Context is...
Magic

Content

Bottom-Up:

What to Do

The action selected - Based on a foundation of why you’re doing it.

How to Do It (Explicit Knowledge)

The approach you decide to take with it.

Why you are doing it that way (Tacit Knowledge)

Based on experiences, reasoning

Understanding behind the problem (our understanding is often limited by what we can see)

Once you get to battle, you only have your perspective

Every moment you have ever experienced that you capture

The strength of your strike is correlated to the strength of the perspective.

The Emperor's Estate - Showing Up For Your Battles

What are you swinging at?

Discuss how showing up entails not thinking about it.  This is the life’s participation ribbon section.

Everything comes at an opportunity cost.  Doing nothing today creates more work for tomorrow and doing more work today only produces more work for tomorrow.  The only difference is how much you are applying yourself and therefore what you are getting out of life.  A band-aid only sticks as much as it is applied and the understandings you can gain from problem-solving, from trial and error, from guess and check, are what influence your ability to solve the next puzzle in life with just a little bit more ease than what you would have been able to before.  Putting your head down and doing the work necessary 

Millennials grew up in a participation ribbon generation where we were incentivised to show up with extrinsic motivators instead of incentivizing the right behaviors of applying ourselves fully to a situation so that we could learn the value of effort as a means for gaining new understandings about ourselves and what is possible for us.

We forget that participation means that we are showing up for something.  How you do ishow effective your battle was, so if you show up and contribute nothing, you haven’t shown up for yourself yet if you know you can achieve what you tell yourself you want to have.a

Finding Your Target (Should this be here or in the very beginning or both to acknowledge customer-based thinking that you should think of your target first.

Showing up also means being early - the more prepared you are, the more effective you will be on the days you are tested.  Believing in your perspective without putting in the work is a soldier who sleeps all day because his amazing sword will protect him.  Do not let your knowledge fool you into thinking you are wise.

Represent Your Battles - Prepare to Be Observed

What are you swinging at?

What kind of things are you telling people about your past?  Are they all about burning bridges and similar issues with different people?  That is a sign of an opportunity to look at yourself.

Be proud of what you have done, including the effort you put into your failures because you learned far more through those things than what you stood to gain from an accomplishment.  Recognition, acclaim, and renown for your accomplishments should always come from someone else and not be something you actively seek out.

It is one thing to show people something you have done in order to get real feedback, but showing it to someone in the hopes of getting recognized is the byproduct of the narcissism that arises from how we are influenced by social media.  We see others being put on platforms for their accomplishments and everyone wants to be recognized, but you have to be mindful that only you need to recognize what you’re doing as good and that is in the context of whether it brings you joy.

Own the stage when you are on it - be self aware, not self conscious.  People are 

Something about Responsibility Process

The Unsung Hero and the Day That Isn’t Coming Anymore

Keeping your head up while getting down to work.

tl;dr: Millennials grew up in a world that told us what life should look like if you’re doing it right but they cannot deal with the hard work required when manning the trenches in the day-to-day.

People don’t stand to gain anything from hearing about what you do, they stand to gain from what you learned.

Finding Your Target

What are you swinging at?

Finding Your Target (Should this be here or in the very beginning or both to acknowledge customer-based thinking that you should think of your target first.

Finding your target is about determining where you need to go when you’re home, centered, and traveling to them knowing you will get lost along the way.  You need to ask yourself what you’re trying to do to understand how you are navigating first because how you collect data in life affects the conclusions you draw from it.

Optimism and Pessimism are children of the Ego, which isn’t exactly a role model.  When Logic calls upon the Ego to ask if one of them are acting up, the Ego immediately shouts Realism, the name of a child it thinks it has, while one of them ends up getting the bigger say. Sometimes we allow one of them to become a brat and we let that favoritism gain traction and voice as we play favorites to the thoughts we are having, not realizing we have a choice to be fair and equitable with how we are observing the world.

The reality is the world sucks, but also get over yourself because you can’t just have all the time, at some point you have to do something about your life if you want to feel meaning from it.  Having your parents get your grades changed didn’t make you feel like any better of a student and facetuning yourself isn’t going to make you feel like you’re enough for yourself.  You can’t just think the world is unfair to you just because it’s hard, it’s hard for everyone and even the wealthy have their own trivialities and bullshit, no matter how malicious anyone you think can be.  Stop tending to the needs of your optimism that cause you to have blinders to what is right in front of you to harness that prevents you from experiencing the very pessimism that you’re trying to avoid.  

I find there is a duality between optimism and pessimism as a function of the input going into the actions.  

“Hard times create strong men,

Strong men create good times,

Good times create weak men,

Weak men create hard times.”

G. Michael Hopf (Source check this)

Whatever the battle is in your current moment is your current target.  Sometimes we forge swords to fight battles through our lifetimes and sometimes we forge swords in the current moment when we are dealing with the mundane problem of traffic.  Other times we are struggling to make it out of bed and it doesn’t matter what, so long as you see what it is that is in your way.  Finding our target is difficult

Seeing Your Target (THIS IS ABOUT VISUALIZING YOUR DREAM)

What are you swinging at?

This has to do with things that blur our ability to see what we really want when we get to the point of action.

Seeing your target is about rendering into clarity what you want and that includes centering yourself on the kind of person you want to be with the results you will have.  

Swinging at the Concerns of Others

What are you swinging at?

You cannot truly control someone, you can only have influence on them based on the value you observe in having a positive relationship with that person in relation to what you want for yourself.

If you are constantly listening to others for direction, then you are wielding your perspective at the things they would do with what they see for themselves out of your situation and is a less certain predictor of your result than your belief in it.

Fighting the battles of others is exhaustive and diminishing because you are still using mental energy to work on the battles you have yet to fight you have put off.

Finding Your Strength

What is helping you pick up the sword? What perspective guides you to your most effective thinking space?

Tl;dr: The best swords worth forging are those being forged for a cause and the best perspectives worth creating about a situation are those taken and tested from your richest sources of meaning.

A sword is only as effective as the belief a warrior puts into its strength. 

Knowing When to Strike

The risks of tentativeness.

tl;dr: 

The perfect battle does not exist and so a perfect problem does not exist.

Unless of course you consider a perfect battle to be

Getting Permission to Swing

You don’t need someone’s permission to have a perspective on something other than yourself.

tl;dr: 

The perfect battle d

Making the First Swing

Forging a sword to hang up on the wall is giving yourself praise for the war you almost fought.  You need to earn the prize associated with your goal, whether that be what you wanted most or the lesson you learned.

If you rest on the fact that you WILL make mistakes then when you encounter an experience of the world that frustrates you can get back up after your first failures and get back into the trenches.  Do not let the fear or knowledge of missing your target on the first strike be the tea leaves that you read before you make the decision on whether to act or not.  You are not a god and therefore not all-knowing.  You are a human and because of that you have flaws, including the tendency to self sabotage your greatest wishes for what you want for yourself at risk of getting hurt by the sting of failure that comes from hoping ‘too much’.

Hope is all you have right now and all you will have after, regardless of whether you miss or not. 

There is No Such Thing as a Perfect Swing (I Think)

The best way to approach a specific situation is not going to be known until you have context from the outcome and the reality is that perfect is only a construct in your mind to compare reality with to prove why you should be sad about your experience instead of making and seeing results for yourself.  Don’t let the possibility of never reaching Pluto prevent you from wanting to take a trip to the moon.  Don’t make a nothing out of something when something is the definition of more than nothing.

Staying in the Fight When Losing Sight of the Target

You need to ask yourself when entering a precarious situation what defines success for you and that re

The person who wins a war is a person who can hold out longer and apply steady pressure over time, instead of throwing a hail mary and hoping it lands.  Throwing hail mary’s has a low success rate, but multiple small actions accumulate in their impact.

To begin with, you don’t just sit down to write a book. That’s not how writing works. You write a sentence, then a paragraph, then maybe if you’re lucky, an entire chapter. Writing happens in fits and starts, in bits and pieces. It’s a process.

The way you get the work done is not complicated. You take one step at a time, then another and another. As I look back on the books I’ve written, I can see how the way they were made was not as glamorous as I once thought.

THIS CHAPTER SHOULD HAVE THE IMAGE ABOUT EXPANDING CIRCLES OF POTENTIAL AND THAT DEVELOPING FORTITUDE AND PERSISTENCE IS WHAT pushes the boundary of what you think is possible for yourself closer to what is actually possible.

Three ways to swing your perspective:

Easy targets - Doing what you know you can do

Difficult targets - Doing what you think you can do.

Breakthrough targets - Doing what you didn’t think you could do.

If you stay stuck in just doing what you know you can do

Having motivation isn’t something you’re born with, it’s something you are pulled by, and you need to find it so you can instill its power into every battle you prepare for.

Millennials want to have impact (recall the video and watch it for this when looking at impact and impatienc

Hawthorne Effect:Observing the same problem over and over will cause your results to increasingly stabilize.  Observing something causes you to chew on it, to disintegrate something the tighter your focus on it becomes.

You cannot simultaneously measure an electron’s position and velocity and I think that is a very nice way of observing how much you are doing something versus thinking about it.  If you are stuck trying to understand where you are going in life you are not going anywhere because you are stuck and you’re not making and acting on a decision.   (This could be a whole section on when is the right time to Do and when is the right time and to think about how you are being, that measuring position is looking at what you have done and having velocity is building and creating what you want for yourself.  Position is consumption of your own dialogue, others dialogue, media, etc. and being in it for too long will result in the sensation of feeling stuck.

Self efficacy is about building