Start With Universe Old Introduction
These are the first seven words of the first pattern of this book, and while they’re dramatic, I’m not exaggerating the situation. We have got troubles.
Of course, you know that. Like the rest of us, you’ve been bombarded with bad news every day for a long time. And like the rest of us, you’re probably asking, “so what am I supposed to do about it?”
Guilt and helplessness
“What am I supposed to do about it?”
It’s a question based in frustration and a sense of helplessness. Frustration because news about the problems we’re facing as a society comes with an implied message: you are part of the problem and you should be doing something about it.
You’re going along living your life and suddenly you’re told on the six o’clock news that the plastic rings from the soda you drink are ending up in the ocean, getting wrapped around dolphins’ noses and inside whales’ stomachs and killing them. Of course, that feels horrible. Your soda drinking is killing sea life! You can cut the rings to help the dolphins, but that doesn’t help the whales. What are you supposed to do? You may not live anywhere near an ocean, so it’s not clear how your trash is ending up there, but you want to do something.
The news story continues and good news! You’re told that there are people working to clean up the ocean, but the only way you can help them is by either uprooting your life and joining their organization or sending them money. Maybe you send them some money or maybe you don’t, but either way, you feel guilty that you’re not doing more. You think maybe you should stop drinking soda altogether.
As this kind of scenario happens over and over, you feel more and more helpless. It’s exhausting being such a burden on society and the planet. There are so many problems and you only have so much money to donate after you pay the bills and feed your family.
A better question
Here’s the thing. You are not solely responsible for fixing the world. We all share that responsibility. You are not a bad person because you drink soda. The soda bottler isn’t evil because of the packaging they use. Yet, the way the world works clearly needs to be improved so we can avoid unintended consequences like our trash killing dolphins. It’s human nature to want to make things better, so it makes sense that you want to do something, but no one person or group can fix all our problems. We have to work together to make it happen.
So I propose a better question:
“What can I do to help make the world better?”
That’s a very different question, and it’s the question I’m trying to answer with this book, not the other one.
Far from the person throwing up their hands in frustration, it’s a question someone asks when they’re ready to get to work. It signals a willingness to join the human family in our ongoing effort to live well and to ensure that everyone else can live well too. When you ask “what can I do to help?” you’re accepting a certain amount of responsibility, but you’re not taking everything onto your shoulders. You’re acknowledging that while you may be a small part of the problem, you’re not alone. There are a lot of people in the world, and we all share the burden.
“What can I do?” also allows you to decide how much responsibility you’re willing to take on. What can you do, given your debt, and day job, and family obligations? How much time and energy are you willing to commit? How much are you willing to rearrange your life to make time? These are questions that only you can answer for yourself, but if you’re willing to commit just a little bit of time and energy, you can make a difference.
Using your time and energy effectively
There are a lot of things you can do to try and fix the world. Some are not going to be very effective, and some might even make things worse. A good process can help you stay on track and catch problems early.
The process I propose in this book is simple and flexible: improve yourself by improving the world, and vice versa. You start by finding things that need doing and choosing one that will challenge you. By working on it, you’ll become more capable, and you’ll have made the world a little bit better. When you’re done, find another thing that needs doing and repeat.
By reassessing each time through the loop, you can avoid getting stuck. As you outgrow some challenges, you can move on and let others take them on. If you’re in over your head, you can back up and work on something else. If the effort is moving you and the world in the wrong direction, you can stop.
Over time, you’ll be capable of taking on bigger and bigger problems, and you’ll begin to see things that need to be done that no one else sees. You’ll find your innovations, the ideas that only you can bring to the table, and you’ll find that you’re not the same person you were when you started. You will have grown into someone greater.
We’re not planting a million trees
Planting a million trees may be work that needs doing, but it’s your decision whether that work is yours to do.
I’m not here to give you a list of “50 simple things you can do to save the Earth.” You have a unique set of skills and experiences that give you capabilities and a perspective that are all your own. It makes no sense for me to tell you to go plant a tree if you’re better suited to making the global financial system more fair and equitable.
You are the best person to decide what you can do to make the world better. We just need you on the team. It’s not up to me to decide what position (or positions) you’re best suited for, but we really need you to play because we need the unique stuff you’ll bring to the game.
That’s not to say that we expect you to be a star player right away. Like anyone new to the game, you may need some time to learn the rules and build up your skills. This book is like your training manual. The goal is to get you oriented to the game and to get you the basic skills you need to get on the field.
What game?
It may seem odd to be talking about a game when we’re trying to deal with something as serious as our survival as a species, but it’s actually more than just a metaphor. Game theory has made it clear that even the most serious human activities, like business, politics and even war follow the structure of games. We describe investment bankers, for instance, as playing the financial game. There are players and rules, winners and losers. It turns out that the kind of game we’re playing matters. And more importantly, the kind of game we’ve been playing, that most of us know well, is hurting us as much as it’s helping us.
The games that are most familiar to us are what are called “finite,” or “win/lose,” or “rivalrous” games. Individuals or teams compete according to a set of rules, and when the game is over, winners and losers are agreed upon. Sometimes a player loses, but still rises in the rankings. Finite games are finite because they have to end, otherwise, no winner can be determined.
There is another kind of game called the “infinite,” “win/win,” or “anti-rivalrous” game. This is the game I’m encouraging you to join and to train for. The goal of the infinite game is to keep play going indefinitely. If anything threatens to end the game, like self-annihilation, the players change the rules to keep the game from ending.
The circle of life is the infinite game. Armadillos play the infinite game by making little armadillos, avoiding predators and moving locations when their food supply is threatened. For thousands of generations, the way humans played the infinite game was very much like the armadillos, but things have changed. The rules that we’ve played by for so long are threatening to end human existence, and they need to be changed.
Instead of exploiting Earth’s natural systems, we need to repair the natural systems we’ve damaged. Instead of competing with other humans around the world, we need to collaborate with them. Instead of creating world systems designed to solve the problems of scarcity, we need to create world systems that support all life for the long term. It sounds impossible, I know. But none of us have to do it alone.
The infinite community
There are a lot of people already playing the infinite game. You may even be one of them. Most of us don’t think of ourselves as playing anything. We’re just trying to be good humans and maybe leave the Earth a little better than we found it: to walk, as I call it in one of the patterns in this book, the “infinite path.” It turns out walking the infinite path is a good way to spend a life. It leads to creativity, growth, peace and fulfillment, and it helps ensure that life, human and otherwise, thrives far into the future.
The more people walking the infinite path, the better off we’ll be. The over seven billion people on the planet represent an immense resource. Together, we have more knowledge and experience of the world than all the people who lived before us. We have the ability to communicate across great distances and work collaboratively across time and space. If we can tap into that resource, even a little bit, we can have all that we need to reset our future.
Together, we have it within us to create a beautiful world.
Joining the effort
There are three broad movements underway that you can participate in. They’re not official in any way. There’s no one leader or organization running them. They’re a loosely coupled collection of efforts by people all over the world. Together, they each move us in the direction of a true humanity.
First, there is an effort to help people reach their highest potential, so they can live more fully and authentically as part of the human family. By working to improve yourself you’re automatically part of this movement. You can also increase your contribution by helping others to reach their potential.
Second is the effort to make the world work better for all people. This movement recognizes that our world is not an even playing field. In order for humans to survive and thrive into the future, everyone has to win. We created our world, we can recreate it such that we all succeed.
Third is the effort to repair and restore our Earth’s natural systems. We depend on Nature to sustain us; without Nature, our civilization will collapse, but we need to go beyond just preserving what’s left and stopping the damage. We need to actively work to rebuild what we have destroyed as best we can.
Finding a peaceful way forward
There are a lot of different ideas out there about change: how much change we need (from zero to everything), what kinds of changes are needed (from incremental to radical) and exactly how we should go about creating that change (from violent revolution to soliciting an alien intervention). Unfortunately, many of these ideas are born of fear and anger. Just as many are born of magical thinking or waiting for Superman to save us.
At the moment, these different ideas are actively working against each other. The most obvious stage upon which this plays out is in politics. We’re faced with constantly escalating battles between those on the left who tend to want a lot of change quickly and those on the right who tend to want to keep things the way they are or go back to the way things were. This kind of polarity is not just in politics, it’s in our families, our neighborhoods and cities, our churches, synagogues and mosques.
From a practical perspective, we’re not going to be able to create a better world if half the world is dedicated to resisting and undoing the work of the other half, and vice versa. We’ll end up playing tug of war, or worse, playing actual war until the world collapses around us. We’ve got to find a way to work together.
In this book, I try to take a practical, yet optimistic approach to the problem. I talk about things like the infinite path, the coming abundance economy, decentralized control and a high quality of life for all life. What it comes down to, though, is that improving the world is always going to be a creative process, not a destructive one. Rather than thinking in terms of destroying things we think are bad, or stopping people we think are going the wrong direction, we need to be creating better alternatives and making the “bad” systems obsolete. It’s like a plant: we need to grow new leaves where they can reach the sunshine, and let the leaves in the shade fade away.
Maybe you think of yourself as an activist or a warrior. Maybe you’re used to thinking in terms of having a common enemy, of good versus evil, of “us” versus “them.” When you’re trying to help 100% of humanity survive and thrive, there is no “us” and “them,” there’s just “us.” Suffering is your enemy. The indifference that lets it happen is the evil that we must confront.
Being a creator must come first. Then you can be a creator-activist, creator-warrior, creator-changemaker, and so on.
A creator’s life
The good news is that you are a creator. We are all creators. Creating is fundamental to the human experience, and we all have access to the creativity within ourselves if we choose to use it.
Living a creator’s life takes a little more effort. You have to work for that, learning, practicing and honing your skills. Many of us don’t think of ourselves as creative. We’re taught that creating is something done by people who are more, well, creative than we are. We’re taught to be consumers, the people who buy the products designed and manufactured by the creators.
Nonsense. We all create every day, whether we’re posting to social media, planning meals, raising children, strengthening friendships, or designing the perfect spreadsheet. At its simplest, creating a better world is just a matter of building on those impulses and using them with intention, working to improve something that positively affects other people in some lasting way.
Maybe that sounds hard. Have no fear. Being a creator is fun and very human.
About this book
This book is divided into three parts. The first part contains patterns that give you the big picture and very broad goals to work toward. I call this section Humanity’s Canvas because it provides a vision of a world where we’re all able to work together to our mutual benefit, where we come together in a true humanity. It’s meant to be your North Star: your guide when you’re not sure what direction to go.
The second part, called A Creator’s Life, goes into depth about the process of creation that leads to a better world. The patterns will help you get started, identify work that needs doing, and help you choose projects that are in line with your skills, and what you really care about.
The third part is all about you. Your mind is the best tool you have for creating a better world. The patterns in this section are designed to improve your perception and understanding of the world, and make your actions more effective by strengthening your personal universe. Not coincidentally, this section is called Strong Personal Universe.
Rather than starting at the beginning of the book, I recommend that you look through the Summary of the Language on the next few pages and start with a pattern that sparks your interest or feels familiar. That’s a great way to tie the ideas in this book to what you already know. All the patterns in the language are interconnected, so you’ll find suggestions on where to go next within the patterns themselves.
Enjoy.