Principles for Success: "Everything is a Machine" | Episode 5

- [Ray] Principles for Success:

An Ultra Mini-Series Adventure

in 30 minutes and in eight episodes.

Episode Five: Everything is a Machine.

Sometimes things happen that are hard to understand.

Life often feels so difficult and complicated.

It's too much to take in all at once.

My deep pain led me to reflect deeply on my circumstances.

It also led me to reflect on nature,

because it provides a guide for what's true.

So I thought a lot about how things work, which helped

to put me and my own circumstances in perspective.

I saw that at the Big Bang, all the laws and forces

of the universe were created and propelled forward,

interacting with each other as a perpetual motion machine

in which all the bits and pieces coalesce into machines

that work for awhile, fall apart,

and then coalesce into new machines.

This goes on into eternity.

I saw that everything is a machine.

The structure and evolution of galaxies,

the formation of our own solar system,

the makeup of Earth's geography and ecosystems,

our economies and markets, and each of us,

we individually are machines made up of different machines,

our circulatory system, our nervous system

that produce our thoughts, our dreams, our emotions,

and all the other aspects of our distinct characters.

All of these different machines evolve together through time

to produce the realities we encounter every day.

And I realized that I was just one tiny bit

in one nanosecond deciding what I should do.

While that perspective might sound very philosophical,

I found that it was very practical

because it showed me how I could deal

with my own realities in a better way.

For example, I observed that most everything happens

over and over again in slightly different ways,

some in obvious short term cycles that are easy to recognize

so we know how to deal with them, like the 24 hour day,

some so infrequently that they haven't occurred

in our lifetimes, and we're shocked when they do,

like the once in a hundred year storm,

and some we know exist but are encountering

for the first time, like the birth of our first child.

Most people mistakenly treat these situations

as being unique and deal with them without having

proper perspective or principles

to help them get through them.

I found that if instead of dealing with these events

as one offs, I could see each as just another one of those

and approach them in the same way

a biologist might approach an animal,

first identifying its species, then drawing on principles

for dealing with it appropriately.

Because I could see these events transpire in

pretty much the same ways over and over,

I could more clearly see the cause-effect relationships

that govern their behaviors, which allowed me to develop

better principles that I could express

in both words and algorithms.

I learned that while most everyone expects the future

to be a slightly modified version of the present,

it is typically very different.

That's because people are biased by recent history

and overlook events that haven't happened in a long time,

perhaps not even in their lifetime,

but they will happen again.

With that perspective, I realize that what I missed

when I mistakenly called for a Great Depression

was hidden in the patterns of history

and I could use my newfound knowledge of these patterns

to make better decisions in the future.

And when I thought about my challenge

balancing risk and reward, I realized

that risk and reward naturally go together.

I could see that to get the most out of life,

one has to take more risks and that knowing

how to appropriately balance risk and reward

is essential to having the best life possible.

Imagine you are faced with a choice

of having a safe boring life if you stay where you are

or having a fabulous one if you take the risk

of successfully crossing a dangerous jungle.

That is essentially the choice we all face.

For me, the choice was clear, but that doesn't mean

the path forward was without challenges.

I still needed to face two big barriers

that we all must face.

In episode six, I'll share some invaluable techniques

I learned about how to best do that.