Being in Space, a book in process

Self Actualization

Self-actualization is being seen by the world, the way you see yourself. It is not as simple as it sounds.

How do you know yourself? And once you do, how do you find the words to describe that?

It is the matter of philosophy, but philosophy generalizes human condition. It moves away from the individual experience of being you. It lumps a particular vignette of human condition across all of its members.

The shortest path to seeing ourselves in new ways is relationally (with others). When we talk to others, we don't know what they're going to say, and that fact alone invites the openness needed to say things we didn't know we thought. One of the process goals of self-actualization is putting language on our intuition.

Realtime (synchronous) communication is the best canvas for learning more about how and who we might be. On-the-fly sense-making asks us to find language to the meaning we hold instead of reading scripts (media) we prepared earlier.

Meaning-first communication is person-first communication. It is meaning what we say as a way of making a living and existing in the world. The alternative is fitting words to the grooves of social norms, meaning be damned.

In communication, we can think of words as the interface and meaning as the value. Tired language is an ineffective interface. Spaces that ask you to fit in are reductive and don't seek meaning. However, when both sides are ready to communicate on the meaning level and miss the words, there is a missed opportunity for self-actualization. Where the individual can learn more about their way of being and be seen by others in the same way, such an instance will promote generative value. By generative value, we mean being helpful when we leave the room. For example, if a coach can help an individual see themselves anew while seeing them the way they feel, this practice can continue outside the coaching environment.

When we consider how others are seeing us, we must consider mediation. There is an average sense of being seen by others in the form of culture and fitting into norms. Under this lens, individuality and diversity might construct a negative image of being seen by others, but I argue that mediated communication is no communication at all. It is not embodied and hence can hold no meaning. And being seen is an embodied activity. We should not factor social/media into personal value because it is asynchronous and mediated by meaningless agents (algo's). Economically, it holds tremendous risk because there is only circumstantial value and no self-value. Since the circumstances are not disembodied, they will inevitably change (say when IG changes something), and our journey to self-actualization (and livelihood) is affected.

So, we are slowly framing self-knowledge and unmediated communication as allies in our perpetual curiosity about our ideas and how we might change the world.

Method

How can we keep an energizing place of thinking connected with a living sense of value?

A personal place of thinking is where we go to understand ourselves. It is where we find the words for our thoughts (subject-object reflections), where we can articulate the ideas we are subject to and hold them out of our heads to see how they look in the light of day. Can they serve us and be scaffolded and connected to other ideas?

The front of the house is where we meet others, where we can decide how clear we want to be, our ideas, who we want to meet, where, and how. It is where we meet others, and where we look for an opportunity to mean what we say.

Meaning as the currency of self-actualization and the building blocks of economic value.

Language is the brush and the canvas of the knowledge economy. Large language models (e.g., ChatGPT) can produce stacks of words, but it is up to a person to measure their meaning (and make it valuable). Words without meaning are useless. The same applies to tired language, which collapses under the weight of meaning it tries to carry.

Being in service of others can be a flywheel, a reinforcing system where what we make energizes our thinking, and so on. It is a process of deconstruction and reconstruction.

Finding the space between words glued together by efficiency and the zeitgeist. Economically, scripted scalable communication (media, thought leadership) does not contribute to self-actualization. That is not to say that individuals who advertise themselves cannot self-actualize, but that other people's language will slow down the process of self-knowledge and actualization.

Collaboration

When we seek similarities and mitigate confusion, we eventually end up in collaboration, which is doing in the world without new self-knowledge. Collaboration is often the path of least resistance, ignoring the invisible costs of value and change.

If you work actively and thoughtfully, you are changing the world. Most people do. Actions change systems because a system (any system) is designed to do what it has always done.

Norms average and smooth out change and authorship. It means that every step in bringing meaning (value) to the people we care about needs to allow enough space to be (high context confusion) and not only fit in (reductive clarity).

Under the lens of communication, we can think of the different parts of the system.

• authoring entity: 'Who is speaking'?
• language: editorial, pedagogical, transformational
• topology: peaks and valleys of meaning
• place of communication: space for creativity and high-context confusion
• interpersonal dynamics: 'Yes, and'...

It is within this scene that value moves. The very moment of meeting others could be generative ('yes, and') or transactional ('but'). We can transmit value through media and other remote controls ('make money when we sleep') or communicate it, allowing it to integrate into people's experiences and practices. We can build Legos or make soup.

We know how to program any structured processes to technology. The choice between outsourcing to technology or inviting people depends on our ability to sense a difference in value. The domain of legos is constantly expiring and running out of ground; the unstructured environment promises value (if we can articulate and meet people) and differentiation.

With this texture, collaborations can allow for additive rather than reductive collaborations.

Brief, Prompt, Practices

Prompts create a space for high context confusion by limiting collaboration. We can't understand each other fully when addressing a prompt because it points inward, seeks meaning, and, by design, lacks language.

We all sit next to each other but are looking in different directions. Questions that are intentionally meaningful but only to the self ask us to bridge a meaning-space with the world. By sharing inner meaning, we are immediately shot out of a place of belonging into a place of authorship. We are forced out of the social grooves that kept low context collaboration in place, and we are now guided by our intuition while looking for words as bridges for thirdness; once we have those, we will be able to listen to ourselves speaking and learn more about ourselves while next to others.

On the other hand, briefs are not interested in meaning; they are about finding utility in existing meaning. Current forms of being, places, and channels anchor the collaboration. That is the function of ice-breakers and traditional team bonding: to create a cohesive (singular) form of belonging.

This form of belonging provides comfort and social support but introduces a cost to changing outside it. Once we change outside an existing knowledge frame and way of being, we are more creative but belong less. The benefit is that integration will require the capacity to write a new, less monolithic version of belonging. The ability to exist within one's version of belonging is creativity.

Prompts seek creativity; briefs bring production (with creativity sometimes clamped in there).

Ethics

Seeing ourselves within a just future and adhering to the constraints of economic activities is a communication problem. Communication creates value, and value is communication. Sensing and discerning value in the place for self-actualization. Artiucalting self-value (the professional value we bring to others) allows us to balance commitments with integrity. Without a channel that can sense (and articulate) the way we support others, we will inevitably end up with a creative surplus of ideas. We will only voice these ideas on evenings and weekends with other "collaborators." Without the rigor and curiosity to bring ideas into our work or job, we will dismiss these ideas as side projects, 'fun' or 'weird.'

Sensing value is the same as sensing meaning. The more we talk in scripts, the more utility there is and the smaller the chance of meaning-first communication. Conversely, spaces that need to be filled in using qualifications, introductions, or other forms of exclusion will make it difficult to author a sense of value.

Utility and value

Fixed utility is a stationary value. Value is an interpretation, a developmental movement towards a new frame and form of thinking. Artificial intelligence emphasizes the dissonance between utility and value. Anything structured can be done by a machine to infinity, with no capacity to adapt and revise forms of thinking. That is the pinnacle example of utility rather than meaning. Economically, it productizes all service forms, exploiting them until they empty. Unlike the practitioner seeking meaning, the machine cannot pursue more value because it has no grasp of the language it manipulates and cannot navigate the peaks and valleys of meaning it passes by.

When we work with or for companies, it is easy to think that creativity is only in service of them, the client, but as providers, we exist in another sphere, needless of any reflection or development.

Of course, this is a Taylorist image turned on its head. In a factory of change, we are the managers, and our clients are on the factory floor.

Like most missed development opportunities, this is a loss for everyone: the clients, the work, and the peers who have less of your creativity.

Commodifying

Commodifying the self never pays off. When we optimize every interaction with other people, we limit growth opportunities. Growth only comes through people.

An imaginary person, locked in a room full of books, would only accumulate book knowledge, adding more facts to their intellectual faculty. Still, without people, that person will have no place to see meaning; meaning exists in open-ended, complex (surprising) moments.

The circularity is apparent; if we don't give others an open minute, we mostly don't give ourselves that space of curiosity. The worst thing to do with a complex, rich tapestry is to try to fit it into artificial goals and ignore all it may reveal or help develop.

After calculating how one uses minutes and transacts most efficiently, that person will inevitably wake up and realize that the foundations moved and are in a place they don't want to be.

Frame

Reporting facts and sharing meaning are different forms of communication. The same way a frame is not the picture it holds. I invite an interrepration of frame as a form of service, not as a disclaimer. As the actual material, a takeaway for the other person to use as they shift and move about their practice.

This form of (meta) communication allows for generosity and value without looking for things in common. When we can connect and share the frames of our thinking, we create containers with more diverse communication and let go of the invisible shackles of aimless collaboration.

In economic terms, it allows us to lean very sharply into effectiveness in a way that immediately surpasses incremental efficiency improvements. A long, tedious workshop that starts with unnecessary icebreakers and is followed by alignment (find a shared frame) and an agreement (compromise) can now be done asynchronously between two or more (self) leaders who can talk about events (facts) and their interoperation (frame), without forcing others onto their planet.

This week, I invite you to visualize a situation where you want to establish and tend to this affordance.

Confusion

Confusion can be useful for creativity. But, like boredom, it can be perceived as a problem to be solved. The inertia that clarity is necessary is the one that looks at commonalities and does not allow space for divergent, not yet clear ideas. Clarity, fitting in, and collaboration reinforce doing the same thing, in the same way, without considering the creative cost.

Focusing on confusion, I propose a breakdown of high context and low context confusion, an idea I shared in the past but growing in texture.

High context confusion is the ability to communicate abstractly and to spend time in unknown spaces together without losing patience or being anemic. It is an active state of conversation, expecting something but nothing specific.

Low context confusion is the opposite. It assumes a foundation but lacks it. Each side agrees on what the other communicates, not realizing either is gazing in the other direction. It prioritizes clarity over value and makes it impossible for anyone to mean what they say.

This week I invite you to find examples of low-context confusion in your channels.

Consistency, Persistence

Seemingly the same, we tend to forget that doing the same thing becomes easier over time. The word 'consistence' originates from standing firm, while 'persistence' means continuing steadfastly. Intuitively, consistency is more interested in sticking to a plan rather than imagining a new one. Persistent protagonists will travel and explore out of an intrinsic belief that something is to be found: a new axiom, a new way of looking at things.

But that same protagonist might compromise relational connection because of such deep conviction. It can get lonely in a belief.

This week's prompt is 'consistency or persistence?'

Constructing

We work in places. The construction of desks, chairs, and mental space is a place of practice with specific affordances for thinking and communicating.

The browser you use, the font you type with, and the app that corrects your typos make the tapestry of what you say and how you say it. It is easy to forego the creativity of designing a place of practice when we use computers for a living.

Reflecting and adjusting where thinking happens can unlock much of our day-to-day work and get us to flow when we need to.

This week I invite you to list what makes your places of thinking.

Content

Most content is closed. A parcel of facts or opinions shared on the internet or printed is written in one way and cannot adapt while in communication.

But all content starts with meaning, whether held or not. That meaning can come from the self (an insight), the world (reporting, journaling), or conversation (interview).

For writing to be helpful rather than entertaining, we ask the reader to (1) find the meaning of what we wrote and (2) integrate it.

Without that, (good) content is like a game of hot potato, where we relay something interesting to someone else, missing an opportunity to make it generative for both of us.

This week, I invite you to look for helpful content.

Cubicle

What makes a cubicle? Limits to communication, inability to author and move ideas around, and fixed set of actions which prohibit from showing up in new ways in service of others. Silos of thinking that result in scripted communication. Managerially, it is the belief that people can scale like machines without the ability to articulate added value, flattening multi-dimensional creatives into a circuit diagram.

This week, I invite you to consider a close-ended system around you.

Delta

What we do for clients is the easy part. Following directions to deliver utility is table-stakes. But we are paid for being thoughtful, reading between the lines, and identifying blind spots. Our aesthetic and the way we act on the opportunities we see.

The delta between what is expected and all you see as possible is making the most of the current professional moment. Finding a way to spend time in that delta, articulating and integrating is self-authorship in the workplace and the shortest path to remaining motivated.

This week I invite you to listen to your motivation.

Difference

More often than not, being interested in different things comes with a cost. We can think of that as the price one pays if traveling outside the 'picket fence,' which is an industry's zeitgeist, conventions, or norms. Looking outside the boundaries of a field, and finding ways to integrate it, often will alienate, especially if it is yet to be legible or if people around do not give space or care to adjust their view of you.

The cost of difference is doubly ironic because differentiation is celebrated in the market. And the circularity is that once differentiation is articulated, it stops being different (inside the picket fence).

This week I invite you to consider little moments of belonging.

Differentiation

All value starts with an opinion, or value is utility plus opinion.

In many ways, opinions are aesthetics. They are the differentiation creativity offers. Without an opinion, all we make (and say) is made of interchangeable Lego pieces.

Articulating an opinion into a plan (/design) or communication (/collaboration) betters the value we offer and the things we make.

This week I invite you to consider where you keep your opinions.

Dualities

One of the best ways to revive tired words is to identify the tension they are meant to hold. Best explained through an example, we can use the space between legibility and abstractness. At the edges, it is clear how fundamentally different these ideas are. What is clear is not abstract; what is abstract is hard to understand and pass around easily. Counter-intuitively, tensions are best experienced in the neutral middle point, where a step in each direction makes more difference than closer to the edges. When we can visualize tensions, a micro moment's movement (toward abstractness or legibility) becomes a valuable signal and a call for better, more energized communication.

This week, I invite you to identify (and spend time with) one such duality.

Expectations

We all expect things. Cause and effect, culture fit, and return on our time; these feedback loops help us navigate, grade, and improve our decision engine. Our ability to make sense improves through (explicit) knowledge and (implicit) experiences. The neurological sport of making plans is rewarded when we achieve our goals and strengthen when disrupted.

The obviousness of unexpectedness means that the world gets in the way of our projects. It is not necessarily negative; creativity (and humor) defy expectations.

This week's prompt is: Where do you expect things without expecting anything specific?

Feedback

A core principle in system thinking is that feedback communicates with action. We act and wait (consciously or not) for feedback to correct our strategy, tactics, or goals. A more expansive system view (complexity, where cause and effect are looser) allow for changing feedback mechanisms as a form of adaptability, managing self-actualization and negotiating with life.

In other words, we look for other feedback we are doing OK in our 20s, 40s, or 60s. We can look at how well we are doing financially (I imagine most people do, although maybe reluctantly), career satisfaction, family, friends, or other forms of actualization.

This week's prompt is: Where do you get feedback from life?

In-Between

Change comes with alienation. When we leave one way of being and travel to a new one, we are in neither. At that moment, we are in acute need of permission (from others or ourselves) to make less sense, work through ideas, and articulate things anew. This moment happens on the people's side of our practice, mediums, media, and the personal work on getting to know our practice better.

It is not an effortless endeavor, and while it carries a reward, it comes at a cost. Some do this perpetually as an intrinsic way of being. It is a matter of critical reframing to acknowledge that alienation from one field comes at a cost. Alienating yourself from multiple is a virtue because it comes with the benefit of positionality.

Prompt: What field are you leaving?

Fitting In

Fitting in comes at the cost of conformity. When we leave an open space for constructive misunderstanding, we can energize containers to take on a not-yet-known (and often more creative) direction of thinking.

More tactically, when a group of people meets to achieve a particular goal, fitting in is inevitable: we need to delegate, assign or assume roles, and reach a standard finish line.

I deposit that this process is not binary, and there are a few (or many) steps on the ways to create alignment. Rushing to alignment too early (/say with immediate introductions) has dire consequences for individual creativity and the container's energy level.

This week's prompt is: where don't you fit?

Friction

Value exchange necessitates connectivity, but frictionless connectivity thins value. As a design gesture, efficiency leaves out what is unnecessary and focuses on function. Value, though, is the accumulation of utility with aesthetics. So it follows that efficiency and aesthetics are at odds. It becomes of particular importance with creativity-driven value.

If we seek to deliver thoughtful value, the mitigation of friction might act against our interests (thoughtfulness is an aesthetic).

I encourage you to consider where friction exists in your work domains and if you're acting out of inertia trying to mitigate it.

Generosity

When we move from lego-building (constructing value) to soup-making (developing value), the connection between our actions and impact becomes less linear. Cause and effect become looser, and so does the social contract of reciprocity.

Creativity is an act of generosity, rewarded through money, accolades, or both. It is energy being put to use for others. In this mode (of soup over legos), we are developing, with and through our work, and it is more difficult to expect a return for aesthetics. Being thoughtful pays off, but in ways and places, we can't sense yet. Lego building has no aesthetic; it is utility all the way down.

This week I invite you to consider the people that warrant generosity without reciprocity.

Grandeur

Throughout everyday life, we correlate more with more. The alternative is not necessarily having less or being humble, while both are great moments. It is a call to add a developmental dimension, where we can see the 'shape' of more.

We imply and call on a certain self-importance in business: 'many people, 'scaling profits,' 'changing the world,' 'the great x,' 'the future of y'. What about slow, small, developmental work that changes the framing of a few people in front of you? I argue that it pays more dividends in value (money or other value) than all of the promised changes we describe. More mundanely, media does not sustain itself. How many more slogans can we put in the world? There is a bond between saying (media) and doing things in a way that reinforces each other. When that does not happen, media fades and drains the speaker in the process.

This week's prompt is: How are you sustaining your media?

Grid

What are we disconnecting from when we say we're 'going off the grid'?

Grids represent a network of communication, nomenclature, and, most importantly, inertia.

When we go 'off the grid,' we usually signal that we need a break from expectations. But that does not necessarily mean we intend to negotiate with such expectations in the future.

This week's prompt is: what is your grid?

Information

Information has the reputation of being infinite, a belief exacerbated by AI language models. When information is out of the reach of creativity, it has no value. When it lacks legibility of value or a mental model, it is hard to render it as anything but useless.

When we connect time with information, we can integrate new thought with existing meaning. Sensing speed and duration will energize back-of-house thinking with front-of-house projects.

This week I invite you to reflect on the speed of signals and duration of value.

Inquisitive

You can't be a good leader without knowing yourself. All leadership is self-leadership. Being curious, imaginative, and inquisitive about the meaning the self sees in the world gives the tools to help others to the same, from a place of experience and integration rather than a solely intellectual ('I read it in a book') or disembodied one ('I am doing OK, but my team needs to change'). Once we experience the systems of communication, perception, and interpretation, we can inspire others to do the same, in their individuated way and on their 'planet' (the things they see and the ways they see them).

This week, I invite you to write the last time meaning moved you (say tearing in a movie or a conversation).

Internet

Nothing exists on the Internet. It is all representations, pointing, and communicating in the real world.

It is up for thinking to place-make rather than accepting an empty desert of supposed infinity. Making a place is as simple as feeling creative with a browser, comfortable when typing notes, or excited to write an email.

This week I invite you to consider the places you are on the Internet.

Intuition

We all rely on intuition when creative or out of knowledge or time. Grasping its dynamics (or architecture) can connect energy with action, past with future, and ideas with language. Our knowledge and skills are all nested within our intuition because, for all purposes, we can think of intuition as our consciousness. Nothing we can think of that does not make it into our consciousness, intellectual or otherwise. It is vast and alive. Hence we must not fool ourselves into believing we understand it. Still, we could establish practices of creative introspection to understand what is interesting to us, how we are interested in ourselves, and where we might be of service to others.

This week I invite you to consider, in a very open-ended way, the architecture of your intuition.

Investing

Those in creative services might encourage clients to invest in the future, talk about the nature of a changing world, be resilient in the face of unknowing, and take a strategic pose that looks beyond the day-to-day. Yet, the same creative might skip their advice and consider opportunities to explore ideas only when immediately paying, or otherwise let the market tell them how to be in the world.

The type of investment I am proposing is not self-care (though necessary); I am offering to invest in a third place: the first is personal, the second is professional, and the third is soon-to-be-professional, the back of the (professional) house – where ideas and rumination grow on the way to become active.

This week's prompt is: when do you invest in yourself?

Knowledge

We all accumulate knowledge and put it to use through explicit decisions and sense-making. We make plans, adjust those plans, and communicate our intentions.

As a community of humans, we differ in our need to map our surroundings, people, and circumstances alike. Some are very curious and ask direct and pointy questions of the people they encounter, presumingly establishing a model of the individual in front of us, later to be used to sequence a plan. Others might let the model emerge and adjust as new ideas and opportunities arise.

This week's prompt: how much knowledge is enough?

Linearity

Being generous all the time is not the most generous thing you can do. Your time, attention, and value are not linear, so deploying these in service of others cannot be either.

Social inertia is quick to distribute this linearity. Words like spitballing or collaborate could be too open in a way that is not robust enough to hold value in a team or a workplace setting. Not all forms of fitting in are open and generous. When we put texture(/language) on modes and containers of communication, we clear the path for generosity to make it across rather than dulled out by 'things people say.'

This week I invite you to consider enabling and limiting sayings around you.

Local

Economic mediation is a mediation of communication. If we accept that all technology exists to facilitate human communication, the same applies to the subset of communication which is value.

Technological scale fools us to believe that we eat the cake (reach everyone) and keep it whole (hold value). A reminder that value is function & aesthetic. And aesthetic is the differentiator between the same forms of utility. When we scale (product, communication) with as little friction as possible, we remove aesthetics (in product and communication) in exchange for neat function.

This week I invite you to consider places where your ideas are mediated and the effect this mediation has on the meaning you're trying to convey.

Meaning and Value

In the ongoing exploration of the space between efficiency and effectiveness, I would like to use the idea of meaning. When we solutionize (efficiently), we look for how things work; we sequence utility for the desired outcome, heavily reliant on cause and effect (for our use or as a commodity). When we strategize, especially in an unknown domain, we might need to mix disciplines that do not allow for continuous sequencing. The connective through-line is an agnostic set of meta-ideas, moving from how it works to what it means. It loosens the cause and effect correlation (sellability) but allows us to be effective in otherwise non-accessible terrain (complex, unknown).

Moving from how something works to what it means seems to be a good idea when shifting our weight from efficiency to effectiveness.

This week, I invite you to consider where you're looking for effectiveness but instead are pursuing efficiency.

Measuring

Metrics are shared, and signals are individuated.

When we sense things, we can first articulate and perhaps share them. Once shared, we can decide to collaborate, and when we do, they will start converging toward shared understanding and a standard. Metrics make a comparison, a flattening of details into a binary scale. Signals are relative to one's intuition and have the same benefits as metrics without collaboration.

This week I invite you to consider using metrics or signals for the next thought you're evaluating.

Media

Media is communication with more than one person. It is what we read on the internet or listen to on a podcast. But also when we talk in headlines to the person in front of us, as an imaginary stage for a possible audience.

Media is not only an activity but a posture. It is rule-book communication and starts the moment we have an idea. We grade ideas and their potential for performance, looking for scale through reach and putting the responsibility on the message.

In negotiating its meaning with distance (from the writer), it is not its reach that is scaling but authenticity. Once a message runs out of authenticity, it is no longer a message.

This week I invite you to consider how you balance reach with meaning.

Vertical Scaling

Living ideas allow for vertical scaling, and the development of more value as we change, pursue new thoughts, and help others. Traditional scale limits tomorrow's ideas to yesterday's plans. When we craft a message and set it up to make it (or us) popular, it will inevitably control us. The more specialized our niche is, the harder it will be to build a bridge out of it.

Vertical scaling is the idea that we deliver more value to a slowly growing number of people. That means that the (1) places where we do that and the (2) nature of that value change, but the containers (the interpersonal space for communication) stay robust while you're in each other's orbit. As an update and an invitation to draw your own, I am sharing my current places of mediation in this Figma file.

I invite you to draw the places you show up for others, with direct attention to how spicy (/energized) your thinking is in each place.

Mediation

Media takes ideas from yourself and brings them to more people than you know. Because you can't be present in the communication, cutting just enough meaning (/energy) to make them immediately legible and competitive for attention is necessary.

Meditation invites the opposite; it is receiving an idea (from others or yourself), sensing (deeply) its meaning, and seeing what is already there. It is small and profound, whereas media is broad and thin.

The edges of that dichotomy are necessary – books and magazines on the media side and mentorship or coaching on meditation. But the gradients in between are the most interesting.

We make small decisions about where to take our thoughts: do they go to a broad and thin place (social media) or a small and deep place (personal back-of-house or small live conversations)?

Tracking the development and lifecycle of an idea from our head to the world and back has the potential to become one of the best reinforcing loops.

This week I invite you to pick an idea you care about and reflect on whether it would benefit from going far and wide or small and abstract.

Meetings

When we meet people in a certain way, with openness and creativity, we exchange energy. Such meetings result in a surplus of energy. When we bring energy and allow it to flow, we leave with more than we came. We must not confuse outcomes and energy. Many transactional moments are draining. In other words, there is a subset of meetings with no product where energy exists, and we might be blind to its value.

As a practice, I invite you to take stock of your last month of meetings, or at least 15, and mark (with a pen or in a list) discussions that stood out in their energy.

Meta-Scale

Most of the time, we go about our professional lives communicating about the external world (in editorial, through meta/skills). Sometimes we ponder, reflect, or go through a change that involves some form of overview moment or philosophizing. Considering 'who am I when I do what I do,' or what are the edges of my affordance (to change, offer value, change sectors). In philosophizing, we learn about ourselves and could travel up the meta scale, from the world, commitments, experience, and other tactical things, higher to our intuition and personal framing. The further we are from the world, the less language exists. That is where 'practicing solitude' is helpful. We can get to know ourselves to meet the world better to understand ourselves and re-author others' understanding of us.

If we climb high enough on the meta scale, to some personal singular moment, we hit philosophy, which as a discipline tries to capture universal truths about humanity as a whole.

Philosophy universalizes experiences and the nature of things. I would add that casual (or disciplined) philosophizing can keep us effective and energized through otherwise monotonous professional routines.

Movement

The word meta comes from Latin: with, across, or after. Different fields use the concept differently, from a change in a position to a second-order kind. It is a change of perspective, a moving of a metaphorical camera. We encounter meta-thinking (warranted or not) every day when we feel something is too conceptual or too simplistic or when we point an ambitious point further out of view. And if we are brought down too quickly (being askedpoint an ambitious point further out of view. And if we are brought down too quickly (being asked for clarity), we might lose our energy or, more importantly, our interest. Abstract thoughts are not better than concrete ones. They are different mental modalities. Different postures. Rejecting either is another form of binary thinking. This week, I invite you to consider an idea that needs more depth or one that asks for too much.

Negotiating

In our pursuit of creativity and self-actualization, we need to negotiate with reality. It means that we might discover new ideas and inspiration but need to adjust them to what we can afford. In design, the notion of affordance refers to what an object allows its user to do; in everyday language, we think about affording things financially. I am referring to both of these and more.

When we act on change, we need to afford the risk/opportunity of income, time, new language/confusion, and network. Some changes will be available, while others might require active negotiation with reality.

This week's prompt is: What do you ponder but can't act on?

Open Source

Open-source culture puts access above anything else. It does not ask for care or meaning, and by ignoring those aspects of communication, it often stays limited to media: fixed forms of communication that can't integrate with those who are interested.

When we're quick to collaborate on the internet, we assume that sharing a company's wiki or being transparent about finances can translate to (1) integrity or (2) value. But access without care can't get to value. At best, it will get to utility and stop short of being useful once we leave. Care and meaning are the added (interpersonal) value to utilitarian building blocks.

This week, I invite you to consider what might benefit from synchronous sharing.

Opinions

When we like everything, we don't like anything. Opinions (signals) create a negative space where preferences become helpful: this space and its value are alive and in movement. Without opinions, everything stays the same, and change cannot happen. Anything we feel passionate about is adjacent to things we are not; we have opinions about both. Some things pass us by.

I invite you to write what you don't let pass you by this week.

Patterns

We look for patterns when things don't work out as a way to organize the world and reason with our intuition. Organize and use a plan to order the world. But "things not working out" is a form of communication: communication with the world, another person, or a situation. Rather than immediately returning to the world with a set of to-do's to remedy the moment, we can look for an opportunity to learn something new about ourselves and use that to reframe our intuition.

This week I invite you to consider when you go from general to specific.

Permission

We meet people in our careers. As time progresses, these relationships develop, and we stay in touch. We (mostly) subconsciously organize these based on expertise or employer. We remember what folks do and can be reluctant to update that view.

It is easy to forget that as we work on ourselves, develop our interests, and pursue new ways of being, the people around us do the same. If we're not thinking, we might resist others' change.

When we expect people to be what we remember them to be, we limit their space for growth and put ourselves in their past rather than in their future.

This week's prompt is: Do you allow others to change?

Philosophizing without Philosophy

Philosophy is someone else's. It is most general by design.

It articulates the first principles of the very nature of things, which makes it dense to integrate into our day-to-day experiences and respective contexts. Philosophizing, on the other hand, is an individual process of asking what it means.

It always starts with what it means for me and could climb up to what it means to the person I am speaking to and then a group of people in my shared local context. All philosophy starts from philosophizing; the more general it becomes, the more existential (charged with meaning and inaccessible) it becomes.

Philosophizing is handy and has all of philosophy's virtues, primarily self-authorship and managing personal views with the inertia of culture, habits, and commitments.

When we reflect, we philosophize. If it lands in language, it can save time in the future and allow for intuition to travel further. When we say that we want to be generative ('teaching someone to fish'), it is not enough to experience the difference but to have the language to access the reframing. Philosophizing (asking what this means to me) leads to language and is the key to generative value.

This week, I invite you to consider where you reflect and where you capture the meaning you find.

Pivoting

Pivoting is used to describe change, but it is a turn with a stationary base. It is being grounded and pointing the camera in a new direction.

When we transform, we move with our feet, exploring a new playing field with new teammates, clients, and rules.

When we pivot, we look for the minimum amount of adjustments: keeping the same business card, and working with the same people. When we change, and even more so perceptually, we are energized by finding new people to work with, creating new ways of talking about ourselves, and most importantly, new models of value. Companies pivot, and individuals change.

This week's prompt is: do you change or pivot?

Place

While creativity is an internal, individual act (when in the world, it is production), it cannot exist without a 'place.'

Creativity uses energy to create something new. That energy might come from a conversation, a place, a discernment, or a moment of excitement. Even when reflecting (say, through a prompt), we revisit experiences in the physical world. That is part of the impossibility of purely virtual (meta-verse) encounters; they always point to or use a mental model originating in the world. Consider the inherent meaningless of a bot and the taxing task of seeing beauty in machine output.

Places are where energy and creativity can be found.

This week, I invite you to consider (and share with one person) one such place.

Plateaus

It is easy to think that people pay us for what we make, for producing optimized outputs in a frictionless Configuration.

But they pay us for who we are when we make said things and how we navigate (use/aestheticize) the friction that living in the real world introduces.

We can most feel this duality once skills plateau. There is more to learn, but learning becomes available (/easy). It is that tipping point where personal development is the invisible blocker.

Knowing the place of our thinking (/making) will unlock value (unknown unknowns) and keep us engaged and creative – being ourselves in new ways.

This week, I invite you to consider a plateau around you.

Popularity

Like efficiency and value, the dichotomy of popularity and aesthetics is part of our lives. Aesthetics is the opposite of popular simply because anything popular is average (/monolithic), and aesthetics is the departure from a median norm.

These tensions are cyclical. Some aesthetic gestures become popular (trends) and then lose their expressive nature (cliches) until the next one comes in. For an aesthetic to remain expressive (/hold meaning, not average), it must resist scale. Hence the need for continuous self-authorship; of language, what we make, and how we are.

I invite you to consider where popularity and aesthetics show up this week.

Positionality

Positionality is the ability to create and navigate a personal constellation of ideas. Ideas are much more than an objective set of facts. We might use language to flatten it, but the words we use are just the tip of the iceberg. Most meaning exists beyond language.

The connective tissue between concepts requires energy. It is not effortless. The closer the ideas or the clearer the navigation, the more creative we can be with our finite energy.

This week's prompt is: when do you place ideas?

Self Actualization

Self-actualization is seeing yourself as the people you care about see you and seeing them the same way. This system is grounded in communication and interest—an interest in the self, ideas, practice, and caring.

If you don't care about your ideas, you can't care about the people you work with and help.

Ideas (/creativity) are the connective tissue that passes meaning (/value) in communication. Without care for ideas, everyone plays a role, with no connectivity. In the arts and the office, performance is filling a role but doing it with personal meaning.

This week I invite you to consider how you might think about self-actualization in your domain.

Similarities

Looking for similarities weakens communication. When we highlight all of the things in common, we implicitly comment that things that are not (individual) are less interesting.

Creativity exists in individuation – divergent communication allows robust containers and new ways of doing and being. Yet, when we meet someone, we ask for an introduction, scanning for things in common: people, schools, jobs, or hobbies.

This week, I invite you to experiment with practicing pauses and open-ended (not to be confused with 'active') listening.

Situations

Meaning can help us measure the usefulness of the books we read and the stories we tell. There is an opportunity to integrate the residues of anecdotes and tiny moments of meaning.

A story is a window to understanding the meaning behind its narrative. When we connect with it, we can decide how deep (level of abstraction) we want to go. Is it the place, the characters, the archetypes, or the inner psychology between them?

While overwhelming in texture, this invitation exists for most places and when we see more in a situation.

This week I invite you to consider a situation where you can imagine more.

Sports

We assume we are in the same sport when we compare ourselves to others. When someone is 'top-notch,' a 'rockstar,' or any other superlative adjective, it is a linear, narrower, and less creative (/open-ended) field. An alternative is counting how many 'sports' you 'play.' It is fun to engage with metaphor on the level of people (how many groups of people), ideas (single cannon or non-siloed ideas), or markets (working with the same type of companies, going to the same conferences, or making an effort to not).

This week I invite you to consider how many sports you are playing.

p.s. I always imagine walking to a basketball game wearing cricket gear.

Structure

We make decisions (design/strategize) based on cause and effect. As time progresses, we build a library of instances and what follows what. When things don't follow such order, we find them confusing and discard them as unruly or 'random.'

Interestingly, the more senior we get, the more we find ourselves assigned to such unstructured situations, and the less we can rely on things with an objective rulebook. Leading and managing people is always unstructured and, luckily, successful in multiple ways.

This week I invite you to consider the type of unstructured moments you encounter in your work.

Systems

All visualizations create a system view. It is impossible to isolate a particular part from its adjacent whole. When we imagine something, it is always next to (/in relation to) something else. Its connection, interconnectedness, and available actions play out in this scene and can make the imagined apply.

Systems have a particular way of carrying through time and hold ways of thinking. Visualizing them can help in reframing for the present and planning for the future.

This week I invite you to visualize a situation you're thinking about and then list the systems within it.

Thinking

When we go about our days, living our careers, we do things we know how to do and think about things we may not yet. If we don't get a chance to complete a thought, these thoughts stay as concepts and abstract (yet meaningful) ruminations. We need to put them into words to position them in physics, relationships, and reality. Of course, not all thinking is the same, and that thinking process is nothing but linear. There is a personal space of thinking, which we may call faculty, back of the house, or simple solitude. Accessing it is always a net positive.

This week's prompt is: what gets in the way of thinking?

Time

One (of many) blindspots for those who subscribe to efficiency practices (e.g., 'second brain') is that not all time (doing the same activity) is the same.

In the field of communication, meaning and value cluster together. It is up to thoughtfulness to strategize our personal, interpersonal, and collective resources. We could be churning water in a pool of thin communication, not realizing there is no meaning to forage.

But the meaning is, of course, personal, and so is its location. It does not scale, there is no map, and it is shared slowly. If we run into a room with introductions, business cards, and scripts, we will miss it.

It is up to individuals and the people they speak with to see this and build practices that allow it to energize their containers.

This week I invite you to write a few signals of meaning (not value) that show up in conversations and the thinking process.

Time and Care

Ideas need time, whereas scripted opinions and machines don't. It is with time and care that ideas enjoy creativity. Without either, there can only be the production (or amplification) of ideas from another time.

While some might think about making money in their sleep, their practices fall behind time. The more we remove ourselves from tending to our ideas over time, the less we can help the people we care about.

This week's brief is: how much time do you invest in thinking?

Types of Writing

'Living ideas' grow in meaning and scope over time
'Evergreen' writing stays the same and preserves its meaning for the writer.
'Artifact' is writing that loses its meaning for the author over time.

Meta-disciplinarity works with living ideas and enables others to do the same.
This week, I invite you to consider these ideas in your domain.

View

Cynicism is the excess energy of reluctant acceptance, an often false realization that this is all there is, either by space of possibilities or the capacity to visualize an intervention.

Visualizing out of view (/out of language) is a practice of sensing, imagining (space), and articulating a path. When blocked, aspirations become a creative surplus, leading to resentment or cynicism.

I invite you to consider which walls might be doors.

Better Work

Getting better work (new business) is a wholly internal process. Knowing oneself (practice, value, interests) leads to more fulfilling, better-paying, and steadier work.

Without self-development, you're only developing in status, not value. The rule book is the same, getting better at the same sport with the same people, making it through more doors. While this appears to be pointing in the right direction, it carries an underlying risk of monotony and falling out of interest in your career, which can balloon out of control until it is too late to manage your current path. The alternative is continuous development and articulation of (self) value, offering it to people in your orbit and allowing others to join.

This week I invite you to consider how you want (not need) to market yourself.

Writing

Writing is thinking, but we are incentivized to do rather than think. If you're good at what you do, the market (the people you know professionally) will discourage you from changing.

For a change to be strategic, creative, and aligned with the person you are, it must be done independently (in solitude) and before measuring it in the world. When we change what we do, we write a new way of being ourselves at work, and that always requires language.

If you don't write independently (not for clients), you will find it challenging to think for yourself (and not for clients). Writing about living ideas and change (development) are the same and can exist in harmony as long as they are done in places that afford you being you and don't pressure you in the wrong ways.

This week, I invite you to consider what change you seek.