Peak Performance Newsletter #10 | Leverage, Integrity, and the Mirage of Perfection
Hey All,
Busy busy busy lately! Less time for writing than I'd like, so more curation this week.
Hope you're well and enjoying peak Autumn!
What we do with the Leverage we create
We live in an age of leverage. Leverage through debt, through media, and through technology.
The concept of leverage comes from the concept of a lever. A lever, at its most basic definition, is a mechanism by which someone is able to generate more force than they could on their own. Hence Archimedes famous quote: "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."
To restate: We live in an age of leverage. Modern humans can create previously unfathomable outcomes thanks to all sorts of modern technologies, in particular debt and the internet:
Someone who before could reach 100 people can now reach 100 million.
Someone who before could only borrow money from friends can now borrow millions from venture capitalists.
Someone who before could only serve a limited number of people can now serve seemingly endless people thanks to software.
We can now achieve more with less than ever before. And yet how we wield this power is so... uninspired.
The modern mythos holds the predominant job of leverage to be wealth creation. Leverage is used to create more dollars for those who wield it effectively. As a result, we have a society that has used leverage to generate more wealth at the expense of what increasingly seems to be everything else.
What else could we use our leverage for?
Reduce net effort to create the same output, thus giving people back time and energy for other activities
Dedicate surplus output to making those things we do more aesthetically beautiful, thus increasing the net wellbeing of ourself and future generations
Use surplus output to create things of dramatically better quality, again bequeathing a gift to ourselves and future generations
As a modern human, you undoubtedly have access to leverage unimaginable to those who lived even 100 years ago. What will you choose to do with yours?
The Mirage of Perfection
This week I happened upon a quote from Pema Chödrön's When Things Fall Apart:
"We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who's awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we're going to have an experience that we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head... To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest."
A useful reminder for us all. Credit to Ed Batista and his article, Pema Chödrön on Being Thrown Out of the Nest.
Integrity & Conscious Leadership
I recently discovered and fell in love with how the Conscious Leadership Group defines integrity. I find it to be, by far, the most tactically useful definition and conceptual outline that’s out there. I highly suggest you watch: