Initial conditions are experiences that different things had in the early stages when they were created.
For example when you were first born, your environment, your parents, their behaviors the culture you are in and the people you’re surrounded with, those are initial conditions.
Why am i talking about initial conditions? Thats a good question. Because everything has a tendency to self replicate.
This is a fascinating one, if we’re looking at current state of my country (Maldives) right now, we’re currently facing a lot of socio economic issues. And if we want to know how this is all caused, we just need to look at the initial conditions.
And if we look at Facebook, it has a lot of privacy issues, Mark Zuckerberg had to face a lot of legal issues with the regard of Facebooks privacy, but how is this all formed?
Again, Initial Conditions.
Back when Facebook didn’t exist Mark Zuckerberg almost got expelled from Harvard for violating privacy. He created face smash which was a site for rating which girl was hot or not with pictures of girls from Harvard. How did he get it? He hacked into the Harvards database to get them. Those were the initial conditions of Facebook (even before Facebook)
And the thing about initial conditions is that, they have the tendency to self replicate at a larger scale.
And whatever of scale it is happening right now, we just need to get a magnified glass in to the situation to find the very same pattern formed during its first initial stage.
And whatever you do in these initial stages, dictates everything.
How do we combat it? We have 3 steps that helped me that i hope helps you.
1- Anti-Entropy :
Entropy
Entropy means disorder and randomness in a system - we’re basically in a constant pull towards disorder.
For example aging, we cant stop aging but it happens anyway. The only way we can fight is with taking care of our health, wearing skin products that makes us look younger. Because if we don’t we’d decay faster.
If you’re young, your lucky because this is your chance to set the conditions in your favor that will scale through time. There’s no such thing as maintenance.
This means your goal should always be to become better than you were yesterday. And today is the worst you’ll ever be because tomorrow - you will be way better.
You need to start finding for your goal, not just anyone else’s goal, not just a goal you think you want - your actual goal. and this happens through trial and error and if you’re careless with it, you’re placing bad initial conditions.
I made a guide to help you find that which you can find in this link.
Once you find a goal that you really want to achieve thats when you leave the rest and follow it. Just like passions evolve , goals will too - and that is the decline of entropy, so you’d need to constantly fight it.
2- Outputs derive from Inputs:
Garbage in , Garbage out
What makes a really good chef? Is it the way they cut the ingredients, is it the sauce? is it the secret Kung Fu technique that makes it taste so damn good?
Nope. Its the chefs ability to source the finest ingredients. If you’re curious I’d recommend watching the documentary chefs table its available on Netflix heres the link, and they show you exactly how they do it.
Some chefs went to the extreme and built their own farm, and it went even more extreme, they started to think of the constituent parts of what makes a good farm. They started spending more time on sourcing the ingredients than cooking. Because the better the inputs are which is the ingredients, the better the output would be.
Your ability to source the best information dictates the way you think, your judgements your skills and value creation. Learn to differentiate signal through the noise.
Whenever I’m learning I prefer to go through long unedited form contents and books. And sometimes i even check on top of this to get to that extreme level, to videos that have low views - we’re comparing 1m,2m views to 1k or 2k views. These might seem unattractive or uninteresting but surprisingly holds more value.
3- Feedback :
You’re a cumulations of your thoughts, beliefs and actions. Thats your inputs, and that starts to process into an output, which is you right now.
And how do we change your output? Easy? We just change the inputs.
For example Isaac Newton- what did he consume and process to become the genius that he is. He had idols. That included genius like Galileo, Copernicus and many others.
So what ever you see the output of Isaac which is considered genius, when we look at his inputs, he consumed on top of the shoulders of other geniuses.
Feedback comes through what you consume, and it spirals into feedback loop that shapes you.
If what you consume are news, movies, junk food, Short form content like Tiktok - you’ll face the consequence of not being healthy, lack of focus and attention - which is the output / feedback.
And this feedback loop cannot be stopped if you’re not aware of your patterns and behaviors, And you as an emotional being cannot find this out yourself. We need rational ways to find them.
And some ways are through your browser history, where your money goes , Myers Briggs test. There are plenty.
Feedbacks help you spiral through an exponential growth or exponential demise. Not just through personal life but through your work too.
Make sure it works in your favor.