endless negotiation over who decides, and who benefits. Every political system is a different answer to the question: how do we live together?

Sport Defined constraints create meaningful competition. The core principle is that rules, limits, and opponents reveal what a person or team is truly capable of. Sport is the only domain where you can measure human performance against a completely fair and equal standard.

Music Sound organized in time creates emotion and meaning. The core principle is tension and resolution — music sets up expectations and either fulfills or subverts them, and that relationship is what moves us. Every musical tradition in human history is built on that dynamic.

Astronomy The universe is unimaginably large, old, and mostly unknown. The core principle is that the same physics that governs Earth governs everything — and by reading light from distant objects we can reconstruct the history, structure, and fate of the cosmos.

Philosophy Everything we think we know rests on assumptions we haven’t examined. The core principle is rigorous questioning of foundations — of knowledge, reality, morality, and meaning. Philosophy is what every field does before it becomes a field.

Writing Language is the compression of experience into symbols another mind can reconstruct. The core principle is clarity of thought expressed through precise selection of words — every good writer is really a good thinker who has learned to make their thinking visible.

Civilisation Cooperation at scale requires trust, institutions, and shared story. The core principle is that humans can coordinate beyond the tribe by building systems — writing, law, currency, religion, cities — that allow strangers to work together. Civilisation is accumulated cooperative infrastructure.

Mathematics Pure structure, independent of physical reality. The core principle is that from a small set of assumptions, infinite true things can be derived by logic alone. Mathematics is the study of what must be true, regardless of what actually exists.

Psychology Behaviour makes sense once you understand the mind producing it. The core principle is that most of what drives us is hidden from our own awareness — our decisions, emotions, and beliefs are shaped by processes we don’t consciously control or even see.

History The present is the residue of the past. The core principle is that context explains everything — no event, person, or idea can be understood without understanding what came before it. History is the discipline of taking time seriously.

Sociology Individuals are shaped by invisible social forces. The core principle is that your beliefs, choices, and identity are far more collectively produced than they feel — class, culture, institutions, and norms operate on you whether you notice them or not.

Medicine The body is a system that can be understood and intervened in. The core principle is diagnosis before treatment — understanding what has gone wrong, and why, before attempting to fix it. Medicine is applied biology meeting individual human suffering.

Architecture Space shapes human experience. The core principle is that how a building is designed changes how people feel and behave inside it — architecture is the art of making space serve human life while remaining standing.

Law Rules only work if they’re enforced consistently. The core principle is that written, agreed-upon rules applied equally create predictability — and predictability allows trust, commerce, and peaceful coexistence. Law is the technology of fairness.

Religion Humans need meaning, community, and a framework for death. The core principle is that there is something beyond the visible world that gives this one significance — and ritual, story, and community are the vehicles for connecting to it.

Art Form carries feeling that language cannot. The core principle is that the arrangement of visual elements — colour, shape, light, composition — can communicate directly to a mind without passing through words. Art is meaning made visible.

Engineering Turn scientific principles into things that work. The core principle is constraints are the job — any solution must be safe, affordable, buildable, and functional. Engineering is physics with consequences.

Linguistics Language is not just communication — it’s the structure of thought itself. The core principle is that all human languages share deep underlying patterns, and the diversity of languages reveals how differently reality can be carved up and perceived.

The Emergent Curriculum

Emergent curriculum is based on the premise that children are most successful at learning when curriculum experiences account for their interests, strengths, needs, and lived realities

This is based on the idea that whatever emerges in a child should be used to explore. It facilitates learning from the child, not from external sources.

The Emergence Curriculum

This is what I call the emergence curriculum.

This is a different idea that we are the result of our inputs, and that we should feed students with stimuli that represent the best of our civilization at the same time as feeding them obstacles and what’s missing so that they have the drive to create and grow.

The problem is that many grow up in great education systems with great families and abundant wealth, but they lack a drive, because they don’t need to.

At the same time there are many talents who emerge from poor areas without the best inputs, but they developed an intense drive to overcome their environment and become something far greater. Some of this is partly by luck, but most are held back by it.

The limitation of the emergent curriculum is that things can only emerge that the student has been exposed to already.

The emergence curriculum leaves none of this to chance, and seeks to take students to the best cathedrals, listen to the best music, to have the best teachers that can be found. Or, if they are unable, surrounds them with as much great material, as possible.

So that if they are the average of their inputs, those inputs are pretty damn great, and if they are the best of their inputs they are likely to be even greater still.

The emergence curriculum has a bigger view of human potential, and would seek to invest more in training the teachers and curating the environment for students.

But if we don’t introduce to students real challenge, real tension, real things to overcome, then they will not create and become something greater, they will observe and enjoy what they already experience.

• How To Build a Future Proof Career

• How to Choose The Right School For Your Child

• How to Succeed in Relationships As a Man

• What Should You Learn to Prepare for the Future

• How to Fix Housing in UK

• How to Increase Birth Rates

• How to Succeed in China as a Foreigner

• How to Get Into Your Dream University

• How to Get a Scholarship to Study at University

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Rome was the center of the empire.

In Wikipedia, there is a saying - all articles lead to Philosophy.

If you click the first link in any Wikipedia article and keep following the first link, they eventually lead to the page about Philosophy.

In the digital age, in terms of careers and opportunity - all roads lead to the internet.

Welcome.

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In the age of Industrial revolution - when people lost their jobs in farming - millions moved to the city looking for work.

In the age of AI, as people lose their opportunities, they are also moving somewhere.

And that place is the internet.

The internet is the city.

The more I think about the future of work the more I realise that all roads and solutions lead to the internet.

Create content.

Create an online store.

Solve problems for people.

Build a community in real life - through the internet.

So here we are on the internet.

The internet is the new city.

A place to learn.

A place to find opportunities.

A place to connect.

And it’s even more true because it exists at a higher level to cities.

I can be in any city and still connect with anyone on the internet.

It is the city of cities.

What is a city?

It comes from the Latin word: Civis which means citizen.

In this case the internet is of greater size, population and importance than a city.

And it might even make more sense to model our cities from the internet.

And it doesn’t even really matter where I am anymore.

Yes the place you are living matters - who you are around matters still, just like what kind of house you live in and which neighborhood you lived in, and who your neighbors were mattered.

So

If you are not using the internet to connect and grow your careers, you can still grow and improve, but you are not going to grow as fast as those that are using the internet.

So you will be falling behind.

That’s why the biggest and fastest growing companies are all digital and online companies.

Because the economics and connective ability of the internet is free.

But in the physical world there is friction.

So you’re paying a friction tax.

Yes, the real world is still useful and necessary.

Like we needed the farms to survive. But they are no longer a source of growth and opportunity.

They are a source of food and subsistence.

For most of the last 200 years, the majority of growth, the majority of the connections, and opportunities, happened in the cities.

In the next 200 years, the majority of the growth, connections and opportunities are going to happen on the internet.

There are similarities but there’s also a massive difference.

The difference is that new jobs started to form - the middle class started to grow. But the nature of the internet is different.

There is no middle class on the internet.

Rather than a middle class to fit into with set jobs to find and career pathways, there are long tail niches to fill.

A place you can build your unique category of one in a thousand niches.

The problem is that any change of this scale has massive challenges.

The move from the countryside to the cities was far from pleasant.

Many people were worse off.

And thats happening now.

And what solved it is that people came together to build new institutions to fill in the gaps, to solve these problems.

Huge numbers together led to sanitation and health problems - so they built sewers.

People were untrained, so they built training centers, the guilds, the trade associations.

People were exploited - so they built mutual-aid and collective-bargaining.

And thats what we need to do now.

Realise that attention is the labor of the new era.

That’s the currency of the internet, that these platforms rely.

And that’s something that we own.

And it’s much more valuable than most people think.

So we can come together to create solutions to our common problems by directing and coordinating our attention.

People are isolated, let’s build online communities that become offline.

People are struggling to retrain, let’s educate them to find opportunities.

The internet is the new city.

Our attention is the new currency.

Let’s build.

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This is an example of emergence:

This is incredibly empowering because the principle is that Newtonian universe is not correct - there is no A to B. It is not linear and you do not choose from a range of choices.

There are multiple possibilities, and your observation and interaction with them affects which ones come into existence.

It’s just like quantum physics becuase principles from lower levels exist throughout all the higher levels too. Physics operates on a biological, and economic and civilisational level too. Biological idea of hunger, does affect economics for example.

Why is this so empowering?

Because you are not choosing but also generating your reality.

You can see the range of possibilities and then choose one, and in doing so bring it into existence.

When you believe in a rigid, linear universe, you carry an immense amount of anxiety.

You are constantly terrified of making the “wrong choice” from the fixed options available, feeling like a victim of whatever environment you walk into.

The shift to a Generative Reality changes your entire operating system:

• You Stop Predicting and Start Steering: Instead of wasting energy trying to passively predict what the market, a team, or a situation will do next, you realize that your entry into the system alters the system. Your clarity, your preparation, and your Frame become active physical variables in the equation.

• You Create Your Own Optionality: If you don’t like the current options available in a market or a business scenario, you don’t accept them. You change your frequency, isolate yourself to clear the noise, focus your intent, and interact with the system differently until a completely new set of outcomes collapses into existence.

• You Realize the Canvas is Wet: The world looks solid, but it’s actually a highly responsive mesh network. The walls are made of probabilities, not stone.

You aren’t a passenger guessing which way the train is going. You are the engineer realizing that the tracks are being laid down in real-time, exactly where you choose to look.

Entanglement also works with groups and relationships.

You’re following what everyone says.

You see all these big creators doing content.

The truth is that when it lands, when you have market fit, it’s effortless and easy.

Otherwise it just feels like you are constantly stabbing in the dark, not quite gaining traction.

But the difference between an extremely viral piece of content and one that just flops is usually this one small thing.

• It’s not the thumbnail

• It’s not the hook

• It’s not even necessarily about the quality of the content itself, though all of these are important.

It’s solving a problem for someone that isn’t solved elsewhere.

And you can do this with this one simple structure.

It’s called: Problem, Idea, Steps.

• Problem

• Idea

• Steps

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I tried creating all sorts of content. For my business, it was super easy, it grows so easily. But when I’m writing for myself, about things I’ve learnt, it was flat. Until I learnt this.

I got this idea from Dan Koe’s article . I did a deep dive on Dan Koe to understand why he is popular, and I found this formula.

It’s a specific structure that you can use for any piece of content.

1. Problem - what is the problem people are faced with or that this article is solving?

2. The central idea -

3. How you can apply it to solve the problem.

That’s it.

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See how I did that with this article.

Thats’ the difference between this

And this

When you focus on the problem, you can start to define the problem, lean into the pain, and let the tension build. Consider the person and how they are. If you’ve had this problem yourself, its even easier.

When you come to the idea you can make it interesting, livid and share examples.

When you come to the steps then you can make it easy, simple to follow.

It’s a super simple idea that you can use to create content, like this, that works.

The reason this works is that

• It forces you to think of the problem you’re solving and the way this content helps

• It forces you to think of the person you are solving the problem for (Which is what I wrote about here)

• It avoids writing for yourself, you have to think about others

• It’s so much easier when you have a simple formula to follow. You can just focus on the core idea and the content and quality of delivery.

It effectively converts your idea to something useful and finds the audience for it.

If you look at all the popular content they all follow this pattern.

If you see the news you can see it all works that way - it’s all about problems. Sometimes content doesn’t do it explicitly, but it does it implicitly.

When you’ve already got an audience, it becomes easier, because the problem you’re solving doesn’t need to be shared each time.

And the great thing is that you don’t have to have followers for this work. Social media now surfaces your content to those it thinks will find it interesting and helpful.

So you can try it.

It’s surprisingly easy.

I didn’t use any AI in making this content, and I’m not opposed to incorporating AI in the process.

I just spent a few minutes and wrote this in 10-20 minutes by following the structure. I just woke up, went to the gym, created this content in 10-20 minutes.

You can even go through your previously under performing content and recreate them in this format.

I strongly believe that the difference between enormous success and average or even losing and giving up, is just a slightly different way of thinking.

So keep trying, reiterating.

Try it today, share with me your article in the comments and I’ll engage and leave a comment.

And if you found this helpful subscribe, leave me a comment which can help others.

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Links:

• About the importance of understanding your audience

• I got this idea from Dan Koe’s article below. I did a deep dive on Dan Koe to understand why he is popular.

  future/proof

  If you have multiple interests, do not waste the next 2-3 years

  Society made you think that having multiple interests was a weakness…

  Read more

  5 months ago · 10083 likes · 317 comments · DAN KOE

If there’s anything that can give you a big advantage in life it’s waking up to a simple morning routine.

Wake up.

Wake the f*ck up.

• Read for 20 minutes.

• Write out things you’re grateful for

• Write out 3 things you want to accomplish and see it accomplished

• Cold shower

• 30 Minutes Exercise

• Reach out to 5 people

• Get outside

Make it so automatic that you don’t need to think.

This compounds and gives you a huge advantage.

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I am straddled between China and the west, sometimes unsure which side to dive into, and how a study abroad platform is going to evolve in the future.

This is what I think about as a founder, but also for the perspective of students who are choosing where and what to study?

Before, it seemed quite clear what to work on - take a degree, and get into a specific trade like law, architecture or medicine.

While they may still be true now, every field is changing more quickly - it seems almost impossible to accurately predict, let alone 4+ years in advance.

So what should you work on in the age of AI if you are ambitious?

I wrote a few ideas in this article

But now I want to look at a slightly different, more applied angle - how to find and evaluate opportunities.

We can look at what is now abundant and therefore what is now scarce.

When I first came to China, sharing the information on an online platform was incredibly valuable.

Now that has shifted the value is more about trust, curation and relationships.

So here are two levels on which to think:

1. On a personal level - which skills to develop and how to apply them?

2. On opportunities and projects - which opportunities to pursue?

As a person, there are some solid principles that I am focusing on:

Personal Skills

Writing and ability to think clearly

This becomes a more valuable skill as the world becomes more disrupted and information becomes more abundant. So I plan to write more to improve my thinking and ability to communicate. This is counterintuitive as I see more students copying and pasting letters and sending automated emails.

AI helps you to refine and improve your thinking and writing.

Strong relationships

This is something that has to go through people annd intelligence and technology can’t replicate. The ability to build and maintain relationships and add value to others.

The subset to that is reputation: Reliability, dependability and competence in your domain. This is a skill, and something to build over time.

Health

This is something that compounds and gives you strength and energy. While seemingly obvious.

Deep Work

The ability to work deeply is an advantage that I’ve come to appreciate more.

Courage

Emotional Stability and Awareness

Financial runway

This is a skill but also a resource, just like relationships are.

These can be pursued but better applied and refined through work.

As the tools become more available, execution more easy, and competition increases, opportunity selection becomes more important.

Opportunity Selection

The exact opportunities are going to depend on each person.

I like the idea of focusing on the work right in front of you. You can’t do bigger work if you can’t do the current work well.

While I think most of us have ideas of what is valuable, here is a framework for evaluating principles to evaluate opportunities.

The test - what is scarce, valuable and scalable?

When we have abundance in one domain, it shifts to what is now scarce and valuable.

For example abundant information makes curation more valuable. And we are only able to grow or develop it as much as it’s scalable. Many opportunities meet only two of those, but ideally they should meet all three.

The materials - Taste, Judgement, Trust

Build something that scales one or ideally, all of these: taste, judgement and trust. A platform, product or brand.

Distribution

One thing I can say confidently that it becomes more valuable and that is distribution, and you develop distribution by consistently express a genuinely scarce perspective, on a channel you can sustain for years, to the specific people who need it, until trust compounds into reach - then layer brand into platform into product.

So what’s the thing you should focus on?

The answer to this question is becoming more difficult now. Before if you got a law degree you were set for life. But that’s why answering this question, for you, becomes more valuable now. This is the game.

But if you look back at this article you realise that things haven’t totally changed, they’ve just shifted.

A platform is just as, or more valuable, but for different reasons.

And here I am figuring it out, building and making progress, and that’s all we can do, together.

One step closer.

What are your thoughts? Let’s share and connect.

“It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious intention of the translator’s preface and notes is to tone down the book’s ferocity and present Hitler in as kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything. Both Left and Right concurred in the very shallow notion that National Socialism was merely a version of Conservatism.

Then suddenly it turned out that Hitler was not respectable after all. As one result of this, Hurst and Blackett’s edition was reissued in a new jacket explaining that all profits would be devoted to the Red Cross. Nevertheless, simply on the internal evidence of Mein Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change has taken place in Hitler’s aims and opinions. When one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics. Probably, in Hitler’s own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when England is out of the picture—that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a different question.

Suppose that Hitler’s programme could be put into effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of ‘living room’ (i.e. stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder. How was it that he was able to put this monstrous vision across? It is easy to say that at one stage of his career he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. They would not have backed him, however, if he had not talked a great movement into existence already. Again, the situation in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was obviously favourable for demagogues. But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches … The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.”

–George Orwell, The New English Weekly, March 21, 1940

For example

Gravity

Physics — mass curves spacetime, objects follow that curvature

Biology — entirely shaped by gravity. Skeletons exist because of gravity. Hearts pump upward against it. Trees grow against it. Your entire body plan — bilateral symmetry, vertical orientation, bone density — is an evolutionary response to living in a gravitational field. Animals that evolved in water have completely different body structures because gravity is partially offset by buoyancy.

Chemistry — convection currents driven by gravity distribute heat and mix chemicals. Sedimentation — how particles settle — is gravity operating on molecules.

Civilisation — every building ever made is primarily an engineering solution to gravity. Agriculture, irrigation, city placement near rivers — all gravity shaped.

Economics — trade routes historically followed geography shaped by gravity — rivers flow downhill, harbours need flat land, mountains block movement.

Gravity never stopped. It just got joined by other principles at each level.

Thermodynamics (entropy — things move toward disorder)

This one is arguably the most universal principle across all layers.

Physics — heat flows from hot to cold, never spontaneously reversed. Entropy always increases in a closed system.

Chemistry — reactions proceed in the direction that increases entropy overall. Molecules spread out, energy disperses.

Biology — life is a local decrease in entropy, maintained by constantly consuming energy from outside. You stay ordered by eating ordered things (food) and releasing disorder (heat, waste). The moment energy stops flowing in — death — entropy takes over immediately. Biology is essentially a temporary, energy-powered fight against thermodynamics.

Economics — organisations, companies, and economies require constant energy input to maintain their structure. Left alone they decay — businesses fail, institutions corrupt, infrastructure crumbles. Entropy applies to human systems too, just more slowly.

Civilisation — civilisations that stop investing energy into their maintenance collapse. Rome didn’t fall in a day — it entropically decayed over centuries as energy stopped flowing into its institutions.

Electromagnetism

Physics — charged particles attract and repel, light is an electromagnetic wave

Chemistry — almost entirely electromagnetic. Chemical bonds are electromagnetic interactions between electrons and nuclei. Every reaction you’ve ever seen is electromagnetism at work.

Biology — your neurons fire via electromagnetic ion flows. Your heart beats via electrical signals. Vision is electromagnetic wave detection. Every sensory experience you’ve ever had is your body detecting and converting electromagnetic information.

Technology — everything electronic is applied electromagnetism. Every screen, every wire, every radio signal.

The implications are that the principles of quantum physics apply to every higher level of emergence too.

Physical principles don't stop applying just because a new level of emergence appears. They get joined by new principles, but they never switch off.

Therefore the core principles of quantum physics must apply at every higher level of emergence too.

1. Wave-Particle Duality Everything — electrons, photons, atoms — behaves as both a wave and a particle depending on how you observe it. It isn’t one or the other. It’s both, until you look.

2. Quantization Energy doesn’t flow continuously — it comes in discrete fixed packets called quanta. You can’t have half a quantum. This is where the name comes from — Max Planck, 1900.

3. The Uncertainty Principle You can never simultaneously know the exact position and momentum of a particle. The more precisely you pin down one, the more the other blurs. This isn’t a measurement problem — it’s built into reality itself.

4. Superposition A particle exists in multiple states at once until observed. Observation doesn’t reveal the state — it creates it. Before measurement, the question “which state is it in” has no answer.

5. Entanglement Two particles can be correlated such that measuring one instantly determines the other — regardless of distance. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance” and hated it. Experiments have confirmed it’s real.

6. Pauli Exclusion Principle No two identical particles can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. This is why matter is solid — electrons can’t all collapse into the same state, so atoms hold their structure.

7. Probabilistic Nature Quantum mechanics doesn’t tell you what will happen — only the probability of each possible outcome. Randomness isn’t a gap in our knowledge. It appears to be fundamental.

The single sentence that captures all of it:

At the smallest scales, reality is not a collection of definite things doing definite things — it is a field of possibilities that become definite only through interaction.

The principles underneath quantum mechanics:

• That systems exist in multiple possible states until interaction forces resolution

• That observation participates in creating reality

• That things are fundamentally probabilistic not deterministic

• That apparent opposites can both be true simultaneously

These are abstract enough that they may genuinely operate at higher levels in forms we don’t yet recognise.

Reality is not fixed, definite, and pre-determined.

It is open, participatory, probabilistic, and paradoxical - at the quantum level, and possibly all the way up.

How Does Observation Change Something in Physics?

You don’t observe the world — you and the world observe each other, and in that mutual observation, both are changed.

A quantum particle has no definite state until it physically interacts with something. Not because we don’t know its state — but because there is no definite state yet. The position, the spin, the momentum — these don’t exist as facts until interaction creates them. The double slit experiment proves this directly — the same electron behaves completely differently depending purely on whether a record of its path exists. Observation doesn’t reveal reality. It participates in creating it.

In Life — The Four Key Levels

People — you don’t encounter a fixed person. Your interaction participates in which version of them actualises. People become more confident when treated as confident, more hostile when treated as threatening. You are co-creating the people around you through how you see them.

Conversation — a thought before articulation exists in multiple possible forms. Putting it into words with another person collapses it into specific meaning — and that meaning depends on who you’re talking to. The listener co-creates what you meant.

Identity — who you are isn’t fixed and pre-existing. Different relationships and contexts resolve different versions of you. The question “who am I really” may have no fixed answer — like asking where a particle really is before measurement.

Meaning — understanding, culture, art, ideas — none of it is pre-existing and discovered. It is created in the interaction between minds.

What It Actually Means For How You Live

If you are co-creating reality — then several things follow that are practically significant:

What you pay attention to matters constitutively — not just instrumentally.

Not just because attention helps you act better. But because attention literally shapes which aspects of reality become more defined and real in your life. The problems you look for, you find. The possibilities you look for, you find. Not because you’re deluding yourself — but because attention participates in actualising one set of potentials over another.

How you see people is an act with consequences you can’t opt out of.

You are always already shaping the people around you through your perception of them. There is no neutral observation. The only question is whether you do it consciously or unconsciously.

Your beliefs are not just descriptions of reality — they are inputs into it.

A person who believes they are capable approaches situations differently, which produces different interactions, which produces different outcomes. The belief participates in creating the reality it describes. This isn’t wishful thinking — it’s the observer effect operating at the psychological level.

Meaning is not found — it is made.

There is no pre-existing meaning waiting to be discovered in events, relationships, or a life. Meaning is co-created in the interaction between a mind and its experience. Which means the question isn’t “what does this mean” as if there’s a fixed answer — but “what meaning am I participating in creating here.”

If reality at every level is participatory rather than pre-existing -

Then how you show up is not a response to reality. It is a contribution to it.

Every interaction, every conversation, every relationship, every act of attention is not you reacting to a fixed world. It is you participating in the ongoing creation of which world actualises.

What The Shift Actually Involves

Moving from the Newtonian worldview to the participatory one isn’t just an intellectual update. It changes everything about how you relate to experience.

Newtonian worldview:

• Reality is fixed and objective

• You are a separate observer of it

• Facts exist independently of who looks

• Your job is to figure out how things are

• Meaning is discovered

• The self is a fixed thing with fixed properties

• Cause and effect are linear and deterministic

Participatory worldview:

• Reality has an objective layer and a co-created layer

• You are a participant in what actualises

• Observation shapes what becomes definite

• Your job is to engage with how things might become

• Meaning is made

• The self is a dynamic process constituted through relationship

• Causation is probabilistic, nonlinear, and mutual

Classical economics asks: how do we allocate scarce resources efficiently?

That’s a Newtonian question — it assumes resources are fixed, scarcity is given, and efficiency is the optimisation target.

A participatory economics would ask: what kind of economic interactions co-create the conditions for human and ecological flourishing?

For The Individual

Your attention is your most powerful causal force.

Not your effort. Not your talent. Your attention.

Whatever you consistently attend to — you participate in making more real, more defined, more present in your life. Problems you focus on expand. Possibilities you focus on become more available. This isn’t positive thinking mysticism. It’s the observer effect operating at the psychological level.

Most people treat attention as passive — they notice what’s there. The participatory framework says attention is active and generative — it participates in determining what’s there to notice.

Your beliefs are not descriptions of reality — they are inputs into it.

A person who believes they are capable approaches situations differently. Those approaches generate different interactions. Those interactions produce different outcomes. The belief participated in creating the reality it described.

This means examining your beliefs isn’t just psychological hygiene. It’s reality engineering. The beliefs you carry are quietly co-creating your experience of the world right now, largely without your awareness.

Your identity is not fixed — it’s a ongoing participatory process.

You are not discovering who you are. You are continuously co-creating who you are through your interactions, choices, and the stories you tell about yourself.

This means identity is not a constraint — it’s a creative act. The question isn’t “who am I” as if there’s a fixed answer to uncover. It’s “who am I participating in becoming through how I show up.”

Most people treat identity as fixed and then act accordingly. The participatory framework says the acting comes first — and the identity is what crystallises from it.

For Relationships

Every relationship is a co-creative system.

You are not encountering a fixed person. You are entering into a participatory process that co-creates which version of them actualises — and which version of you actualises — in that relationship.

This means there are no neutral relationships. Every sustained interaction is continuously shaping both people. The question isn’t whether you’re affecting the people around you. You always are. The question is whether you’re doing it consciously.

How you see someone participates in creating who they become.

This is empirically established — teacher expectation studies, psychological priming, attachment research. But the implications are almost never drawn out fully.

If how you see someone participates in who they become — then seeing people as who they could be rather than only who they are is not naive optimism. It is a participatory act with real consequences.

The most powerful thing you can do for another person may not be advice, resources, or help. It may be holding a vision of their potential that they can’t yet hold for themselves — and letting that vision participate in drawing them toward it.

Conflict is participatory too.

Every conflict exists in a superposition of possible resolutions. The interaction — how each party shows up, what they attend to, what meaning they assign — participates in which resolution actualises.

This means you are never just responding to a conflict. You are co-creating its trajectory. The question in any conflict isn’t just “who’s right” but “what am I participating in creating through how I’m engaging with this.”

For Organisations and Leadership

Culture is a participatory field.

An organisation’s culture isn’t a set of rules or values written on a wall. It’s the collective participation of everyone in it — the shared attention, expectations, meanings, and interactions that co-create what’s possible within that system.

This means culture can’t be imposed from outside. It can only be participated into existence. Leaders who understand this don’t try to control culture. They participate consciously in co-creating it — through what they attend to, what they reward, what questions they ask, what they make meaningful.

Leadership is participatory observation.

What a leader pays attention to becomes what the organisation pays attention to. What a leader treats as meaningful becomes meaningful. What a leader expects tends to actualise — not through magic but through the cascading effect of participatory co-creation through every level of the system.

The most powerful leaders aren’t the ones with the best strategies. They’re the ones whose quality of attention and expectation participates in drawing out possibilities that wouldn’t otherwise actualise.

Strategy needs to become participatory.

Classical strategy is Newtonian — analyse the fixed landscape, determine the optimal path, execute. It assumes a deterministic environment that can be predicted and controlled.

Participatory strategy recognises that the act of strategic attention changes the landscape being attended to. Competitors respond. Markets shift. New possibilities open. The environment is not fixed — it co-evolves with the strategy being applied to it.

This doesn’t make strategy impossible. It makes it more like jazz than chess — disciplined improvisation within constraints rather than predetermined moves executed mechanically.

For Education

Learning is participatory co-creation — not information transfer.

The Newtonian model of education treats knowledge as a fixed object that gets transmitted from teacher to student. The teacher has it. The student doesn’t. The teacher transfers it. The student stores it.

This model is wrong at every level.

Knowledge is not fixed — it’s a living, evolving, contested set of frameworks. Understanding is not stored — it’s reconstructed in each mind through active participation. Teaching is not transfer — it’s the creation of conditions in which meaning can be co-constructed.

The most powerful educational interactions are genuinely participatory — where the teacher’s questions draw out understanding the student didn’t know they had, where the student’s questions open up territory the teacher hadn’t mapped, where something genuinely new emerges in the interaction that neither brought into the room.

This is what Socrates was doing 2,500 years ago. We’ve mostly forgotten it and replaced it with information delivery.

What you expect of students participates in what they become.

The research on this is overwhelming. Students who are expected to be capable become more capable. Students who are treated as limited become more limited. The expectation participates in the outcome — not just through motivation but through the subtle participatory dynamics of every interaction.

An education system that understood this would treat expectation as its primary pedagogical tool — and would be obsessively careful about the implicit expectations it encodes in every aspect of its structure.

For Medicine and Health

The meaning of an experience participates in its biological outcome.

Placebo research has established this beyond doubt. The meaning a patient assigns to their treatment — whether they believe it will work, whether they feel cared for, whether the treatment makes sense within their understanding of themselves — produces measurable biological changes.

This isn’t the whole story of medicine. Pathogens are real. Tumours are real. Broken bones are real. The objective layer is non-negotiable.

But within the constraints of the objective layer — which possibilities actualise, how quickly, how completely — is genuinely shaped by meaning, expectation, relationship, and attention.

The doctor-patient relationship is a participatory system.

How a doctor sees a patient participates in what’s possible for that patient. A doctor who sees a patient as a set of symptoms to be managed is co-creating a different reality than one who sees the patient as a whole person with the capacity to heal.

This isn’t soft. It shows up in outcomes. The therapeutic relationship is not just psychologically supportive — it is biologically active.

For Society and Civilisation

Collective narrative participates in collective reality.

The stories a society tells about itself — who it is, what it’s capable of, what it deserves, what’s possible — participate in what that society actualises.

This is not just inspiration or morale. It is a participatory mechanism. The collective attention, expectation, and meaning of millions of people interacting within a shared narrative co-creates the social reality they inhabit.

Societies that collectively believe they are capable of transformation — undergo transformation. Societies that collectively believe nothing can change — don’t. Not because belief is magic but because collective belief shapes collective attention, which shapes collective action, which shapes outcomes.

The most powerful political act is participation in collective meaning-making.

Not voting — though that matters. Not protest — though that matters. The deepest political act is participating in what stories become possible — what futures become thinkable, what possibilities become imaginable, what expectations become collective.

This is what great political leaders, artists, philosophers, and movements do. They don’t just respond to existing reality. They participate in creating new realities by making new possibilities imaginable.

Lincoln. Gandhi. Mandela. The suffragettes. The civil rights movement. These weren’t just political movements. They were collective acts of participatory reality creation — making actual a reality that had previously been only potential.

Institutions are participatory fields — not machines.

A democracy is not a voting mechanism. It’s a participatory field of shared attention, expectation, and meaning that continuously co-creates what democracy means and what it’s capable of.

When people disengage — stop participating, stop believing, stop attending — the participatory field weakens and the institution decays. Not because the rules changed but because the participation that animates it withdrew.

This is why institutional decay is so hard to see coming and so hard to reverse. It’s not mechanical failure. It’s participatory withdrawal — and rebuilding it requires re-engaging millions of people in co-creating meaning together.

For Our Relationship With the Natural World

This may be the most important implication of all — and the most ignored.

The Newtonian framework treats nature as a fixed resource — an objective layer of stuff to be extracted, managed, and optimised. Nature is out there. We are in here. Our job is to figure out how it works and use it efficiently.

The participatory framework suggests something completely different.

We are not separate from natural systems — we are participants in them.

Every human action participates in co-creating what natural systems do. Not just through the mechanical effects of pollution, deforestation, and climate change — though those are real and urgent.

But through something deeper — the meaning we assign to natural systems participates in what those systems become in relation to us.

Indigenous knowledge traditions have understood this for millennia. Not as mysticism — as practical participatory knowledge. The way you attend to a forest, the meaning you assign to it, the relationship you enter into with it — participates in what the forest does and what it becomes.

We have almost no scientific framework for this because the Newtonian worldview makes it literally unthinkable. Nature is object. We are subject. Subjects observe objects. Objects don’t respond to being observed.

But if the participatory principle travels up through all levels of emergence — ecosystems are participatory systems. The attention, meaning, and relational quality we bring to our engagement with natural systems participates in what those systems do.

We may be co-creating ecological collapse not just through mechanical extraction — but through the participatory withdrawal of meaning, attention, and relationship from the natural world. And the restoration may require not just technological fixes — but a restoration of participatory relationship.

The Single Most Profound Implication

Everything above matters. But they all flow from one thing.

The Newtonian worldview produces passive observers. The participatory worldview produces active co-creators.

In the Newtonian world — reality is fixed, you respond to it, your job is to figure out how things are and adapt accordingly. Power belongs to whoever controls the fixed resources and mechanisms.

In the participatory world — reality is continuously being co-created, you are always already participating in that creation whether you know it or not, and the question is whether you participate consciously or unconsciously.

Unconscious participation defaults to replicating existing patterns.

If you don’t know you’re co-creating — you participate in whatever patterns are already running. The cultural defaults. The institutional inertia. The collective stories that are already in circulation. You participate in reproducing the existing reality because you don’t know you could participate in creating a different one.

Conscious participation opens the possibility of genuine novelty.

When you understand that your attention, expectation, meaning, and quality of presence are causal forces — not just psychological states but actual inputs into what reality becomes — you begin to participate differently.

Not with the naive belief that you can think anything into existence. The objective layer is real and constraining. Gravity doesn’t care. Cancer doesn’t care. Poverty doesn’t care.

But within those constraints — which possibilities actualise, which potentials become actual, which futures emerge from the superposition of what’s possible — that is genuinely open. And it is being continuously shaped by the quality of participation of everyone involved.

Why This Matters More Now Than Ever

What’s needed is not just better mechanisms. It’s a civilisational upgrade in how people understand their own participation in reality.

It says within the real constraints that exist — which are non-negotiable — what actualises is not predetermined. And your participation genuinely matters in shaping what emerges.

Most people are participating in co-creating reality unconsciously — running on inherited assumptions, cultural defaults, unexamined beliefs, habitual patterns of attention.

That unconscious participation accumulates. It’s what produces the world as it currently is — with all its beauty and all its problems.

Conscious participation is rarer. And therefore more powerful.

Arguments rarely shift worldviews.

If someone’s operating on Newtonian assumptions — presenting them with participatory evidence usually triggers defence rather than openness. The new information gets filtered through the existing framework and rejected or distorted to fit. This is called confirmation bias and it’s almost universal.

Experiences shift worldviews.

When someone has an experience that their existing framework cannot account for — that’s when genuine openness appears. The framework cracks. Something new can enter.

Questions shift worldviews more than answers.

A good question creates an experience of not-knowing — a moment where the existing framework doesn’t have a ready answer. That’s participatory territory. That’s where new seeing becomes possible.

Relationships shift worldviews most of all.

Sustained contact with someone who sees differently — and who embodies that different seeing in how they show up — is the most powerful worldview-shifting force there is. Not because they argue better. Because their quality of presence participates in creating a different kind of interaction — one that makes new ways of seeing available through direct experience.

THerefore under what pricniples should you choose?

2. Choose Toward Aliveness Not Toward Safety

The Newtonian framework optimises for security — the best guaranteed outcome given fixed conditions. It chooses to minimise downside risk.

But in a participatory reality — the future is genuinely open. There is no guaranteed outcome. The act of choosing participates in creating outcomes that don’t yet exist.

Which means optimising for safety is optimising against participation. You’re trying to secure a future that isn’t fixed — which means you’re actually just narrowing the range of possibilities you’re willing to participate in creating.

The question that cuts through this — a question philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin pointed toward — is:

Which choice feels more alive?

Not more comfortable. Not safer. Not more logical. More alive.

Aliveness is a signal. It’s pointing at where your genuine participation is available — where you can bring real attention, real presence, real engagement. Where the participatory layer is most active in you.

Dead choices — the safe, logical, optimised ones that leave you flat — produce partial participation. Which produces diminished realities regardless of how good the option looked on paper.

Alive choices — even risky, uncertain, harder ones — produce full participation. Which participates in creating realities the safe choice couldn’t reach.

This doesn’t mean be reckless. The objective layer is real. Constraints matter. But within the constraints — follow aliveness over safety.

Your identity is important because without it you are just a collection of cells and organs.

And it is important to design it yourself.

This is something I discussed in how to design your dream life

You can be what society gave you, or those around you need for you, or you can be the architect yourself, something far greater.

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This is the process of emergence, when 1+1 = 3.

And when you understand the nature of emergence, you start to see it everywhere.

Your organs and cumulative experience and input come together to become something far more than they were before.

So how do you design your identity to become something far greater?

I’ve found the process of writing out your identity as a good exercise in clarifying where you are and where you are going to go.

Write out your new identity, and do it until you feel a pull.

Often if it feels heavy, it’s a sign it needs to be refined or re-written.

The best format is:

• Who I am

• What I do each day

• Who I’m becoming

Some possible archetypes:

• The builder, creator, rock, helper, giver

• Specific goals can resolve your identity and tie things in

If you write it and feel a pull and resolution it’s a great sign.

But this is just one step, it’s no replacement to action.

Action gives you information and is a test of the theory of your new identity.

It can also help you uncover what the internal conflicts you have - the internal tug of war between yourself that many of us have, that show up in difficult decision making and conflicts.

The clarity you get from the new identity can show up cleanly.

And often the resulting clarity can see a new you in a much faster time than you can imagine.

This is a part of the emergence curriculum.

Entrepreneurship is basically all about emergence

What catalysis actually means

In chemistry a catalyst doesn’t create a reaction. It lowers the activation energy required for a reaction that was already thermodynamically possible. The ingredients were always there. The catalyst makes it happen faster, at lower temperature, with less friction.

This is a precise description of what social media does to emergence.

The conditions for major shifts - the tensions, the frustrated behaviors, the latent desires with no infrastructure - exist in the world independent of any platform. Social media doesn’t manufacture them. What it does is make them visible, shared, and actionable at a speed and scale that was previously impossible.

The result is that threshold crossings that might have taken decades now happen in years.

Or months.

The old sequence and the new one

Before social media, the entrepreneurial sequence was roughly:

Build something → prove it works → attract believers → scale → narrative follows success

The narrative was downstream of proof. You had to demonstrate reality before you could attract the people and capital to extend it.

Social media inverted this sequence entirely.

Now the sequence can be:

Articulate an emerging reality → attract believers → believers become the emergence → build with them not for them → reality catches up to narrative

This isn’t spin or hype, at least not when it works. It’s using narrative as a material force to pull a future forward in time. To compress the gap between latent possibility and actual threshold crossing.

This mechanism only works sustainably when the underlying emergence is real — when there’s actual tension in the system that the narrative maps onto. When it isn’t real, you get bubbles, collapses, and destroyed trust. We’ve seen plenty of both.

The narratives that collapse - and many do - are the ones where the underlying emergence wasn't real

The question to keep asking yourself is always: is the tension real, or am I just making noise that sounds like signal?

Elon Musk and the narrative machine

Musk is the most instructive example because he’s used this mechanism more deliberately and at larger scale than almost anyone.

Look at Tesla in its early years. The conditions for an electric vehicle transition were building - oil dependence was politically toxic, climate anxiety was rising, battery costs were falling along a predictable curve, the car industry was complacent.

The emergence was real. The tension was there.

What Musk added was a narrative so compelling it changed the behavior of people who hadn’t yet bought a Tesla and might never buy one. Competitors, regulators, investors, engineers - all started acting as if the electric transition was inevitable before it was inevitable. That collective behavior change accelerated the actual transition. The narrative was self-fulfilling not because it was manufactured but because it mapped onto real underlying forces and made them move faster.

The reservation model is the clearest mechanical example. Hundreds of thousands of people paid money for a car that didn’t exist yet. That’s not normal consumer behavior. It’s behavior produced by narrative strong enough to make people act on a future they believe in. Those reservations funded the manufacturing that made the future real. The belief preceded and partially caused the proof.

SpaceX follows the same pattern. The narrative - launch costs are the constraint, reusability is the answer, humanity must become multiplanetary - attracted the best aerospace engineers in the world before SpaceX had demonstrated anything. That talent concentration pulled the technical reality forward. The story recruited the people who made the story true.

This is the Musk mechanism: find a real emergence, articulate it more clearly and compellingly than anyone else, and use the narrative to compress the timeline by changing how enough people act before the proof is complete.

Where Musk has run into trouble is instructive too. The cases where the narrative machine has misfired are largely cases where the underlying emergence wasn’t as real - where the narrative ran ahead of genuine system tension rather than amplifying it. The mechanics still work. But without real tension underneath, they produce noise rather than signal. Eg., Robotaxi - too early.

WeWork, Theranos are other examples.

Reality Has Become More Emergent

Social media didn’t just accelerate emergence - it also created a simulation of emergence that’s hard to distinguish from the real thing in real time.

• Real emergences happening faster and from smaller initial conditions

• Fake emergences that are more convincing and more frequent

The boundary between “narrative about reality” and “reality itself” has become genuinely blurry

Social Media Skills Have Become More important

Saying true things at the right moment with enough clarity that the idea can travel on its own.

The skill worth learning isn’t really a social media skill. It’s:

• Clarity- can you say the thing precisely enough that it travels without distortion

• Timing - can you recognize when a tension is ready to cross a threshold and say the thing then rather than six months early or late

• Authenticity of tension- do you actually have something at stake, or are you simulating it

Saying true things at the right moment with enough clarity that the idea can travel on its own. That’s it. The platform handles the rest when the underlying signal is real.

Social Media To Test and Understand the Tension

Traps

A lot of people who are "doing it" are getting corrupted by the doing of it.

The real question isn't whether to do it but whether you can do it in a way that keeps the signal clean. Which requires being honest with yourself about whether you're saying things because you believe them or because you've learned what performs.

Examples

Figma didn’t just build a better design tool. The founding team and early community articulated a specific vision of collaborative, browser-based, democratized design that attracted designers who wanted that world to exist. Those early believers shaped the product, spread the narrative, and created the community that made Figma feel inevitable before it was dominant.

The creator economy itself is an emergence that social media both enabled and narrated into existence. The narrative that individuals could build audiences and monetize them directly - without labels, publishers, studios, or employers - attracted enough people to attempt it that the infrastructure to support them became economically viable, which attracted more people, which built more infrastructure. The narrative and the reality bootstrapped each other into existence.

Why this matters now more than ever

The mechanism has always existed. Compelling narratives have always shaped markets and behavior. But three things make social media qualitatively different:

Speed. Narrative can reach critical mass in days now. Threshold crossings that required years of slow diffusion can happen in months.

Directness. An individual with a laptop can reach millions of people with no institutional intermediary. The capital requirement for narrative at scale has collapsed almost to zero.

Self-selection. Social media lets you find and assemble the specific people whose beliefs and behaviors are the raw material of a particular emergence. You’re not broadcasting to a mass audience. You’re attracting the exact nodes whose activation matters.

That last point is underappreciated. The most powerful use of social media for emergence isn’t going viral. It’s assembling the specific community of early believers whose collective behavior tips the system. A thousand deeply aligned people matter more than a million passive followers.

The honest limit

The power cuts both ways.

The same mechanism that accelerates genuine emergence also accelerates false emergence - narrative that looks like signal but is actually noise, communities that form around ideas that don’t map onto real system tension, threshold crossings that turn out to be bubbles.

Some examples

Post the uncomfortable version of a true thing in your domain. The thing people in that world know but don't say publicly. If it lands, it lands hard because you're the first to name it clearly. If it doesn't, the tension wasn't as real as you thought or the timing isn't right.

Reframe something everyone’s already talking about in a way that cuts deeper than the current conversation. If the reframe spreads, it means people felt the existing conversation was inadequate - real tension was present but unresolved. You’ve given it a sharper vessel.

The Ship of Theseus is an old thought experiment. Theseus returns from battle. His ship is preserved as a monument. Over time, planks rot and are replaced — one by one - until every single piece of original wood is gone.

The question: is it still the same ship?

Philosophers have been arguing about this for centuries. But they’ve been asking the wrong question.

Form Vs Matter

Aristotle gave us the tools to think about this clearly. Everything that exists has two aspects: matter (the stuff it’s made of) and form (the pattern, the arrangement, the idea of the thing). The wood is the matter. The ship is the form.

The matter is replaceable. It always was. A ship is not a pile of wood — it is wood arranged in a specific way, for a specific purpose, carrying a specific history. When you replace a plank, the matter changes. The form continues.

But here’s what’s more interesting. Take all those original planks - the ones removed and replaced - and rebuild a second ship from them. Now you have two ships. The old matter. The continuing form. Which is the real Ship of Theseus?

Emergence

Emergence is what happens when a system produces something its parts cannot explain. Water is wet -but no individual H₂O molecule is wet. Consciousness arises from neurons - but no single neuron is conscious. A city has a culture - but no individual building has culture. Put wood together in a certain combination and it becomes a ship.

The whole is not just the sum of its parts. It is something the parts could not have predicted.

The Ship of Theseus is the same. The ship - as a ship - has properties no individual plank possesses. It floats. It sails. It carries meaning, history, identity. None of those properties live in the wood. They emerge from the arrangement.

The Ship Is Emergence

So what persists when every plank is replaced? Not the matter. The form. The pattern. The idea of the ship - made real through arrangement, held together by function and meaning.

The Ship of Theseus is not a paradox about replacement. It is a demonstration that identity is emergent. It doesn’t live in the parts. It lives in the relationship between the parts. In the structure. In the pattern that persists.

This is why the second ship - rebuilt from original planks but disassembled and scattered - is not really the Ship of Theseus. It has the original matter. But the form was broken. The emergence collapsed. The ship ceased.

This applies to you. Your cells replace themselves. Your opinions change. Your memories reshape. And yet - you persist. Because you are not your matter. You are something that emerged from it. A pattern. A form. An idea, made continuous through time.

That’s why if you clone you and upload your mind, it’s not you.

Institutions and civilisations

A company, a country, a culture — these are emergent patterns too. Rome didn’t fall when a battle was lost. It fell when the pattern collapsed — the shared idea, the organising structure, the emergent identity. This reframes how we think about institutional survival. You can replace every person in an organisation and it persists. Or you can keep the same people and lose the thing entirely.

The deepest implication

Ideas themselves are emergent patterns with no fixed matter. This article exists as patterns of ink, pixels, electrical signals, neural firing. The matter keeps changing. The idea persists -or doesn’t - based on whether the pattern is preserved and transmitted.

Which means the Ship of Theseus isn’t just a metaphor for identity. It’s a model for everything that exists and persists through time.

• Emergence - that new entities of increasing size or complexity have entrely new properties of their own.

  • Everything is process, not thing

• Attention - that what you focus on expands.

  • Projection - Jung - What we can't see or accept in ourselves we tend to perceive strongly in others.

  • He said what you admire in others is equally revealing - you can only recognise a quality you already possess in potential. You can't see what you have no internal reference for. So what moves you, what you find beautiful, what you're drawn to - that's also a map of something in you that wants to develop.

  • observation produces a definite reality from indefinite potential

• Relationship is more fundamental than substance

• Information is as fundamental as matter and energy

• The observer is not separate from the observed

• Time can be a construction of consciousness rather than feature of reality

  • Einstein introduced the block universe - past, present and future all equally real, laid out like a landscape.

  • The present moment is actively being constructed in the mind - rather than passively received.

    • Think of it this way. Your eyes have a blind spot - a gap in the retina where the optic nerve connects. You never see a hole in your vision because your brain fills it in seamlessly. The filling-in is real. The experience is real. It’s just not a passive recording of raw reality - it’s an active construction that serves you better than the raw data would.

      The now you feel is like that. Real. Vivid. Yours. And actively produced by a mind that is itself part of reality.

  • The brain constructs the present moment. Memory constructs the past as narrative - not a recording but a reconstruction, rewritten each time it’s accessed. Anticipation constructs the future as projection.

  • Carlo Rovelli - in his beautiful book The Order of Time - argues that when you strip away entropy, when you go to the fundamental level, time disappears. The fundamental equations of quantum gravity have no time variable. Time is not in the basement of reality. So what is time?

  • Time as relational and thermal

    Rovelli’s answer - time is what we call the statistical unfolding of entropy from our particular perspective inside the system. We are thermal beings. We interact with the world through heat and entropy. Time is the name we give to the direction of that gradient.

    Different beings with different thermodynamic relationships to the world would experience time differently. At the quantum level — no time. At the cosmic level - time nearly stops near massive objects, runs faster far from them. Time is not a universal container. It’s a local, perspectival phenomenon.

• Space might not exist

  • Think of temperature. Temperature feels real and fundamental -you feel cold, you feel hot. But at the microscopic level there is no temperature. There are just molecules moving at various speeds. Temperature is what the statistical behaviour of billions of molecules feels like from the outside. It’s emergent. Real at its level. Not fundamental at the deeper level.

    Space may be like temperature. Real at the level we experience it. Emergent from something underneath that has no spatial character - just information, just relationship, just quantum entanglement between degrees of freedom.

• We actually have no idea what reality is made of

  • The classical idea of fundamental stuff - little billiard balls of matter existing independently in space - is almost certainly wrong. The deeper you go the less thing-like reality becomes. More mathematical. More relational. More strange. It could be:

    • Information

    • Symmetry

    • Consciousness

    • Nothing

• Reality is emergence - Reality may be a self-generating process of emergence, with no foundation beneath it, producing its own ground as it goes - and consciousness is what that process feels like from the inside.

• The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.

• Recursion and self-reference

  When a system applies its own rules to itself - strange things happen.

  A camera filming its own screen. A sentence that refers to itself. A mind thinking about thinking. A set that contains itself. The implication:

  No system can fully know itself from inside itself. There are always true things about you that you cannot prove from within your own framework. Every sufficiently complex self-referential system has an outside that exceeds its inside.

  • Your blindspots - what you can’t see from inside yourself

    Your own attractors are nearly invisible to you.

    The patterns you keep repeating - the way you respond to criticism, the situations you keep finding yourself in, the emotional states you return to - these are mostly invisible from inside because they feel like reality, not like patterns. They feel like justified responses to what’s actually happening, not like a loop you’re running.

    The person who keeps ending up in controlling relationships doesn’t see the attractor. They see a series of individually explicable situations. The pattern is only visible from outside.

    Your assumptions are invisible precisely because they’re assumptions.
    Your blind spots are defined by what you can’t perceive.

    By definition you don’t know what you don’t know. The shape of your ignorance is invisible to you. You can know that blind spots exist - Gödel tells you they must — but you can’t see their content from inside.

    Your self-model is always behind.

    The you that you understand is a model built from past experience. But you’re not static - you’re an ongoing process. By the time you’ve understood something about yourself, you’ve already moved. The model is always slightly out of date. You’re navigating the present with a map drawn from the past.

  • The practices that help - therapy, close relationships where people tell you truth, sitting in silence, keeping a journal, putting yourself in genuinely new situations that reveal new responses - all work by providing outside to your inside. They temporarily exceed your frame.

    Other people are extraordinarily valuable for this. Not because they know you better than you know yourself across the board - but because they can see your patterns from outside in a way you structurally cannot.

    The dog doesn’t know it doesn’t know itself. You do. And that knowing - that you have blind spots even if you can’t see them - is itself a kind of wisdom the dog doesn’t have.

    You’re a self-referential system aware of its own incompleteness. That’s rare. Maybe unique in the universe.

  • Knowing yourself and requisite variety - our thinking is simpler than ourselves

  • Which means growing in self-understanding is not about finding the final complete model of yourself. It’s about continuously expanding the variety of your self-model - getting more complete, more nuanced, more accurate — while knowing it will never be fully complete.

• Requisite variety

  From cybernetics. Ashby’s Law.

  Only variety can absorb variety. A system can only control its environment to the degree that it has as many possible responses as the environment has possible disturbances.

  In plain terms - the complexity of your response capacity must match the complexity of what you’re navigating.

• Your capacity to navigate reality is strictly limited by the variety you've built.

  • Requisite variety isn’t built by reading about variety. It’s built by being put in situations that exceed your current repertoire and having to find a response.

  • implications:

    Your ceiling is set by your variety, not your intelligence

  • Homogeneous environments actively reduce your variety

  • Discomfort is the signal, not the problem

  • Other people are your most important source of variety

  • Organisations have requisite variety problems too

  • AI changes the requisite variety equation

  • Self-knowledge and variety are connected

  • How to build variety?

    1. Deliberately seek situations that exceed your current range

  • 3. Relationships with people who are fundamentally different from you

  • 4. Do the thing you’re most avoiding

  • 5. Learn domains that think completely differently from your primary mode

• The adjacent possible

  Stuart Kauffman’s concept. One of the most generative ideas I know.

  At any moment, what can come next is constrained by what already exists. Not everything is possible from any starting point. Only certain moves are available - the adjacent possible - the set of things that can become real given what currently is.

• It doesn’t matter - have fun!