The 3 Pillars of Activism
2 min read
Steering towards anything, from going to the bathroom to winning a Nobel Prize, stands on three different "moods":
- The creator. Creating a pool of questions or answers, which are both ideas. Ideation and creativity strengthen this
- The Prioritizer. Choosing the ideas for execution. This could be a combination of several of them (though thinking about blends of ideas could be done in the previous stage as well), parts of ideas, and different investment effort into different ideas. Analytical thinking, bias mitigation, and tools like Weighted Factor Model can strengthen this. Prediction capabilities are of most importance.
- The executor: It's a bit tricky to define what exactly execution is, because usually after the prioritizer and the creator stage, one goes back to the prioritizer mode again. See this example for more details. I define this stage as a robot stage, unaware, uncreative, unopen to change. only automatic actions based on prior work are needed. Strengthen it by attention to everything you decided, focus, and calm. Those things depend mostly on the result of all the Q&A and prioritization you have done before in your life: your working system, your inner investigation, your knowledge and skills.
Improving Yourself Across the Three Pillars:
- meditation comes in handy for all stages
- Order, standing on the shoulders of your prior self, really helps with creating pool of Q&As. I could do this website since I have developed a knowledge management system, a second brain, for several years
- The creator and the Prioritizer are very different modes, as different as can be. Ideally they should be done separately, on different days and different locations
- Many People skip first and second pillars, leaving it to the automatic mental processes that are outside awareness. If you start from the third pillar, you live in the world of answers. It is important to often visit back the world of questions, it is what opens up new doors. One way to do that is to ask questions about the questions. This ensures you're in the questions world.
- Creating pools of ideas, questions or answers, is an ongoing process. If you don't have an idea list, or you plan to start one at a later stage, you're doing something wrong
Getting better at those three pillars is the only thing you need. In my opinion, that's it.
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