Systems, Ideas, Projects

I’ve been bothered for a long time by my inability to express myself effectively, both in general and in this blog. There’s so much I want to talk about, so much I want to say and so much I want to do, but I’m never quite sure of what’s the most effective way to say it. Logic dictates that it’s impossible to figure out the best possible arrangement until we’re halfway through. So I started with a fairly vague idea of what I wanted and had faith that it would resolve itself along the way.

Systems are worth building + mastering:

I believe that effective, self-sustaining systems are worth building. If my blog eventually grows into something greater than what it is now, it will be because of effective systems management on my part. Think of it as the central Project underlying everything else, in an attempt to test the hypothesis of one of the more important Ideas around.

I am a system myself, as a person- a system of systems- a nervous system, an immune system, a digestive system, all of those things. So are you. And together we live in societies, which are systems too. Music scenes, nation-states and the internet are systems. We could think of our entire species as a system. Gaia theorists think of the entire planet as a single organism. It’s systems all the way down.

I’m interested in learning about systems. I want to visualize them, to appreciate them, to understand them, to build them, to manipulate and troubleshoot them. I’ll begin with the simplest and hardest of things- mastering myself. That’s kind of a lifelong process.

But once I’ve developed a fairly decent grip on things, I hope to move on to build and influence other systems. I want to play a role in improving my community, my country, the internet, my species at large. Achieving each of those things requires systemic awareness and mastery- knowing how the components fit together and influence each other, knowing the right amount of pressure to apply to the right nodes at the right time.

Ideas are worth sharing:

I have ideas that I want to share. That’s a very core, central theme. One of my earliest posts was about how I wanted to be immortal through my ideas. I’ve grown a little more mature since then- I no longer claim ownership to my ideas. It’s the ideas that are immortal- they were around before me, and they will be around after me, and it’s my duty to share them. That’s a powerful idea in itself.

Sharing them is a sort of never-ending project- perhaps we could describe it as The Idea Project. I’m not the first to do this and I won’t be the last, but I believe I can make a contribution. I believe that I’ve had a fairly unique mix of experiences that allow me to see certain things in certain ways that not everyone sees, and that it’s kind of my civic duty to share them.

Projects are an effective way of managing complexity:

Almost everything worth doing could be broken down into projects- the act of doing so is a project in itself. Running this blog is a project, and assembling it into a self-correcting system is another. The 90 Week Project was the main focus of this blog for a while- but of course, it won’t always be. The 90 weeks will end.

I initiated the Legion of Heroes project, which I have since shelved, because I feel like I was attempting to do more than I was capable of doing justice to. I believe I will be able to tie up a lot of loose ends in a single coherent whole, which I will call The Polymath Project. Other sub-projects include the Book and Conversation projects. All of these projects are to function in synchrony as part of a larger (you guessed it!) system.