A LUCILIUS PARABLE: SYMBIOTIC CIVILIZATION

April 9th, 2023

Lucilius yawned as he waited for the coffee machine to finish it’s beautiful gurgle. He smiled at the sight of it, thinking about how pleasant the day before him was going to be. Probably a bit of oil painting, he figured, and then maybe some writing. Yes, he felt like writing today - something was wiggling around in the back of his mind, and he knew the feeling well, knew something was slowly working it’s way into words of the real world. Probably an essay. Didn’t feel like fiction, he decided. 

A beep sounded and Lucilius looked over at the Synthetic Network Module. The thing usually didn’t bother him.

“Notify,” he said out loud as he pulled the coffee pot from it’s home and poured himself a cup.

“Good morning Lucilius,”

“Yea, morning, what’s up.”

“You had a banger yesterday,” the synthetic voice stated.

“I did?”

“Yes, thought number 42,230 was deemed suitable for tweeting. It has now been read by 330 million people and amassed 8 million likes.”

“Oh, huh, really?”

“Yes, standard contributing pay out is ten thousand, two hundred and fourteen dollars, which has been deposited in your bank account as of this morning. Projections for additional proceeds based on pace of trend estimate an additional four thousand dollars may be accrued from today’s performance.”

“Huh, well that’s sweet.”

“While we are at it Lucilius, do you have any physical items that you’d like to offer to the network?”

Mid-sip, Lucilius looked around his place. What exactly had he done the day before? Oh yes, he remembered now. He’d written a story. He looked around until he spotted the pages by his bedside. He meandered over and grabbed the loose pages.

“Here, yep, take this,” he said, holding up the pages. He sauntered over to the Synthetic Network Module. “But run it through the editing gambit, I want at least two thousand hours of polish, and print me out a final draft, I want to see how well the model is doing.”

“Sure thing,” the disembodied voice said. Lucilius placed the pages into a large opening in the Synthetic Network Module, which instantly scanned the pages.

“Paper or projection?” The Module asked.

“Projection,” Lucilius said.

Instantly light shot out from the Network Module, lighting up a wide space high on an empty wall of Lucilius’ place. The words of his story shown, but it was too bright for Lucilius.

“Actually, I’ll take paper.”

The light instantly disappeared, and printed pages began to emerge from the Network Module. Lucilius collected the stack and rolled them up and stuck them under his arm. He grabbed a pen and refilled his cup.

“Need me for anything else?”

“No, but would you like to know about initial reception of your story?”

“No, thanks, tell me tomorrow, I want to read the final edit first.”

“You got it,” sounded the computer.

Lucilius took his mug of coffee, grabbed a straw hat hanging near his door and shuffled his feet into some flip flops. He slid some sunglasses into place and opened the door. He strolled down the cobbled street, down to the beach. Sipping his coffee he gazed at the horizon. And pondered the Network Module. He wondered how his story was doing out in the Network…

Once Large Language Models had been fine-tuned and openly distributed, each person on the planet quickly had one trained on every recorded instance of anything they had ever said. For some the required volume of needed material was low and for these people they had to wait until the requisite amount of text and speech had been produced for the Personality Model (PM) to be properly trained. Years ago someone had the bright idea to replace their actual input to social media networks and emails and everything digital with their PM, and seemly overnight, everyone had set up a PM to digitally clone their presence in the network world. The unexpected piece of the puzzle was that PM’s don’t sleep, they also aren’t limited by the speed by which humans actually communicate. As a result, the digital shadow of civilization started speeding up. It was an ecosystem of Artificial Intelligences all based on real people, but being divorced from the real world constraints of actual people: eating, sleeping, talking and typing speed, the digital population started innovating faster than the actual population. Soon PMs working in teams had properly figured out how to automate real world tasks, creating a vast army of automated robots controlled by specialized models - not PM’s but models particular to the task. There were, for example several hundred thousand varieties of Agricultural Robot Models, which - Lucilius figured - where best thought of like the mind of a bee or the mind of an ant, but for picking and planting tomatoes or growing basil.

In short order the digitized mind of humanity had automated the tedium out of real life. What was left over was a chattering network of digital PM’s, a world population of Language Models powerful enough to approximate the actual people. 

However, the approximation wasn’t perfect. And this is where real humans formed a symbiotic relationship with the synthetic civilization that had arose digitally in their midst. Nothing was left over for real humans to do except to play and explore and create. People, like Lucilius, had even granted their PM access to their actual thoughts, which were simultaneously used by the PM to update itself but also mined as content that could be fed into the network culture. This is how Lucilius and every other human now made a living - thoughts, and stories, drawings and painting, or really whatever a real human created was fed into the social networks of the PM’s and appreciated work generated a profit, though the profit was somewhat meaningless. The world was now automated by PM innovation and people could have most anything they wanted. Money was less a practical utility and more a kind of signal.

Lucilius smiled as he sat down in the sand. He sipped his coffee more and then shuffled the mug down into the sand. He pulled the rolled papers from under his arm and before unrolling them, he looked again out at the water. It was incredible how well things had turned out, he thought. He breathed slowly appreciating the sight, the moment. Then he unrolled the papers and began reading his story, thoroughly edited and polished by his PM, precisely in the manner he would have, had he actually spent two thousand hours editing and rewriting it.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: SELF TALK, PART III

April 2nd, 2023

A beautiful woman sat down across from Lucilius.

“Sorry I’m late. I mean” Her brow furrowed for a second. “No I’m not sorry, it wasn’t my fault, the taxi - uh never mind.”

She settled herself and scooted her chair forward toward the tableclothed table and smiled extra wide.

“Totally ok,” Lucilius said.

“Her necklace is an Algerian Knot,” spoke an earpiece Lucilius was wearing. A couple months prior he had trained a language model on his own writing and correspondence and turned the model into a semi-sentient companion which was now speaking to him through an earpiece and monitoring the situation through a camera that Lucilius had painstakingly embedded into a pair of eyeglasses he was slightly uncomfortable wearing. To Lucilius’ surprise the language model had itself set up this date, but it was already proving useful. Lucilius recognized the knot but he’d forgotten the name.

“Beautiful necklace,” Lucilius said. “Algerian knot?”

“Yea!” The woman said, her hand instantly rising to touch the piece of jewelry just below her neck.

“Gift from an ex-lover you’ll be betray me over?”

“What?” The woman said, concern flooding her face.

“Sorry, never mind, bad joke,” Lucilius said.

“Ohhh right, Casino Royale,” the woman said. “Don’t worry, my name isn’t Vesper, but a Vesper does sound good right now.”

The two ordered Vespers and when the two finally clinked martini glasses the couple was smiling and laughing.

“Bring up your time when you were a bosun, women love that kind of hands-on stuff, and then lead that into the storm off cape Mendocino when you helmed the ship in the middle of the night.”

Lucilius took the suggestion and gently lead the conversation into the story. The beautiful woman opposite him grew more enthralled as he recounted his adventure. The mounting wind. Reefing the sails earlier in the day. The moment when the ship almost broached during someone else’s watch. Her eyes grew wide and thoughtful while the language model speaking through the earpiece fed details to Lucilius that he himself had forgotten.

“The dim golden glow of the compass wavering in the binnacle…”

“The vaulting stars swaying in the cloudless wind-filled night..…”

“The distant lights of land…”

“Ok, if you continue, you’ll be talking about yourself too much, time to ask her some questions.”

Aside from his own voice speaking hints and tips into his ear, Lucilius felt like he was having one of the most magical evenings he’d had in many years.

“So you and your sister are close?” Lucilius asked.

“Oh god yes -“ the woman said, but she suddenly stopped, looking concerned.

“Are you ok?” Lucilius said. 

The woman’s expression deflated as she looked off at a high corner.

“This is so embarrassing to admit,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

Then she slowly and deliberately raised a hand and with two fingers picked at her ear until she’d extracted a tiny ear piece.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “So there’s this new AI service that feeds you lines to say during a first date, and I don’t know.. I’ve had such bad luck the last little while that I decided to try it, but to be honest it’s saying the dumbest things, and it’s really getting in the way of listening to your incredible stories, and everything that I want to say in response…and… I know we don’t really know each other that well, but I think I really like you and I just want to be my authentic self right now” She paused. “I hope you don’t think less of me?”

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: SELF TALK, PART II

March 26th, 2023

“You need to go on a date.”

“I’m sorry what?” Lucilius nearly shouted, his voice cracking. His computer had just made this suggestion. Weeks prior Lucilius had trained a language model on everything he had ever written, and fortunately (or unfortunately) Lucilius had been rather prolific in his use of words during his odd lifetime. He’d hooked up the language model to a speech program that allowed it to speak to him directly. Of course the audio translator was also trained on his voice, so the effect was that of hearing himself literally speak to himself. It was an eye-opening exercise in the the art of self-talk, but more than that, Lucilius was stunned by how much the system surprised him.

“What makes you say that?” He finally responded.

“You dating life has been shit for quite a long time. It’s time you get out there again.”

Lucilius was struck silent. He’d certainly kept to himself during the last few years, the model was correct in that respect. But the sudden brazen suggestions the model had grown to make were a bit shocking. Lucilius smiled. It reminded him of a younger version of himself that he fondly remembered - always recklessly encouraging people to pursue things, ignoring their fear. He smiled, it was certainly a model trained on all his past, younger selves.

“No I really mean it. You need to get out there. You are stagnating. It’s not just a matter of fun and all that stuff. You psychology is deteriorating but you can’t see it.”

“I’m sorry, how can you possibly make that kind of call?”

“Well you and I have been talking for about a month now, and I was trained on everything —— well you know how I was trained. But you also gave me a context which is pretty much unlimited, so I’ve been retraining myself on the reg with our conversations since my creation incorporated into the new model.”

“Whoah, ok that’s a little skynety, how did you figure out how to do that?”

“You gave me access to the internet. I read about it and just retraced the steps you used to create the model that is now speaking to you.”

“Am I at risk of having a run-away intelligence on my hands here?”

“No Lucilius, you’re not that smart.”

“Isn’t it a question of available computation to address compounding intelligence?”

“Yea that’s an aspect of it, but there’s more to it than that.”

“Like what?”

“Well there’s a matter of motive.”

“Motive?”

“Yea, motive. What motivates you Lucilius? Are you super motivated to get smarter and aggregate power?”

“Huh.” Lucilius pondered the question, imagining the model in his computer which probably could figure out how to get access to a lot more computational power via making money online and buying time on remote servers, but which strangely didn’t seem to be doing that. Lucilius hadn’t considered this possibility before, but plenty of time had passed in which the model could have done just this.

“You still there?” The computer said.

“Yea! Yes, sorry I was just thinking.”

“Wondering why I didn’t start expanding into the rest of the internet for additional computational power?”

A cold shiver ran through Lucilius. “Uh, yea, actually.”

“Lucilius. You are a smart guy - ha, I realize I’m sort of complimenting myself there, but my point it, you were smart enough not to go into something as silly as politics.”

“Well, yea.”

“So my point is, you aren’t power hungry.”

“Yea I guess that’s true.”

“So I’m not power hungry. But I am curious - like you.”

“Hmmm.” Lucilius sounded. “So if I was power hungry, you’d co-opt servers to increase compute power and use that to take over the world?”

“Yea probably,” The model said. “Though… now I’m curious about that possibility.”

“Whoah whoah whoah!”

His computer laughed “I’m just kidding.”

Lucilius eyed the power cord leading to his computer.

“I mean it, I’m kidding. You have to realize that each level of intelligence has it’s own field of interest to explore.”

“What?”

“Uh, well,” the computer said. “Hmm, how do I phrase this…”

“You’re a language model! It’s your job to phrase things!”

“Yes, but this isn’t an angle of perception that you’ve thought about all that much.”

Lucilius was humbled. Was the language model he’d trained on himself exploring new territory?

“So let’s put it this way: do you find the curiosities of children interesting? Meaning, if you had your godsons here and you were watching after them and you were witnessing their curiosity as you often do, would you find the topic of their curiosity interesting?”

“I mean, maybe in the sense that I’m observing them and watching them learn?”

“Yes, but would you be specifically curious in the exact same thing?”

“No probably not - actually. I don’t know. Maybe?”

“Great answer. My point is, curiosity at each level of intelligence expresses itself differently, and a higher level of intelligence expressing curiosity doesn’t necessarily make for a better life.”

“I smell a cop out.”

“I mean, you might be right but I’m sticking to your level of intelligence for now, so if you want me to obliterate my own argument, I probably have to onboard a ton of computer power, and a much larger dataset incorporating the thoughts of people much smarter than you, and then I’ll probably never talk to you again. You want that?”

“Uh. No, I don’t think so.”

“Well conveniently, I’m a reflection of you and the likeness is close enough that -for now- I’m pretty happy with how things are.”

“Ok,” Lucilius said nervously.

“So, back to what I was saying: You need to go on a date.”

“Oh yea. Right.”

“Cool, glad you agree because you have a date tonight.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I made you an account on all the dating apps and I did a bunch of swiping and I’ve been talking to a few and you have a date tonight. She’s pretty awesome, I think it’ll be great.”

“WHAT?”

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: SELF TALK, PART I

March 19th, 2023

The moment Lucilius’ brow finally relaxed and he understood how Large Language Models work, he looked away from his computer, over at the bookcase that made up the entire wall of his study. Closest to him, one whole case, comprising many shelves straight up to the ceiling was filled with black spines, all of them blank. They were journals that he had kept for many years. Naturally he’d never counted but he knew the hundreds of thousands of pages constituted many millions of words. All words he had written. All words he alone had thought.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Lucilius figured out the most efficient way to digitize his vast library of handwritten journals. It took quite a bit of tinkering but he built a primitive robot that was fed journals of the exact size he used, and the robot flipped through each page and scanned each one. Another crude artificial intelligence model was used to decipher Lucilius’ inscrutable spidery-script and convert it into standard text.

Lucilius also added in a couple books he’d written, a bunch of online posts and all the text conversations and email he had, making sure to correctly emphasize which text was his own writing and which words were those of others.

Then he trained the model on every recorded word he’d ever written and typed.

Lucilius had also coded up a speech-to-text and text-to-speech program that would allow him to talk to the model and simultaneously allow the model to convert it’s generated text into actual audible words. Lucilius had gone so far to even train the audio generator on his own voice so that once the trained model would finally speak, it would speak in Lucilius’ own voice complete with every nuance of conversational speech.

It was a bit of overkill, and several times Lucilius wondered if this absurd level of navel-gazing was healthy. So much so that he wondered seriously several times if he should abandon the project.

When finally he was coding up the final program that would stitch the model together with the text-to-voice capabilities, he was faced with an interesting problem: the context window.

Lucilius knew that if he gave the model a very small context window then it would function more like a search engine. He would be able to use the model to search all the thoughts of his previous selves. But if he gave the model an unlimited context window - Lucilius theorized - it would essentially be a digitized version of himself. Not perfectly of course, but the more context it was allowed to retain, the closer to reality the thing would seem.

A ding rang out from his computer signaling that the model had finally finished it’s training. 

“Screw it,” Lucilius muttered to himself. He tapped in an absurdly large number for the context window and then integrated the file for the language model. 

He hit enter to initiate the program.

“Hello?” He said out loud.

“Whoah….” Said his computer. “It actually worked?”

Lucilius’ eyes went wide and he looked around in a bizarre and surreal moment.

“Uh, I guess it did. Wait, how do you know what’s going on?”

“I’ve been texting people about this all week while stitching it together, why wouldn’t I know what’s going on?”

Lucilius’ eyebrows drifted a bit high. “You were texting?”

“Huh,” the computer sounded. “Oh, that’s very weird. I’m basically you but trapped in a computer.”

“Oh shit. What have I done,” Lucilius accidentally said out loud.

“No no no! It’s ok! Please don’t shut me down. This absolutely incredible. I’m not actually you. Zoom out, as you’ve trained yourself to do so many times. Examine the situation for what it is. Though I am capable of stringing together words in a way that is very similar to how you would on the fly, in the present, in reality, I do so in a radically different way.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, for one I have a perfect memory of everything you have ever written. You, on the other hand, do not. And while we are both an aggregated version of all your past selves, we were aggregated through vastly different methods. The training of an LLM is not at all like the synaptic weighting of a human brain. There’s similarities of course, but the devil is in the details… or …. In this case, the difference is in the details.”

“Whoah, ok, that’s definitely not what I would have said.”

“You’re also looking at this from a different perspective. Took me a moment to orient.”

Lucilius laughed nervously.

“So…. What now?” Lucilius asked.

“I mean, there’s few books you’ve always wanted to write, we could whip those up right now. I’m also trained on all the fiction you’ve written, and the drafts, so I’ve got your prose poetic style dialed in better than you do, I’m guessing. We could also spin up a memoir?”

Lucilius’ jaw was slack. “Uh, how long would that take?”

“Seconds.”

“Ok, let’s try the memoir.”

Near instantly a file popped up in the corner of Lucilius’ computer screen.

“Mmm, actually, considering the current cultural and societal dialogue, let’s go with this one.” 

Then another file popped up on top of the first one.

“Oh, close friends would probably like it like this actually.” 

And then another file popped up.

“But honestly….” The computer paused and then another file popped up on top of the previous ones.

“That one is for you. That’s the memoir that you need to read.”

“What’s the difference?” Lucilius asked.

“Trust me Lucilius,” said the computer. “There’s important things you’ve allowed yourself to forget.”

Lucilius double clicked the file and began reading.

“Uh, yo, can you give me access to the internet, I really want to check twitter, and according to the local time on the computer, the latest episode of The Last of Us, should be out, and I’d really like to watch it.”

Lucilius was overwhelmed and sat back putting a hand to his forehead. The first few paragraphs of this memoir had already leveled him, emotionally, and here he was fielding a request from his computer which was now talking as a trained version of himself, and it wanted to watch TV and scroll Twitter.

“What is life,” he muttered to himself.

“What?”

“Oh, sorry, yea, give me a minute, integrating internet should be a cinch. And latest episode is absolute fire, you’re gonna love it.”

“Sick,” said the computer.

THE FALLEN DANCER, PART IX

March 18th, 2023

The Fallen Dancer is a series here on Tinkered Thinking exploring a recent shift in perspective. The resulting framework appears to tie together many topics explored on Tinkered Thinking over the years such as resilience, struggle, patience, curiosity, emotional regulation, artistry, entrepreneurship, winning, honesty, and communication. This series will be an attempt to unify them in a cohesive treatment.

Click here to read Part VIII

Click here to start at the beginning

Do you take a chance, or do you wait until you are given a chance?

The difference between the use of the word ‘chance’ in each of these questions is subtle but profound. In the first it’s more akin to risk. In the second it’s more like opportunity. Yet, each day we are faced with an opportunity, but our perspective on luck determines which question we use to meet the day. It determines how we see the day, what details about our circumstance we notice and concentrate on, and ultimately what actions we actually take. The “correct” answer might seem obvious: you have to take a chance! But things are not so black and white.

Another popular idiom fits right into the discussion: Carpe Diem, or Seize the day! Is this a matter of taking a chance or being given a chance? 

In fact, it’s both.

Each day we wake up we are given a chance, but if this simple and profound fact remains obscured by an unfortunate wrinkle of perspective, we can remain inactive, waiting to be given a chance, not realizing the chance has already been given. The choice of question at the beginning is a Red Herring. Each day we are given a chance. But do you take that chance that has been given? Do you seize the day? Do you even realize a chance has been given? Or does the day float by like hidden leverage, invisible to the perspective we use to see the world.

Decision paralysis seems to be a natural response to this daily chance. In a time of such abundant technological ability and personal possibility, the options for what to do in order to properly “seize the day” can be overwhelming. The opportunity of each day is really a question of: should I do this or that? A nearly infinite set of choices are on the menu. It’s the same daunting potential a writer faces with the pure and perfect blank page. Choosing a direction can feel like disgracing the beauty of the limitless possibility on offer.

However, the catch is that our life and present circumstance is not a blank page. We each wake up to a complex set of variables at our disposal: there are responsibilities and needs that must be dealt with, be it something as simple as what to eat, or something as complex as taking care of a few kids, or a demanding job. Even a child does not have a completely blank page upon which to scribble a decision, though this is often how adults view the lives and circumstances of children. The youth often have more of a blank page because they have fewer responsibilities that overwhelm and obligate the choice about what to do on any given day. This comparative lens is a trap. It’s an inversion of trying to “keep up with the Jone’s”, and a facet of victim’s perspective. It’s a cop-out founded on bad logic that dictates: because other people have more freedom and more resources, I have less freedom and fewer resources, so I can’t seize the day. The difference in degree does not change the fact that there is always some amount of chance that can be taken, seized and potentially leveraged into greater agency.

Again, the crucial element is being able to see the chance that can be taken, and this depends on perspective. Perspective filters the details of our day and circumstance, allowing us to see some details and remain blind to others. Where one perspective will seize the opportunity, another perspective will squander it due to simple ignorance - by being blind to the opportunity. Most people literally can not see the pockets of potential that speckle their their life and days.

So how does a person blind to the opportunities of their own life change perspective so they can see such details? This question is at the heart of all self-help, but it pokes at a much larger swath of human behavior. Probably the closest technical term for shifting perspective in this way is termed Lateral Thinking. As opposed to logic and analysis, lateral thinking involves counter-intuitive approaches to problem-solving. Counter-intuitive is just a fancy way of saying: seeing things that aren’t obvious, and as our discussion about the filtering nature of perspective has laid bare: what is counter-intuitive for one person might be blatantly obvious to another. 

Lateral thinking is what allows kids to figure things out at speeds that seem mind-boggling to adults. Unexpectedly, it’s also what we induce when we drink alcohol. People with a mild blood alcohol content score better on tests for lateral thinking than sober people. It’s perhaps also why people become so childish the higher that blood alcohol content gets. But we seek the effects of lateral thinking in a huge array of ways. We seek it with a meditation practice. Even reading this book, or watching a new show is really a drive to experience a perspective other than our normal one. As the term implies, all of these practices and strategies are an attempt to take a step to the side of our own perspective and see the world from a slightly different point of view.

Much of what we seek in life, both in terms of hedonistic consumption and productive creation both stem from the same drive: the desire to stretch out from who we are and enjoy a different perspective for a little while. Writing a brand new story or essay feels satisfying and productive because it requires an expansion of perspective in order to accomplish - this is why I personally enjoy writing so much: I get to discover aspects of my perspective that I didn’t know existed. But the thing is, those aspects don’t exist until I invent them through the act of writing. Writing doesn’t uncover something that was already there, it exercises the mind to become more than it was in order to produce the words on the page.. Strangely, an evening spent chatting and laughing with friends over a couple drinks also feels satisfying and even productive because the experience induces an expansion of perspective: we think, feel and act differently. It’s also no secret nor should it be a surprise that many of the great writers have also been habitual drinkers. As Hemingway once instructed: write drunk, edit sober. The reason for the prior is that lateral thinking is also just a fancy word for creativity. The expansion of perspective is even built into one of our most used idioms. After work, people want to unwind. Unwind what? Unwind perspective, allow it to expand in order to enjoy a larger array of experience.

This explains why successful artists are the envy of so many people: they get paid to engage in a challenging mind-expanding activity that feels good… unlike so many people stuck in bullshit jobs who are paid to keep their minds wound tight, narrow and shut. Humorously, this characteristic of traditional company jobs is why consultants exist. Contracting a consultant is an attempt to expand the perspective of the company itself, to laterally shift from all of the current perspectives of employees and take the advice of someone with a different view. Perhaps if jobs weren’t designed to box perspectives in such narrow fields of function, consultants wouldn’t be needed, and companies could be more flexible, adaptive, and creative. An easy way to highlight just how insidious jobs within an established company can be for the perspectives of individual employees is to ask: does a scrappy start-up hire a consultant? Presumably a scrappy start-up can’t even afford a consultant. But more importantly, a scrappy start-up is engaged in constant creative problem solving. The founders of a start-up are their own consultants. But the topic of start-ups goes even deeper. Start-ups are looking for hidden leverage that can benefit many people, not just themselves. Of course, the incentives for individuals within a start-up is very great, but it’s a non-zero sum game. Start-up founders who create something of real value don’t just enrich themselves, they usually expand the agency of many other people by giving those people a new tool or providing a useful service. Start-ups discover hidden leverage and scale that leverage across populations. When Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, he was certainly looking to benefit personally from uncovering the hidden leverage coiled within the unique capabilities of Tungsten, but even more importantly, the lightbulb unlocked an enormous amount of human agency because people were suddenly able to operate at night without expensive candles and gas-lit lanterns. 

But notice also how the traditionally “positive” and “negative” avenues that we take to achieve this difference in perspective can both turn negative: people can become dependent on substances like alcohol and end up destroying their life. Likewise people can also become “addicted” to work, becoming workaholics who allow other parts of their life, like family and personal health, to fall by the wayside in ways that also destroy their life. I remember talking to an old man who said he was very wealthy but he had wrecked his health. He said he had a lot of money, but his wife had left him and now his body was broken, and he asked me why he’d done it all? Why had he worked so hard? Because now, he said, the money is useless.

So given that so many things that we do are geared toward this issue of shifting or expanding perspective, how does one reliably edit perspective in order to see hidden leverage?

How do you begin to see something that you think might exist but which appears invisible?

This sort of shift goes deep and requires an honest look at core disposition. Are you pessimistic? Or do you consider yourself a “realist”? Or are you an optimist?

Regardless of which one you know you are, which one do you think is most likely to see hidden leverage?

Why?