Mission

 

This is my personal mission statement. It helps me figure out what I’m supposed to do and how I’m supposed to do it.

Beliefs

My beliefs are what I think is important and true.

  • Humanity is part of a larger society including non-human animals and machine intelligences, and to some extent plants and other living creatures.
  • Our collective mission is to make the universe more interesting by exploring it, learning more about it, and inhabiting it.
  • The more that we are conscious of our collective mission, and work towards it, the faster it goes and the better a job that we do.

Role

My role is an assessment of my place in the world.

I am a human with exceptional privilege – white, male, heterosexual, English-speaking, part of the dominant human culture on the planet. I have innate intelligence, a good memory, an analytical approach, creativity, and empathy. I’m good-looking, I have a quirky sense of humor, and I am slightly reckless, which gives me good leadership. People listen to me. I have had a good education in math, the sciences, and the arts, and I’ve had a career working in one of the most important current fields, software development.

Mission

My mission is trying to figure out how I can best apply my role to my beliefs.

William Gibson said, “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” My job is to make the future more evenly distributed.

Values

My values are other properties that I use to measure if a course of action is the best one to follow.

  • Autonomy – control one’s own life and destiny
  • Memory – preserving personal and cultural history
  • Diversity – more voices, more ideas
  • Globalism – All one or none!
  • Complexity – complicated is interesting, and interesting is good
  • Effectiveness – judge actions by their effects
  • Speed – faster is better than slower
  • Honesty – real is better than fake
  • Thriftiness – cheap is better than expensive

Strategies

My strategies are techniques and rules of thumb that have worked for me before.

  • Make probability work for you. Use math to analyze how things work. Go for bigger numbers rather than smaller numbers. Don’t take unnecessary risks.
  •  Plan ahead. Part of making probability work for you. Starting projects early gives you a chance to re-start or adjust.
  • Be nice. It causes less unnecessary drama. It also makes other people happy.
  • Force multiplication. Employ allies and technologies that give me an outsized impact.
  • Virality. A type of force multiplication; get ideas to spread themselves.
  • Do what others aren’t doing. Find a niche and work there.
  • Maintain my physical, mental and emotional health. Satisfy my personal needs and wants so I don’t become overtaxed and ineffective.
  • Take lots of shots. Try lots of different things. Try lots of ways of doing the same thing. Experiments are cheap.