1. The power of the free market comes from competition
2. If you are nice to someone, you will be rewarded commensurately
3. A penny saved is a penny earned
4. The more scarce something is the more valuable it is

I no longer believe these statements to be true.  To understand why, I’d like to share a little of my journey as an entrepreneur and investor.

In the mid to late ’90s I was working on a startup and getting my feet wet as an angel investor in Silicon Valley.  I, like everyone I knew, was an adherent of the Chicago School of Economics and the Efficient Market Hypothesis.  One of the mantras of this religion is that

The invisible hand of the marketplace will feed us all, but we have to compete vigorously with one another for it to work its magic.

Signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement on a first date — that’s not just good business, but a moral imperative as well.

Flash forward to my first TED Conference several years ago.  I learned phrases like “Social Entrepreneur”, “triple bottom line” and “doing well by doing good”.  And while I didn’t feel like these were exactly oxymorons, I didn’t really understand how powerful this new mindset could be.  Can you really make more money by putting your customer’s well-being ahead of your own?

So, in the spirit of TED, I started experimenting with a personal monetary policy that combined philanthropy with investment.  In practice this meant spending my time and money helping others with their ventures, not worrying so much about “return on investment”, and seeing what would happen if I left that part up to the universe.  In other words, testing out how real Karma actually is.

I would give people loans to go to conferences that would enrich their lives, and I’d ask them to “pay it forward” instead of pay me back.  I would invest in ideas and projects that had little “logical” chance of success because I believed in the individual, and that they’d somehow figure out how to make money.  I did deals on handshakes and email confirmation.  I let the other party suggest terms they thought was fair, and I didn’t negotiate looking to get the biggest piece of the pie that I could; instead I worked with the other party to increase the size of the pie that we would share.

Normally when we give our time or money to people in a business context, we are expecting an immediate quid pro quo, whether it be an airtight contract or a thank you with a solemn promise to return the favor.  But because I was feeling financially secure at the time, and I’d adopted this mindset of presuming the universe would sort out the Karma in the end, I was treated to a much different experience than I’d ever encountered in business.

First off, the Karma was often instant; I’d do something for someone and within days, sometimes hours, I’d get an unexpected favor in return.  Secondly, the return I received was usually greater than what I gave.  Third, it wasn’t always the person I gave to who gave back to me.  Sometimes I could tell that the original person talked to another and there was a sort of “Karma chain” that was coming full circle. But other times I couldn’t see a causal relationship between my giving and what I was receiving.  Maybe it was there, but it certainly was not obvious or predictable.

I started to get this odd impression that if I were trying to give my money away — which I certainly was not — that I actually couldn’t do it.  What I sensed was that the more I gave out, the more came back.  Now, I’m not suggesting that the Karmic return I received was in cash, but rather the social currency I was building up exceeded the value of the cash and time I was putting out.

A Theory of Abundance

Being trained as a cognitive scientist, and having earned most of my living by understanding probabilities, I know that this impression could easily be explained away with cognitive biases and logical fallacies.  But since it cost nothing to imagine an alternate explanation, I started to explore the idea that Karma was a universal force, just as real as gravity, entropy, and the invisible hand of the market.

In science, for a new theory take hold, it has to explain and predict all the same observations that the old theory did, but also explain and predict stuff that the old theory can’t.  In physics, we saw this when Einstein refined Newtonian mechanics with his Theory of Relativity, and then again when Quantum Mechanics showed us a more nuanced understanding still.

So let’s re-examine the tenets of “Newtonian Economics”:

1. The power of the free market comes from competition
2. If you are nice to someone, you will be rewarded commensurately
3. A penny saved is a penny earned
4. The more scarce something is the more valuable it is

I suspect if asked to answer True or False, most people would say they believe these statements to be True.  And it’s not that I think these aren’t perfectly valid under many conditions.  But like we found out with Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, there’s a more nuanced refinement which better explains and predicts.  Here’s my Theory of Abundance in a nutshell:

1. The real power of the free market comes from competition cooperation
2. If you are nice to someone, you will be rewarded commensurately with multiples
3. A penny saved is less valuable than a penny earned
4. The more scarce something is the more valuable it is; but some things are more valuable the more you give them away

Let me explain.

1. The Power of the Market Comes from Cooperation (not Competition)

“[Competitors] always beat cooperators when they encounter each other in a well-mixed population…. [But] cooperation can thrive when cooperators huddle together to form clusters.” (Martin Novak, Director of Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics)

For a market transaction to take place, two preconditions must hold.  First, both parties have to be made better off after the transaction than before.  Second, both parties must trust that the other party will honor their end of the bargain; i.e. not lie about the nature or value of what they are giving, and not reneg or change the deal at the last minute.  In other words if you and I transact in the marketplace, I must trust you to do something that helps me, and vice versa.  This is cooperation.

Yes, there is competition that takes place to determine which two parties get to transact.  But once that’s been determined it’s all about cooperation.  The whole trick of the market, the reason it exists, is not to facilitate competition, but rather to form “clusters of cooperation”, even in the midst of a well-mixed population of competitors.

2. If You Are Nice to Someone, You Will Be Rewarded With Multiples

This is the Karma effect that I described earlier, and we’ve all experienced it at one time or another.  One thing I’ve noticed since I started believing in Karma, is that the more trust I put in others (or in the universe), the bigger the Karmic multiple.

3. A Penny Saved is Less Valuable Than a Penny Earned

Amongst my Silicon Valley friends, there was one who was legendary for “wasting” money.  He’d never haggle, always buy the most expensive brand, waited until his lights were turned off to pay the utility bills, and leave thousands of dollars in cash, checks and stock certificates laying around, stashed in old sock drawers, forgotten about.  His cost of living was easily twice the average of me and my friends.  Yet, somehow he always had way more money than any of us.  He was the first of my friends to become a “millionaire”, and opportunity seemed to fall out of the sky and land in his lap.

What I learned from observing my friend, is that the time and mental energy most people spent on preserving the resources they had accumulated, my friend spent figuring out how to make more of it.  So while his burn rate was 2x average, his earn rate was easily 5x.

One interesting aspect of this philosophy is that, if you believe you can always earn more money tomorrow, it helps you act on the natural generosity you are born with, today.

4. Some Things Are More Valuable the More You Give Them Away

Until a brave theorist named Brian Arthur challenged the Chicago School dogma, economists thought that return on investment could only diminish as you scaled up your investment.  But now we know that with certain types of resources like the FAX machine and the internet, we get not diminishing returns, but increasing returns.  With abundant resources, the more you give one away, the more valuable every other one of them becomes.  It’s known more commonly as the network effect.

I believe Karma exhibits the network effect too, because it’s infectious.  If I see someone do a good turn, I’m more likely to do something good too.  Behavioral psychologists have shown this is true in many different contexts.  We’re just hard-wired to imitate behaviors of other humans.

Giving creates more giving.  Add a dash of cooperation and creativity, multiply by Karma, and you get Abundance.

Societal Dilemma

Taken together, these four pillars of the Theory of Abundance suggest that when it comes to maximizing profits, we’re underperforming in our society.  We’re in a Prisoner’s Dilemma on a global scale.  We are playing a game of maximizing scarce resources, and ignoring the immense — and multiplicative — shared value that’s within our reach through radical collaboration and presumed abundance.

In future posts, I’ll describe experiments being done and case studies that support the Theory of Abundance and show us the way out of our collective dilemma.

Related posts:

1. Towards an Economy of Abundance
2. Investing in Superstars, part 4
3. Complexity Economics

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1. 3 Interesting Articles on The Economy
2. Brilliant or Crazy? I Really Don't Know.
3. Announcing a new kind of Angel Investment Fund

These days cosmologists are holding the infinity of the universe as constant and letting its density and expansion/contraction rate vary.

In some sense quantum mechanics is about holding the observer constant and letting the physical interpretation vary (particle or wave; position or momentum; exist or not).

What would we get if we held consciousness constant and let the universe vary?

Related posts:

1. Entanglement
2. Quantum Reality and the Measurement Paradox
3. The Process

I then remembered another colleague who was universally praised by the media and others as being a one-man savior in Haiti after the earthquake. He had quite admirably hit the ground running, on his own initiative, with incredible resources, to set up a refugee camp. While I’m not sure how his efforts have evolved today, when I visited his camp I was struck by how isolated it was from the rest of the relief effort, and how sanitation and medical care were actually worse than what was reported about the USAID and Red Cross camps. This is not to question his good intentions or the impressive amount of work he was able to almost singlehandedly accomplish in a short period of time. But rather the way he was going about it possibly nullified all that.

Together these two examples illustrate to me that social enterprise is not about What you are doing so much as How you go about doing it.

To be sure, there are limits to this definition. Does it matter how Pepsi creates its products, or what refreshing innovation challenges it supports, when the vast majority of its operations are to sell us sugar water in plastic bottles?

But shifting the focus from What to How, enables us to see more clearly that most entrepreneurship these days is in fact social enterprise. Why? Because most entrepreneurs these days care deeply about social/environmental problems, and are intent on addressing them, either directly or indirectly through their business. Nor do you have to be an entrepreneur to be a social innovator.  Pepsico has legions of them as employees and consultants.

Calling yourself a Social Entrepreneur or saying you work in Social Innovation does not automatically make it so. And on the flip side, just because you don’t identify with these terms, doesn’t mean you are not a positive role model for social enterprise.

It’s time to shift the conversation from What to How.

Related posts:

1. Help Wanted: Social Capital Uncontractors
2. “Social Entrepreneurship has Complexity Written All Over It”
3. Social Entrepreneurship Tax Credit

Yet, all around the world, there are signs that the Berlin Wall of education reform is crumbling. Here are a few shining lights:

TEDucation

No single institution or movement has done more to spark educational change than TED.com.  Hundreds of millions of people are watching their videos and learning from inspiring individuals sharing ideas and experiences that cannot be learned in a traditional school environment.  And there’s an acceleration effect because many of the talks are about education and the transformation that’s going on in areas you would never know about otherwise.  Best of all, these talks are free.

Working from Within

There are groups like Decision Education Foundation which go into schools and augment their capacities by teaching skills that should be part of every curriculum.  And there are individuals like John Hunter who teach lessons which cannot be learned at home or on the internet (unlike the three R’s).

Not Waiting Around

There are many groups who are not waiting around for Supermen like Hunter to save the existing system.  Rather they are working alongside it to make it more effective.  There are after school programs, like Self Enhancement, Inc., which miraculously has transformed an entire population of at-risk youth into a community of high school graduates (100% in 2008 and 2009) many of whom go on to thrive in higher education settings.  Dave Eggers, the bestselling author, started a grass-roots initiative to provide extracurricular tutoring in which the tutors get just as much benefit as the kids.  And there’s El Sistema (“The System”), which famously produced the virtuoso symphony conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, but which more importantly is transforming our idea of what education is.

Reinventing the Model

Others, like John Hardy, are taking taking the idea that education can be revolutionized, and are just doing it.  And in doing so are challenging our most basic assumptions, such as “adults know what’s best for kids to learn and how to teach it to them.”  What if there were a school with no classes, no grades, no tests, and the students (age 5 to 18) decide what they are going to learn and how to run the school?  If you are thinking “Lord of the Flies”, tune in to hear about the Brooklyn Free School and free your mind….

Turn On and Tune In

It’s no surprise that formal education is moving online.  But did you know that it’s top notch and free?  Check out the Khan Academy which has delivered almost 100 million lessons to students around the world in math, physics, finance, history and more.  And why pay over $300K attending Stanford to get a degree in Computer Science when you can take the same classes for free online?

We Are Superman

It turns out that kids really can teach themselves and each other, when provided with the right guidance and framework.  And it’s not just in resource-rich areas like Brooklyn.  In India, Kiran Bir Sethi and Shukla Bose are showing the way.  But it also turns out that kids don’t need guidance from adults, they just need access to learning tools and for adults to stop interfering.  If you haven’t seen Sugata Mitra’s experiments of providing free internet terminals without instruction to rural Indian kids who don’t speak English, you need to watch what happens.

It turns out it’s not just kids who can learn from one another.  The Barefoot College is turning grandmothers into solar technicians and teachers of solar technology.  Oh, and again, a common language is not necessary in either case.

It turns out, it’s not just schoolchildren and the elderly that can learn from one another.  Skillshare is connecting individuals who want to learn anything to people who want to teach them.  Why not teach a class yourself in your local area?  After all, we are all Superman or Superwoman in something.

So, what are your favorite examples of Education 2.0?

Related posts:

1. Decision Education Foundation
2. Decision Education: A Call to Arms
3. Don’t wait for superman

Beating the world champions at Jeopardy was slightly more interesting because we acknowledge the vast range of knowledge and language understanding involved.  But ultimately, since Jeopardy is just a game, we are left with the feeling, “so what?”  How does this affect my life one way or another?  Enter, Siri, the voice recognition system integrated into the new iPhone 4S.

When I heard about the feature and saw what it claimed to do, I was intrigued, but figured that the claims of how well it worked were really exaggerated.  After all, it’s easy to program for requests that you can anticipate and individual speakers’ accents and colloquialisms.  Practically speaking (I figured) it would be no more useful than the standalone Siri app you could download, or the Google voice recognition system.  But after experimenting with it for a few minutes, I was blown away.  Not only is the syntactic recognition way more accurate than anything I’ve ever seen, Siri exhibits an understanding of the semantic and pragmatic like no other system I’ve seen, except perhaps google’s search engine itself.*

Sure it was fun asking “Who’s your daddy?” and getting a different reply based on the gender of the speaker, or asking Siri what (s)he’s wearing and getting an appropriately evasive answer.  But my real aha moment came when I got an email from a friend suggesting we chat next week sometime.  Normally this kind of thing would either clutter my inbox until I created an appointment in my calendar or next Friday rolled around and I realized I hadn’t responded in a socially appropriate timeframe.  I was curious how Siri would handle the request, “Remind me to call Mark on Wednesday”.  Not only did it repeat back my request verbatim, but it created a reminder for 9am on Wednesday using a new Reminder App bundled with iPhone that I didn’t know about.  Most importantly, it gave me a very real peace of mind and reduction of anxiety that I haven’t been able to get from any of the dozens of productivity apps or systems I’ve tried, like Evernote and Omnifocus.

This Quora article outlines the significance of Siri’s great leap forward for AI, pointing out that voice represents the “4th interface” for human-computer interaction (the first three being keyboard, mouse and gestures).  The real key though is that Siri actually does things of practical value for a mass audience.  In other words, Siri helps you get things done that you want done.  This is new.  And huge.  And just the tip of the iceberg.

The article ends with a suggestion that we should start thinking about new uses for the technology because eventually there will be an API that allows app developers to make use of the power of voice interaction.  This fact is inevitable, even if Apple and Siri are not the ones that will do it.  The AI genie is coming out of the bottle.

So, my question to you, is what’s the next killer app that utilizes voice interaction?  What would you like to see personally?

Related posts:

1. Truthocracy – Part III – MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

What I would like to express here is concern for my family, friends, colleagues and supporters who believe in me and who feel my pain as if it were their own.  It sucks to have to endure the character assassination and potshots being taken at me in the media and social networks without being able to defend myself.  Privately though I have received incredible support from many of you, and I can’t tell you how much it means to me.  May you never have to endure something like this, but if you do, I hope you have friends as good as mine.

To the skeptics, please consider that not everything you read is true, and our society is built on a presumption of innocence until proven otherwise.  It’s difficult to take back hurtful things that you might later regret, when the damage has already been done.

To those of you who have asked what you can do to show your support, I am grateful for the offer.  My only request at this time would be to not let the naysayers and haters be the only voices out there expressing their opinion of me. My twitter is @rafefurst, and I’d love to hear from you publicly.

With Respect and Love,

Rafe

No related posts.

Background: part 3, part 2 and part 1.

In the interview with Jon Gunn in Part 3, I mention that I’ve been thinking of what “version 2″ of the Personal Investment Contract might look like.  Here’s the model:

1. Investment Amount - Same as before, intended to give the individual some time to pursue their passion (or figure out what that is) without having to worry about how to support themselves.
2. Maximum Return - The cumulative total amount that the investor can receive as return on their investment.  If and when this amount is reached, the contract is over.
3. Annual Exclusion - The amount of annual income the entrepreneur can make without having to share any of it with the investor.
4. Minimum Revenue Share - The minimum percentage of gross income the entrepreneur returns to the investor after deducting the Annual Exclusion.

Following are some examples of various different career paths and uses for a PIC.  Click on the thumbnails to expand the graphs.  These are modeled with various “reasonable” assumptions but if you want to experiment with how it might apply to you or under different assumptions, here’s the spreadsheet.

Example 1: Entrepreneur

• Investment Amount: $50K
• Maximum Return: $2M (i.e. 40x )
• Annual Exclusion: $100K
• Minimum Revenue Share: 25%

Example 2: Social Innovator

• Investment Amount: $100K
• Maximum Return: $1M (i.e. 10x)
• Annual Exclusion: $50K
• Minimum Revenue Share: 30%

Example 3: Small Biz Expansion

• Investment Amount: $300K
• Maximum Return: $1.8M (i.e. 6x)
• Annual Exclusion: $0
• Minimum Revenue Share: 40%

Example 4: Career Change

• Investment Amount: $1M
• Maximum Return: $4M (i.e. 4x)
• Annual Exclusion: $200K
• Minimum Revenue Share: 60%

Example 5: Investor

• Investment Amount: $3M
• Maximum Return: $300M (i.e. 100x)
• Annual Exclusion: $250K
• Minimum Revenue Share: 100%

Several things to note: the Minimum Revenue Share is calculated from the gross income (all sources) as reported on your tax return; you get to deduct the Annual Exclusion amount before figuring and paying taxes.   If your effective income tax rate is 40% and you quit your job — using the Investment Amount to live off of — you’ve just stretched out your runway by 40% (i.e. you don’t pay taxes on the money someone invests in you).  Finally, this contract gives you incentive to pay more than the Minimum Revenue Share to your investors, since the more you return, the quicker you reach the Maximum and end the contract.

Related posts:

1. Investing in Superstars
2. Investing in Superstars, part 3
3. Investing in Superstars, part 2

I get a lot of questions from folks who are interested in learning more about Personal Investment Contracts and so I felt it was time to synthesize some of the most common ones and give you some answers.

Who is the first person you invested in?

A film maker named Jon Gunn.

What is your relationship with Jon outside of this investment?

He is my brother-in-law, and a former business partner of mine in an instructional DVD company we co-founded with Phil Gordon.  I’ve also invested in a couple of his independent films.

Why did you invest in Jon directly?

I have been a big believer in his talent for a long time.  None of the ventures I just mentioned though have made me any return on my investment.  Phil had been suggesting for a while that if we simply invested directly in Jon’s future earnings, we’d do better than investing in his projects.

Why is the contract only three pages if it’s a lifetime deal?

Basically it comes down to this:

1. The contract is there simply to remind both parties of what was agreed to at the time of signing.
2. Inevitably circumstances change for one or both parties and it will be necessary to amend the contract.
3. If both parties are committed to maintaining a strong relationship, then amendment is easy and actually leads to strengthening the underlying relationship.
4. On the flip side, if one or both parties are stuck in the past and are not looking for the continued win-win, it ends in lose-lose (i.e. litigation).
5. If you can’t trust each other to honor the spirit of the agreement when conflicts arise, is a longer contract going to make matters better or worse?

Are there legal and tax consequences you had to consider?

Yes.  It turns out a three-page contract is way more complex than a 30-pager.  If you are considering doing anything like this and want to deviate from the contract template, I recommend contacting Orlando Medina who created the contract and vetted all of these issues.  There are very few lawyers like Orlando who are both legal virtuosos and business-creative rolled into one.

Why not create a fund for Personal Investment Contracts?

Most investment funds are explicitly meant to remove the personal relationships that a PIC relies on.  While not explicitly a PIC fund, the Presumed Abundance fund is based on the premise of investing in people and relationships.

Another approach that might work is to attach a fund to an incubator like TechStars or a fellowship program like the TED Fellows.  The incubator then acts as a proxy for that personal relationship: both investor and investee feel a sense of responsibility to the third party, which can also act as an neutral arbiter if problems arise.

Have you made an equity investment in anyone else besides Jon?

Yes, Michael Keller.  He was a founding partner in the instructional video company (along with myself, Phil and Jon).  Michael and I have been friends for years and I had also invested in one of his movies.

Do you only invest in film makers, I thought you were into technology and social entrepreneurship?

The film connection is somewhat coincidental.  Michael is working on a startup in stealth mode right now.  I’ve talked with a few close friends who are tech/social entrepreneurs about investing in them but the conditions just haven’t been right.

Would you invest in me?

Not unless we’ve known each other for several years and have been through some experiences together that have tested our relationship.  We need to know that we’ve got each other’s back, and are committed to working out problems that arise.

What’s more important to you as an investor, trust or talent?

No question: trust.  I truly believe that “talent” is within us all, and by removing obstacles (financial and otherwise) we can unlock that talent.  That said, not everyone is at the point in their lives where lack of money is the real obstacle.  In fact, very few people are, even though we’d all like to believe otherwise.

So if money isn’t the real issue for most people, what is?

It’s different for every single person, but what I see most often is that there is a tricky balance between the drive/confidence to achieve lofty goals on the one hand, and the courage/commitment to personal development, growth and learning on the other hand.

How have your personal investments turned out?

From an ROI perspective for me as the investor it’s too early to tell (it’s been two years since the first one).  But from an interpersonal standpoint, my friendships with Jon and Michael, it’s been incredibly positive for me so far.  To give you insight into Jon’s experience, we recorded this:

Related posts:

1. Investing in Superstars, part 4
2. Investing in Superstars
3. Investing in Superstars, part 2

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”  (Margaret Mead)

“Be the change you want to see in this world” (Gandhi)

There is an idea virus within American culture that has the power to destroy.  The idea is that technology and innovation are fundamentally good.  Whether you consider yourself a technologist, an entrepreneur or a scientist (all labels I use to identify myself at times) I’d like to propose an alternative to to this idea and an inoculation against the virus.

Observation #1: Innovation amplifies whatever values and beliefs are held by the innovator.

For instance, if I value my time, I might invent the first clock, or start a business to create time-management products, or devote my life to unlocking deep mysteries of the physics of time.  And if I believe clean drinking water is a fundamental human right, I might invent a new method of water purification, or start charity:water, or study how global climate change affects water policy for at risk populations.

Observation #2: When certain values or beliefs are amplified others are necessarily diminished.

This is moral leverage.

Through the creation, promotion and use of specific innovations, the values associated with those innovations become selected for; conversely, those innovations which are never created (or are out-competed in the marketplace) leave their concomitant values vulnerable to conflicting and more technologically fortified values.  Think of it as an evolving moral ecosystem where values thrive and spread or go extinct bad on selective pressures amplified by innovation.

Let’s look at the global financial crisis through the lens of moral leverage.  We may ask ourselves what are the innovations — technological, financial, legal, political, and so on — that enabled the situation to unfold as it did?  What are the values that were promoted or amplified, and what are the values that became “collateralized damage”?  Finally, what are the individual and collective beliefs about the world that were either reinforced or falsified by the events of the past few years?

To make it more concrete, listen to this Fresh Air segment on tax liens and see if you can answer these questions.  Or listen to the second segment in the show to hear the link between the industrialization of food production and the advent of breast cancer.se

Observation #3: Innovation by itself is neither good nor bad.

There are luminaries that argue innovation is inherently good because it is democratizing.  And others who point out that technology leads to bubbles and echo chambers, which lead directly to evil.  But innovators are optimists and often make the claim that, in the long run, innovation leads to good: violence declines; eventually dictatorships fall.  The techno-optimist story goes that violence and dictatorship cannot last against the inexorable and exponential advance of technology, especially those that promote transparency.

Moral leverage provides another another interpretations of the same data, which is not that innovation is good, but rather…

Conclusion #1: People are inherently good.

Except for the value placed on democracy itself, democratic systems are, by definition, amoral; they simply allow “we the people” to express and live by our own individual and collective values, whatever those may be.  Part of the freedom of expression afforded by democracy manifests itself in what we would call innovation.  So if innovation acts as moral leverage — amplifying the will of the people — then the logical conclusion is this: the moral arc of the universe derives it’s bent towards justice, not from technology or innovation but rather from their source: YOU.

Is this so surprising though?  Isn’t “good” defined by that which promotes our values?  Or if you prefer, the value of life as a whole?  And even if you believe that good is defined by God’s values… are we not made in God’s image?

Now you may say, so what?  The distinction between “humans are good” and “innovation is good” is purely academic.  To that I would say:

Conclusion #2: Innovation without conscious moral intention is amoral.

Innovation by itself will not save the world, it will only hasten the arrival of its implied moral ecosystem.  If you are working on technology for violence — even in the name of “defense” — you are creating an ecosystem under which violence thrives.  This internet worm, presumably created by those who would protect you from nuclear attack, chillingly illustrates this point.  Without considering moral leverage, it’s easy to frame our choices in ways that blind us to the infinite possibilities, and “force” us to act against our own values.

Conclusion #3: It’s not hard to save the world.

What life requires if we are to survive is this: each of us must check in from time to time with our own values, and reflect on whether they are in harmony with our words and actions.  It’s really that simple.

The great thing about leverage is that it turns small shifts at the source (i.e. you) into massive revolutions in the end.  That choice you made the other day to forego the water in a plastic bottle is a small expression of your values, but it has the potential for viral infection that changes the world.  And when you align your career choices with your personal values as Scott Harrison did, you accelerate the spread of your values exponentially.

So how do we know what’s right for us?  Very simply… it’s what feels right.  It’s an emotional resonance (a loving feeling perhaps?) that tells us that we are in line with our values.  Conversely, when we feel stress or discord, or that sinking feeling, we know something’s not right.  It only becomes hard when we waste energy on things that we cannot control, when we take responsibility for other people’s actions, or when we mistake other people’s values for our own.  Which leads to the most subtle but important premise of all:

The only way to fail is to judge.

The act of judgment is what the “logical” mind does.  It tells us what we (and others) “should” do, based on a set of rules and assumptions.  The mind is a wonderful tool, essential for survival.  But it distracts us from listening to our heart and living by our values.  That is something that can only be felt and is beyond the reach of logic or words.

You don’t need laws or incentives to be a good person.  Listen to your heart.  And trust the universe be the judge of whether you did the right thing.

Related posts:

1. Violence on the Decline
2. Invisible Etiology