Limits for the Win
August 10. Welcome to my corner. Grab a coffee and let’s get smarter together.
It’s the next to last day of the Paris Olympics. Time to say goodbye. Asked to name one event that was my favorite, I’d say climbing, the combined variation of boulder and lead. It’s not just about strength or quickness or balance or agility. It’s all of that but none of it counts when you are not solving the puzzle at the core of it all first. And then comes the moment when even the best inevitably fall out of the wall, which is more often than not followed by a shrug.
It seems so out of place at an event where winning has sadly become everything. Once it was all about participation and meeting minds that generated their world differently. The shrug of the climbers – it’s not a return to that. It’s something else very important: an acknowledgement of a limit that has been found – in a not negative way.
We think in frames what means when something is connected to a certain frame, the whole frame comes up every time a single word belonging to the frame is mentioned. It prevents us from thinking thoughts that would challenge the connections established in the frame. Over time we, as a society, have assigned limits to the losing frame. So, even thinking of limits brings everything bad up we connect with losing.
That’s a problem because only when we locate one of our limits we locate an area of possible growth. The failure gives us something much more valuable than winning.
I bring this up because for the last two days I’ve mentioned that we don’t experience reality but a model of the world that we generate ourselves from a very limited set of available data, that set of available data again very limited compared to all the data in the physical universe. By nature, the modelling is geared towards optimizing our chances to interact with the energy patterns that promise the most payoff towards the two main goals of all material matter: reaching the lowest energy state and being in equilibrium with the whole of the physical universe. This tool of world generation, and it is a tool to use and not something we simply observe and can therefore be abused, offers us so many possibilities including a vast imagination to explore hypotheticals. But the limits are vast as well and we fail to acknowledge them at our own peril.
Just like for the single person, the potential for growth of societies and humankind as a whole lies outside our limits, outside the worlds we can generate. Without acknowledging the limits – including artificial limits we put on ourselves through the power of our mind and how it detects and directs energies – there will be no growth. Or as Einstein put it: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.”
Challenge yourself. Locate your limits with joy. Explore. AKA think. Make a habit out of thinking. Let’s turn thinking into the norm again.
Like, comment, share – and follow, lest you miss a single opportunity to improve yourself and society. Once you do, we’ll meet again. At the coffeepot.
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