Our levels of productivity, creativity, and inspiration have an intimate, hard-to-articulate connection to our environments. And we all have different predilections — quiet vs. noisy, calm vs. bustling, light vs. dark. Each quality creates a climate that pulls something different out of us.
Our surroundings shape how we work, yet we also have the power to choose and to mold them ourselves.
Evolution has generated two opposed modes for organisms to find fitness:
r-selection is about speed: rapid reproduction, fast growth, many offspring
K-selection is about carrying capacity: slow development, robust fitness, few offspring
What can we learn to harness both approaches in work and life?
Gratitude is how we maintain the fragile, critical systems of relationships that come to our rescue when things go bad. Strong institutions get that way through the effortful work of the grateful to nurture them on.
Riffing on one of my favorite quotes, from Calvin Coolidge:
Wrote this week about the problems with feeds, algorithmic discovery, and passively letting the machines define your taste.
We all need a return to active participation in what we consume.
A return to active discovery.
Andy Grove's 'modes of control'.
Last month’s interesting finds.
My latest post is a deep dive on Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. If you can’t tell from the length, this book is full of gold, and one of my favorites in a long time:
On Kevin Kelly’s “Technium” and why human innovation is different than the biological variety.
Latest Res Extensa , on our natural genetic wiring to explore, and its biological benefits of asymmetric bets:
Fostering a comfort with complex trade-offs.
My most interesting links from March.
My latest essay. Comparing the notion of “pattern languages” across domains, like writing and architecture:
My latest post on Res Extensa:
Passing over the hill of complexity.