It’s all about tryin’ stuff. It’s all about experimentation. It’s all about getting’ on with getting’ on. Which means it’s all about …
Markets. (Lots a folks tryin’ lots of stuff.)
Decentralization. (Lots of folks tryin’ lots of stuff.)
Freedom. (Detroit 1900, Silicon Valley 2000, America 1783-???, new China 1979-???, etc = Lots of folks tryin’ lots of stuff.)
Hence one of my labors of love (= reading project) this summer is freedom per se. Amazingly (to me), the idea of liberty as we conjure it today is only a quarter millennium old. My tomes under current study:
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History.
Michael Barone, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers.
Here’s the way I see the life of individuals (top list), and organized entities (bottom list):
Go on offense.
Give everybody a shot.
Decentralize.
Try a bunch of stuff.
Make it up as you go along.
Get some stuff wrong.
Laugh a lot.
Get some stuff right.
Become a “success.”
Extract “lessons learned” or “best practices.”
Thicken the Book of Rules.
Become evermore serious.
Enforce the rules to increasingly tight tolerances.
Go on defense.
Install walls.
Protect-at-all-costs today’s franchise.
Centralize.
Calcify.
Install taller walls.
Write more rules.
Become irrelevant and-or die.
This master process is my life’s work. And my personal joy. (And horror.)
Happy summer.
Try some stuff.
Remember Eleanor Roosevelt:
“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
(Ciao, I’m heading out to the woods for my daily dose of brushcutting—a “widow maker” branch broke loose on me yesterday, which I suppose passes the E Roosevelt “scare-the-shit-out-of-myself” test.)