The easiest way to hide problems is to increase the scope of measurement. If a town has a few districts whose population lives in poverty, it can conveniently hide the problem by talking about the average income measured across the city as a whole. If your romantic life is in shambles, you can conveniently hide the problem by measuring your happiness across all your activities, including your career and your friends. Big Ideas Problems
The fastest racers in the world, didn’t get there because they were the fastest. They got there because they were the fastest of those who didn’t get injured into retirement. In skiing, and life in general, it is not the best ones who succeed. It is the best ones of those who survive. Big Ideas
You, too, can take advantage of natural selection. Remember: whenever it encounters a population, it “kills” some of its members. Therefore, you can become stronger by making yourself a population – of habits and beliefs – and getting rid of the unfit ones. Even though your ego wants to save them. Natural Selection Big Ideas Improvement
Natural selection benefits populations. This is good news if you are a population and bad news if you are one of its weak members. In the latter case, you can turn the tables by making natural selection work for you rather than against you. The trick is to become a population yourself. This is easier than it seems. After all, you already are a population: of habits and beliefs. If you let the feedback you receive from your environment hurt the habits and beliefs that are holding you back, you are effectively making natural selection act inside you rather than on you. You become stronger rather than extinct. You are not your habits nor your beliefs. You are their container. Their survival is not yours. What’s best for them might or might not be what’s best for you. Natural Selection Charles Darwin Big Ideas Beliefs
Markets are made of businesses, businesses of employees, and employees of beliefs and habits. Natural selection is inevitable, but we can avoid it at any given level by pushing it towards a lower one (in some measure). Natural Selection Big Ideas
The solution is to realize that natural selection, while inevitable, can be further pushed down to lower levels. Just like companies can protect themselves by firing their unfit employees, employees can protect themselves by firing their unfit mental patterns. To protect the individual, natural selection must be free to act within the individual. There, it can select the beliefs and habits of his or hers that are fit (i.e., beneficial) and terminate those that are unfit (i.e., hinder his or her performance). This is fractalization. The name comes from the realization that natural selection acts across levels with a fractal-like pattern. Just as it acts within a market by selecting companies, it acts within companies selecting employees, within individuals selecting beliefsNatural Selection Fractalization Improvement Big Ideas Fractal
If you want to survive, do not identify with your habits and beliefs but with their container. This way, you will let natural selection remove the habits and beliefs that are holding you down. You will get stronger, thus less likely to become the victim of natural selection yourself. Natural Selection Big Ideas Improvement
The easiest way to increase performance is to restrict the scope of its definition. Sadly, it is also the easiest way to incur problems. For example, we can restrict the definition of fast from “fast during a whole championship” to “fast in this particular slope.” Or, we can restrict the definition of happiness from “a fulfilling career, a happy family, a good social life, and a healthy body” to “a prestigious job title” or “a coveted spouse.” Happiness Performance Big Ideas