Reinvention for the impossible

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

— Helen Keller

This writing is my learning from a wonderful book: the last word on power.

The games in life and the strategy

Life can be seen as many games: family, health, wealth, etc. Interestingly, we tend to play all those games using the same strategy. That’s why ‘How you do anything is how you do everything’. This strategy is termed Winning Strategy in the book.

The winning strategy is the foundation of our successes. However, what gets you here won’t get you there. The strategy gradually degenerates and even becomes our limitation to the next stage in the games.

The winning strategy was developed during our adolescence. It’s usually a result of compensating for a flaw: for something we could never have had or for someone we could never be. For example, because I can never be as good looking and popular as XXX, so I will become the smartest one in my class. Then comes the strategy: become the expert that is capable of doing something no one else is.

Beginning as an effective compensation, the winning strategy slowly loses its power because the nature of the game evolves when we play at a more senior level. Without notice, we stopped winning but are barely surviving. Such is the plateau in our career or personal development.

The breakout comes when we are able to realize the ineffectiveness of our strategy and find new strategies to compensate for the new nature of the games. Hence begin a new ‘flaw realization > developing new strategy > win by fixing flaw > strategy degeneration’ cycle.

I think the realization of strategy degeneration and repeating the above cycle is enough for us to go really far. It’s very hard most of the time and is already self reinvention in each cycle. But this book provided a meta strategy(paradigm) to play the life game systematically. It’s designed to realize the impossible futures.

The two paradigms

The underlying methodologies of game strategies can be classified into two paradigms.

The history oriented paradigms

The action flow is mainly from the past:

Most of us use this history oriented paradigm(termed Universal Human Paradigm in the book). The core idea is to establish links between history, present and future. Use the knowledge from history to predict what’s possible in the future and guide the action of the present. The action into the future will provide new data to learn from.

This is a sound method for incremental improvement and is widely adopted in my whole career. It’s usually successful when executed by capable people.

Pitfalls of the history oriented paradigm

Interpretation is treated as fact. People are meaning making machines, we are born to assign meaning or reason for everything we observed or happened to us. But the truth is that those meanings are just our interpretations. My boss didn’t respond to my hello in the aisle doesn’t mean he dislikes me. My peer’s comments on my doc doesn’t mean they will block the proposal. Those are very harmful interpretations because we tend to react. However there’s usually no right reaction because those interpretations are false in the first place.

We easily became (self) interpretation-driven rather than data driven. The cycle of ‘event > interpretation > react > event’ is a blackhole.

Future is limited by the past. This paradigm is almost useless for anyone needing a real breakthrough or making the impossible future to happen. For example, under this paradigm, great inventions like electricity, airplanes, cars or the Internet can be impossible to envision. Because none of them are possible from history, no one will project them into the future or take action to realize them.

The future oriented paradigms

The future oriented paradigm(termed as executive re-invention paradigm in the book) is a much more powerful and aggressive paradigm.

It disregards the past and starts from an envisioned future. After the future is declared, we find the difference between the present and the declared future. We find ways to produce what’s missing by continuous action driven by speech, until the road to the declared future is fully paved.

This paradigm is the tool for revolutionists.

Components of the future oriented paradigms

Life in nature is meaningless and doomed to fail. No matter what we do, on a scale of thousands of years, almost none of us is significant. On a scale of millions of years, even the human race is meaningless. Yet one million years is a very short time for the earth, let along the universe. Very few people will care whatever we do. The number of attendees at our funeral is dominated by the weather. Regardless of how we feel, we are objectively nobody. So our lives are really not that important.

Realizing the meaningless of life is the foundation of the future oriented paradigm. One can choose to resign or live one’s life fearlessly, because there’s not much to lose. Such thoughts make the most powerful and dangerous people in this world.

Actions as speech. The cliche of ‘Idea is cheap, execution is king’ is overrated. The root of this paradigm starts with an idea clearly expressed in human language. More importantly, most of the actions here are acts of speech. Speech moves things forward. Other executions, like doing research or actual execution are only valuable if they can make some speeches more powerful. The TikTok acquisition is an example that impossible changes are driven by speech(request) from POTUS.

Denial of interpretations. The error prone component of interpretation doesn’t exist in this paradigm. Removing an unreliable component simplifies methodologies applying future oriented paradigm and makes them robust.

The infinite game. The declared future is usually a status like becoming rich, rather than an implementation(like making 10 millions by selling burgers). This enabled us to play the infinite game: every rejection from the world can at most kill one route from the present to the future, it’s not possible to kill the future altogether because there are an infinite number of routes. Because we need to design a path from the present to the future, the First Principle approach naturally fits with this paradigm.

These two paradigms thus treat the same events very differently. Assume you are told by many authorities that you don’t have enough talent to be successful in your career. Under the history oriented paradigm, this assertion is a knowledge. It’s tempting to interpret this as a death sentence. Under the future oriented paradigm, what happened is that authorities evaluated your talents as being enough. This very likely blocked your route of becoming successful by your talent. But this is OK, you will immediately begin finding routes to be successful without much talent, which has proven to be entirely possible in almost all career.

The verdict

The two paradigms should be preferred in different scenarios. Not everyone needs to make the impossible happen or be revolutionary and most of the time we should not. However, I find the some principles should be widely applied, including

• Rejecting interpretations from others and ourselves
• There’s no right or wrong of I, them or the world, it’s just the way it is
• Failure of one implementation in the past doesn’t logically rule out the realization of a future, because there are other ways of implementation
• Things never happened could happen in the future
• The future are realized mainly by acts of speech

Lastly, while many great achievements are realized under the future oriented paradigm, applying it alone doesn’t imply greatness. We need other ingredients, like integrity and resources. Donald John Trump is a very interesting case study. He clearly dominantly applied the future oriented paradigm in his life. Though he won’t be a positive figure in history, he demonstrated the paradigm well.