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Founded in 2002, the blog here continues to be a space of daily conversation about the science of mind and its implications and applications
Potential energy is energy that exists because of an object's position or condition. A coiled spring releases its potential energy when uncoil Ed.
The power of interests and questions is that they have potential energy. Engaging in them releases the energy that makes forward progress and momentum possible.
Working from knowns and unknowns keep us focused and adaptive.
For knowns: what's known, clear, true? For unknowns: what's unknown, unclear, assumed? We can also access knowns and unknowns by considering: what's our sense of things, what's our expectations, what are we hearing?
We get momentum on any venture for one reason. We’re ready. As soon we are actually ready to do something, we do it. Readiness in part is the moment when nothing holds us back from simply taking the next step forward.
So we create more momentum with the questions:
What are we ready for?
Could anything make us more ready for anything?
When we work on our interests from knowns and unknowns, it becomes clear that our knowns are our constraints. They are the givens within which we have to work, our boundary conditions.
Our unknowns are our possibilities. They are the edges of exploring and experimenting that lead to new discoveries and options.
This explains why we see such diverse productivity from equally talented and motivated groups. It's all about whether they're working predominantly from their knowns or from knowns and unknowns.
When we work on any interest, it's useful to start with our knowns before beginning our unknowns that lead to our questions.
What is clear at this point? What do we have evidence for? What do we know for sure? What seems certain? What do we know as true that we guess will continue to be true, and for how long do we guess it would continue to be true? What could be indicators that it is no longer being true?
This creates optimum conditions for our questions.
By definition interests have no end points. In contrast to goals, they are not achieved or accomplished. They are expandable and adaptable. We can adapt and expand their intentions, forms and tempo.
If we have interest in running our business better, there could be no end point to the exploration and experiments we can engage in, one question at a time.
One of the simplest ways to identify our interests is with the question: What would be interesting? It unleashes all kinds of imaginative possibilities. This question taps into our eagerness for exploration and discovery.
When we have a goal, every day we aren't achieving it, we are failing. If we fall short by even a bit, we consider it a fail.
When our interest is progress in a specific direction, everyday is a win. Everyday is success because we can make progress on a daily basis as long as we define what progress is. If we want to accelerate momentum, we can adjust resources or definitions of progress.
If we have goals, we can still consider any and all relevant interests. If we have plans, we can consider any and all relevant questions. We can move forward with a sense of curiosity, competence and confidence.
We can sharpen our sense of what we are interested in by also considering what we’re not interested in. What don't we want to see, create, explore?
As long as our interests generate new learning, discoveries and realities, they will shift in look, feel and function. They grow and evolve. They spark new flows of interest and accelerate ones in progress. They become richer, more nuanced and refined. They become more focused, inclusive and expansive.
Reality is, we do act on our interests. Interests can inspire, generate and organize as much action as anything we would label a goal, commitment or intention. I would argue that interests have an actionable advantage because they work from questions. Nothing has more power to energize and engage our best selves as compelling questions that matter.
Part of our human nature is to hold beliefs as the ultimate indicators of truth. This creates a tendency to disregard or question any facts to the contrary. We believe what we want to believe, which in many cases is what we have always believed. This is the legitimacy of familiarity.
One way to escape this is by translating beliefs as assumptions into questions. As soon as we have a question, our mind becomes interested rather than certain. And in interest, new things become possible.
Our interests are evident in how we feel about them. Our interests are things we feel excited and eager to explore. They are questions that inspire and engage us.
The contrasts are burdens, things that are oppressive, worrisome or endurable. They are barriers, constraints and challenges we want to relieve ourselves of.
With a refraining of meaning, burdens can become interests.
What we call vision, values and dreams are really interests. They are things we’re interested in exploring and pursuing. They generate questions that move us in the direction of what we want to see possible.
We can sequence them in the order we want to explore and pursue them. We can time frame them so we can approach them logically.
The temptation in any kind of planning or working toward goals is to work from what we know. Knowns are the territories of comfort zones, the familiar. One response to uncertainty is to focus on our knowns and work from them.
Working from our knowns is good when we can and/or want to repeat history. It’s not a viable strategy when we want to make something new to happen. This takes working from our unknowns, translated into the forms of our questions. New possibilities live in the land of the unknown.
The distinctions of uncertainty are many:
Things that are unclear, unresearched, unconfirmed
Things that are unpredictable, variable, changeable
Things that are untried, untested
At the core of each category and example is the abundance of known unknowns (things we know we don't know) and unknown unknowns (things we don't know we don't know). When we engage unknowns as assets, we gain new knowns and new unknowns. The continous emergence of new unknowns is the pathway to experiencing what most interests us.
What does it mean to work on a question?
For research questions it can mean interviewing people, doing searches, assessing data and reports, observing and making sense of seemingly chaotic patterns.
For experiment questions, it can mean designing and testing something, using learning from tests to modify designs and changing test contexts, conditions and scopes.
For launching questions, it can mean implementing something, getting something started, making something happen.
For growth questions, it can mean adding, modifying or simplifying the features of something, scaling or spreading it.
In an interesting life, we learn our way into the future we want to see.
It is in contrast to planning. Planning is doing what we know about what we know. It is known centric. Learning unleashes the power of the unknowns. We learn our way into the future through question based research and experimenting.
Question based learning accelerates action and experience.
Timing is everything. Once we identify our research, experiment, launch and growth questions, it's all about making the right things happen at the right time.
This means timing each question in four timeframes:
2 years - 2 decades
2 quarters - 2 years
2 months - 2 quarters
2 weeks - 2 months
As we progress, the timing of questions will shift and new questions will emerge that need to be well timed. The timing of each relates to when we will begin work on that question. There are too many unknowns to determine completion timeframes.
