Systems skeptic
I don't know if I buy the quote: "you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." (And this is coming from a systems guy.) It's a beautiful piece of rhetoric. The rise/fall structure. The humility to stay grounded. But I just think when you really want to make sense of how to pull off hard things, it should be a little complex, a little more than what can be packaged into a meme.
Two opposite things need to happen at once: top-down destiny forging, and bottom-up monk-like routines. It's a negotiation: "What will I want to complete in 100 days?" is a very different question from, "What should I be doing today?" and you can try to force alignment, but that's not always easy, because what you feel like doing often diverges.
The quote above simplifies this whole dance into a blind trust in systems. A system is a servant, not a master! I write this to remind myself as I'm immersed in probably one of the biggest system rebuilds in my life (one where I'm suddenly able to fluidly create the containers I work within) ...
It is wild to think that probably 50% of my computer use these days are within GUIs I've designed for myself. To me, liquid GUIs are a bigger deal than autonomous agents. My whole conception of what personal computing can be is changing very fast, and it becomes alluring, almost addicting, to continuously evolve my own OS, to see what's possible. It's very easy now to get tangled in knots of systems and software that are all very impressive, lead nowhere, and become chores. What leads to aliveness, to your intentions?
An emerging maxim for me is to start with the goal and let the system emerge around it; otherwise, you feel the cold of the infinite tinker, especially if you are quarantining in the attic from COVID and you can't go touch grass because there appear to feet of snow outside and you are too achey to shovel out your car to go anywhere and so one way to relax when you're sick is to live-clone all incoming Substack posts into local JSON folders and redesign a better algorithm. But to what end?