We place limitations, artificial barriers, brules, facades on ourselves all the time. Thursday evening, I realized I had placed one on myself in terms of learning Spanish. I set this initial process and structure of wanting to have 1 module at each of the 5-star levels. I was following that rule I had set for myself blindly, unconsciously. The point of the process was to ensure that I was learning new words and practicing older modules at a rate that was sustainable. But as I was doing one of them, I realized I didn't need to be going through each module's 5 star levels all the way through with each lesson, which equated to 20+ lessons. I would be learning the word after the first couple lessons.
This is something Duolingo has done a really good job of. Thinking that I need to practice more than I need to. It wants users to spend as much time as possible on the app as its primary goal. Its secondary goal is for people to learn languages. It's really a monetization / attention app whose means to that end is teaching a language. Similar to how McDonald's is really a real estate company that happens to sell burgers and fries as its way of buying more real estate. Same as how 2U is really a logistics company that happens to clean laundry. People get bamboozled thinking the means to the end is really the end. I fell for that with a self-imposed process.
Duolingo even created an artificial 6th level recently so that people 'practice' more. They make the 'egg' break after like 3 days of not practicing that module so that users like me keep going back and 'perfecting' that skill. They have 10 arbitrary gem leagues, where you can get relegated or promoted depending on how many points you get. The leaderboard with in a league actually changes throughout the week depending on how much you practice. So that you essentially see that there is someone always ahead of you. Triggering your competitive side to practice more. They have a streak of how many days you practice in a row. You can freeze the streak with an 'ice' twice. You see the rewards getting higher and higher for each day of the streak you have. It's this artificial rat rate made to suck you in. Soon enough, you get lost in it that when you bring your head up and realize "Oh wait! The real reason I came to this app was to learn a language and speak it fluently."
It's crazy. It's really an addiction to the app and not to the actual learning of a language. Those types of things are around us all the time. It's up to us to question the intent of whoever created them. Question the assumptions. Asking questions like who is this designed to benefit? Am I repeating a process aimlessly? What is my intent? Does my true intent align with the app creators' true intent? Wow, that opened my eyes.
These artificial limitations, brules are also there in government. The current government structure was set up in a time when people didn't have access to information, so they needed people to represent them. Many were uneducated. That's largely not the case any more. You need a system of government that can evolve as rapidly as the world does these days. If you can't, it'll simply get left behind.
The culture of overpromising and underdelivering is prevalent across sectors, backgrounds, jobs, etc. It's from our inability to judge time properly. I think one reason is since our emotions & feelings dictate how fast we feel time going by and we largely don't have great emotion management, our sense of time can get warped. Actually, combining this idea with optimism, you get something interesting.
Overpromising and underdelivering is at one root driven from optimism, which is love-based intention. You are optimistic because you think you can get something done quicker than it actually takes. Optimism and love are positive emotions. We established recently that positive emotions can make your perception of time go by quicker than it actually does. So that optimistic overpromising is misguided by that unconscious belief that we can get more done than will actually happen, i.e. the quicker passage of time.
On the other hand, however, you have overpromising and underdelivering also potentially coming from a place of fear. Politicians have a good amount of de facto power (even if they are figurehead-ish with money running the world nowadays). They want to keep that power. That social status. That class. That privilege. So they tell people that they're going to do all these amazing things for them in the 2 years as representative or 6 years as Senator or any other position. And after the term has passed, nothing substantial impacting citizens' lives has actually gotten accomplished. They spend a decent part of that term focused on re-election. Which is how to keep that power. Not because of the overall good it can enable, but because they like being in that position. And it gets worse when there's 2 major factions who are just spending the majority of their time undoing things from the previous administration of the opposite party. They're not focused on the actual end goal. They've been tricked to believe that the means of government to an end of effectively organizing and optimizing society is the actual end. Their heads are buried in the sand. They've been running this infinite rat race. The hamster wheel to nowhere.
So someone can make the same statements of overpromising and underdelivering but with vastly different intentions. One is love-based of actually wanting to make progress for the overall good. The other is fear-based of wanting to keep their position of power. So then how do you recognize this as a citizen, as a voter within the context of government? This intention of the politician.
This actually comes back to the chicken or the egg paradox. Did the intention come first or the result? Let's first ask these 2 questions. Can you have a result without an intention? Can you have an intention without a result? The first question is more definitively no. By doing something, by having some effect, there was necessarily some cause. Whether that intention was conscious or subconscious, that's a separate question. But there's definitely an intention before a result. What about the second question? In the 'real world' this seems like 'yes, I can have an intention without the result aligning with that intention.' However, that's narrow-minded and falls into a trap of short-term thinking. Knowing what I know about imprints, the imprint will always itself be the cause to another imprint. And it'll always be in the position of a cause. In other words, no imprint will not have another imprint 'unmatched' to it. In other words then, no intention will not have a result to it. So that means the answer to the second question is No, you cannot have an intention without a result.
So how then can both answers of 'No' be true? Simple. The intention is the result. The result is the intention. They are one and the same. Once again, only separated by something we call time. Exact same answer as the chicken or the egg. So what came first, the intention or the result? Yes :)
So then how do you recognize the intention of a government official? You see the results, their record, because those will inform you of their prior intentions. You can't hide from your intentions. The results not just within the scope of the government but holistically. If they truly want the best for everyone, then there'll be some record of that politically, professionally, personally, interpersonally, emotionally. We just don't get the whole picture when making these decisions.
Transparency is what we need to get greater visibility into that intention. Greg was saying the other day that Transparency = Visibility + Intention. I definitely see that. "How we do anything is how we do everything."
Writing this all out, I really think the blockchain holds one of the biggest pieces of this puzzle for that transparency. I'm sure the government system of the future will have blockchain incorporated into it. Naval Ravikant was saying in a podcast a few years ago that I just recently listened to that maybe the government system of the future is the wrong premise. There's not one right government. The proper government allows there to be multiple systems of government within the larger system of government. Maybe that's where my 'states of being' come in. I realize this is actually what I'm trying to do in my TLDR of Life course. I'm trying to provide a personalized experience within a predefined course. It's a system within a system. Many answers will exist at the same time. All as equally as correct as the others. Same with governments. Many government systems can exist at the same time. All as equally effective as the next.
My vision and mission should then be to create the layer above that. What are all the forms of government people resonate with? How can they all not only coexist but actually enhance their own and overall system with the presence, collaboration, and cooperation of the other systems? That is the question that I am working towards. In due time.
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