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

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 a while, 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.

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 overlooked events that haven't happened in a long time, perhaps not even in their lifetime. But they will happen again.

With that perspective, I realized 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.

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 risk, and that knowing how to appropriately balance risk and reward is essential to having the best life possible.

Imagine you are faced with the 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. [Music]