My wife and I are taking a mini-vacation until next week, so I won’t be posting my thoughts here for a bit. But I want to kind of recap some things I’ve been thinking about lately and try to understand how they relate to my sense of identity and narrative as a whole.
It’s becoming more and more plainly evident that my life’s work is not about making life like an actual MMORPG but instead making it feel like a game. In other words, life should feel epic and adventurous, as though everything you’re exploring feels almost completely unknown, where what you’re sharing is what you’re learning in the moment (as Dave Gray shared the other week). So every day should contain uncertainty, like stepping over the horizon of our minds and perhaps discovering monstrous fears which help us to learn and grow in the process. (Am I talking using mythopoeic language here? Maybe a bit.)
Vertical development is the key underlying framework for life that needs to be shared and understood, thus helping people to learn to evolve and grow, broadening their capacity for complexity in the larger, rapidly changing world that is emerging. That said, how can we make vertical development easier to understand or even perhaps even understand it stealthily as a Trojan horse within another system? As I noted the other day thought, Robert Kegan’s plateaus of the mind (i.e. Socialized Mind, Self-Authoring Mind, and Self-Transforming Mind) and how they relate to single, double, and triple-loop learning are definitely easier introductory stepping stones to learning vertical development though.
A emergent-based note-taking system is an essential cornerstone for vertical development, as it makes understanding ourselves an adventurous affair, helping us to map out ourselves. The problem is that most are currently not optimized for vertical development and exploring something unknown. Even some of the best people, creating some of the best note-taking frameworks today, have not built them with this in mind. They are geared towards horizontal development and knowledge management of known domains of knowledge instead. Any vertical development that does seem to occur from existing note-taking system today, just seems to be a lucky happenstance at best.
A new type of holistic resume needs to emerge from this note-taking system. How this would work and look exactly? I don’t know yet. I just intuitively know there’s a connection here, emerging from the patterns and relationships that emerge from the note taking system over time.
A new narrative-like map of ourselves also emerges from this note-taking system, using keywords which can be integrated and linked to our larger note-taking system. Again not sure how exactly, I just intuitively know. It’s why I’m playing around with this still. I’m also still not sure if the homepage is your whole life narrative or just perhaps the narrative of where you are right now and where you want to go next.
AI seems to be becoming an assistant for our vertical development as a whole as well. AI like Inflection’s Pi is a perfect example of this. But also AI that effectively organizes our thoughts for us in our note-taking system and helps us to see relationships within our lives (and between our notes) that we might not have seen ourselves, can be immensely helpful as well. A lot of times, I think it’s not so much that the AI sees these connections and relationships but instead they are just validating what the person is seeing but often cannot believe (which relates to my own experiences). So the AI validates the person’s adventures in exploring their identity beyond what society expects them to only be.
Video games seem to safe environments where we can explore our growth and development using triple-loop learning as an onboarding experience to the larger framework of vertical development. I’m already think of different ways of how to do this and which games I’d like to do it with. Honestly I wish a new game would come along that was optimized for this but it looks like for now I may have to go back to older games I’ve played before.
That’s it. That’s this big overarching picture that I see above my life and what I feel like I’m working towards right now. But just like in an adventure, I have no idea how to get there, I just know and believe that this visionary destination exists and each day I want to step towards it somehow in some way.
Hmm, just realized something while reflecting upon this finished post. If you remove the video games from this, what I’m collectively talking about here is a societal framework for Society 2.0. But instead of one that’s optimized for stable times with stable growth, where we can knowingly plan for where we’re going, it’s for unstable times where everything is changing rapidly and where we’re going is fairly unknown. Thus the process is much more emergent overall.
