(2018-10-26) Rao Self-interest And Seized Initiatives

Venkatesh Rao: Self-Interest and Seized Initiatives. To seize the initiative is to dictate the logic of a course of events when others in the game also have free will. To be constantly in a reactive mode, never being the one taking the initiative, is a fundamentally dangerous thing, even when you're not fighting an evil genius adversary who's all up inside your OODA loop. It is dangerous even in dealing with friends and family who might genuinely intend to act in your best interests. The thing is, only you can truly act in your own self-interest, and indeed, have a responsibility to do so.

It's more than a way to lose often. It's a way to be (or gradually turn into) a loser at the level of character: someone of no use to anyone.

How long things take has little relation to how much they matter (Prioritize)

The weak correlation between importance and time is why pure reactivity is bad

When you react, your attention/energy allocation is determined largely by how long things take. Greasing squeaky wheel, sweating small stuff.

By contrast, when you act instead of react, you have more control.

You aren’t as locked into time commitments determined by others’ plans because you can tweak the plan itself, deciding what requires care and what can be neglected.

You can’t entirely escape time. Execution is after all just a set of reactions to the consequences of your own intentions

The difference is, it’s leveraged time.

It means you capture more of the positive, designed consequences of your own actions and escape more of the negative ones.

You can’t “manage” time. You can’t even “manage” attention or energy outside of a fairly narrow band. All you can do is limit the number of things you choose to react to and seize the initiative more often. Create more room for YOUR logic to work, over that of others.

Parents, spouses, teachers, priests, bodhisattvas, social workers, doctors, AIs that read your emails, Google, coaches, therapists... nobody can set up your actions to be purely shaped by the logic of your own needs. Self-interest cannot be truly outsourced.

Only YOU have access to all the information, conscious, unconscious, and subconscious, to act with self interest (context)

Self-Interest is a responsibility.

Acting on self-interest sets up conflict with others acting on self-interest of course, but you’re not doing others any favors by curtailing it. Your self-interested actions are the peer review of the logic of my self-interested actions.

You know what is worse than being wrong and failing? Being right and failing. That is often what happens when you fail to seize the initiative. You become complicit in others' avoidable mistakes, inspite of knowing better.

You can walk away from responsibility for executing bad decisions at work (DayJob) perhaps, but you have to live with the consequences of letting others make bad personal life decisions for you.

Your refusal to react as I want reshapes my attempt at leveraged action

It also frees up space and time for your attempt at leveraged action. When you say "No!" you also create an opportunity to say "Let's try my way instead." You trade the anxiety of reactivity for the eustress of real responsibility.

Anxiety is, in a way, conflict-aversion debt.

Anxiety is a very poor way to process improperly expressed self-interest, since it does not carry the logic of leveraged time/action. So it just sloshes around screwing up all behavior somewhat randomly.

There’s not enough self-interest in the world.

Not enough people have the skill, self-awareness, and most importantly courage to fulfill their responsibility to be self-interested.

The opposite of self-interest is not altruism but anxiety and unchecked excesses on the part of those who need your self-interest to recognize their selfishness and be forced to face the coercion and power they’re deploying.

What they do with that is their moral dilemma. They may choose to change or not. Your job is to create that moral dilemma.

This model of self-interest is best expressed in relationships of mutuality with others. In fact, it is the flip side of effective mutuality.

Never seizing the initiative, and always being reactive, is a way to ensure that long-term, you are I-lose-you-win mode, or worse, I-lose-you-lose mode, when a little initiative could have brought your unique strengths into play, creating more wins for everybody.

Self-interest and true mutuality are two sides of the same skill. Both atrophy without adequate expression and exercise. Neither can exist without the other.

I've focused here on initiative and reactivity, but if this vein of thinking interests you, you can find some good general background in The Courage to Be Disliked.