- Keep Cool
- Posts
- Artificial boundaries
Hi there,
Trying something different for a change and slingshotting right into content; no long preamble or <50 word summary even. Hope you’re doing great and that you enjoy.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Will Wiseman, the CEO of Climatize—an SEC-registered funding portal that democratizes renewable energy investment by giving everyday investors access to crowdfund community-scale solar and storage projects—and I recently recorded a podcast episode you can listen to here. In it, one particular line of conversation has been reverberating for me since, so I wanted to pull it into relief here briefly and expand on it more than I did live.
Will: “We live in a world of systems that create these kind of artificial boundaries on us, and we assume things can't change because of how embedded those systems are in the status quo and the incumbent powers that benefit from those systems. And when we rethink the role that we can play, particularly around capital formation, capital is one of the biggest levers in enabling change, especially acute now as you see how much power certain incumbent individuals or organizations have and how that can radically change the systems that we thought were more robust than they actually are…”
Nick: “I was reminded of I'm pretty sure it's the Steve Jobs quote, but he's like, you can literally just like look around you. Everything that you see, someone at some point had to envision and build. And so, you know, if you want to see something different, and again, like this applies, as you said, not just to technology or systems, it applies to social structures, it applies to, you know, you could think about like, how do I want to structure a democracy? People take that to mean one sort of fixed system of government, but it's actually a really complex question that lots of societies have imagined completely very differently over thousands of years… If we want to make change, it’s primarily incumbent on people to start, to have a vision, and to test things. And to our earlier conversation, there will be a lot of hurdles in the beginning, but that's what you know, that gives some validity to testing and trying different approaches and seeing where, with some perseverance, there may be momentum that accrues.”
Will: “Yeah, absolutely. And I love flywheel-type concepts where everyone in the beginning says that'll never work. And then, once it starts to work and capture momentum, it seems obvious in hindsight. And, you know, we really look at that as now something that's forming in real time and only expect to accelerate moving forward. It's not that there won't be challenges along the way, but the hardest part in terms of getting the network going has been solved. And now it's a matter of how quickly we can accelerate it?”
One of the things that stands out to me now is that what Will is hitting on here is ultimately about how things in the world actually change, whether and when the conditions are right to do so, and how and who can direct these changes. Something that seems shocking to many, at present, is the extent to which the second Trump administration has been able to railroad conventional norms of governance.
Without putting any words in Will’s mouth or your head, i.e., regardless of your political persuasion—regardless of to what extent if at all you think some of the new frontier in American politics is good, bad, or even entirely new (governance predominantly by “pen and phone” rather than legislation certainly isn’t)—I reckon many of us would agree that this current Presidential administration is much more of a “live player” than past ones.
Which speaks to what Will referenced in stating that “assume things can't change because of how embedded those systems are in the status quo and the incumbent powers that benefit from those systems.” Even in a ~250-year-old country that benefits perhaps more than any other from being seen as a pillar of stability, especially in terms of the rule of law and the strength of its capital markets, this Trump administration has clearly shown there are plenty of softer spots in seemingly entrenched systems. There are echoes of the concept of upper limiting, inherent in the opposite assumption of what Will and I are asserting, a concept from Gay Hendricks in which individuals subconsciously sabotage themselves to avoid exceeding their perceived, self-imposed ceiling on success, happiness, and abundance.
Understanding that goal one is to not get mired in upper-limiting or fear and dauntedness in the face of artificially daunting-seeming boundaries, or even very real ones, the question then becomes: where else is this true? Presumably everywhere. Perhaps the most immovable rules and systems, those with the most gravity that aren’t easily turned, are those governed by physics. But even in those realms, as a species, we’ve clearly proven capable of significantly impacting Earth’s climate systems, in a way that's more dysregulatory than calm and sustainable. Maybe we can find ways to direct outsize impact in the other direction, though. And certainly in terms of mitigative efforts and adaptive ones, it stands to reason that we can find points of significant leverage, as I discussed last week, to drive change in systems like power generation, transportation, agriculture, and more, at a global stage.
With respect to climate mitigation efforts, the above graph, which showcases how much higher-leverage contrail mitigation would be over mitigating carbon dioxide emissions from aviation with respect to short-term warming impacts, comes to mind (Credit: Hannah Ritchie and Tristan Abbott)
The most dangerous assumption might be that the world is already optimized, that systems exist in their current form because that's the only way they could be. Or that you yourself can find massive leverage somewhere. Nearly every system we take for granted was, at some point, a radical experiment that most people thought would fail. Often by people who weren’t originally ludicrously endowed with inherent talent or existing capital. If you don't like the outsized leverage that certain actors are wielding—whether in politics, in markets, in climate work, or otherwise—the answer isn't to bemoan the system. It's to find and press into the points of maximum flexibility you can identify and leverage.
Go forth and ponder, tinker, and build towards something great,
Nick
Reply