Apr 4, 2017
If anyone doubts the power of Motivation 3.0, they should listen
to this episode. In the last couple of months, people from all over
the world who have jobs, kids and lives have volunteered to help
evolve Mixed Mental Arts and get the ideas that have been trapped
in books for decades out into the world. Bryan and I have never met
most of these people. Matt Maurer has worked on the website for no
money. Nicole Page and Matt "Unicorn" Madonna have set up our
t-shirt store and provided endless advice to improve the website.
Cate Fogarty has been taking Hunter's wordy ramblings and
distilling them into #knowledgebombs that in under 500 words sum up
key mental tools to upgrade your cultural software. And even though
Brian Otoya makes basically zero dollars he is personally funding
ads to drive traffic our way. Chris Price and Jake Brady have
stepped in to help teach Hunter how to not screw up the sound. Milk
Toast reached out on Twitter and even offered to fly out to LA to
help with that. There are a lot of people who are helping out and
really it goes to prove something a Ukrainian grandmother once told
Hunter: "Everywhere you go, people are nice. Governments are
assholes."
This has certainly been Hunter and Bryan's experience growing up.
There are a lot of great people everywhere. Are they perfect? Nope.
But they all have value and the challenge in unleashing the wisdom
of crowds is getting all those people to work together. There's a
great scene in the Michael Fassbender Steve Jobs movie where Woz
asks Jobs what he does...
Steve Wozniak: You can't write code... you're not an engineer...
you're not a designer... you can't put a hammer to a nail. I built
the circuit board. The graphical interface was stolen from Xerox
Parc. Jef Raskin was the leader of the Mac team before you threw
him off his own project! Someone else designed the box! So how come
ten times in a day, I read Steve Jobs is a genius? What do you
do?
Steve Jobs: I play the orchestra, and you're a good musician. You
sit right there and you're the best in your row.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the great challenge of the
human family. It is not that the wisdom of crowds isn't there. It's
that we need to get the orchestra playing together. For too long,
we've been waiting for a conductor to come along. We want a leader
who will tell us how to play together. And it's time to realize
that that leader isn't forthcoming.
Recently, Isaiah Gooley (who I've also never met) wrote a post
for
MixedMentalArts.co
that takes the Chinese proverb "Heaven is High and the Emperor is
Far Away" and relates it to modern times. (
http://mixedmentalarts.co/tian-gao-huangdi-yuan/) We
have become so consumed with who is elected President or Prime
Minister that we have forgotten that the wisdom of crowds comes
from us. It comes from the orchestra. And if no one will emerge to
play us then we must adopt the attitude of jazz. We play our notes
and we listen to what other people are doing and we figure out how
to build on what others are doing. The Mixed Mental Arts community
is a place for anyone from anywhere in the world who wants to do
it. If we get together and start playing really cool music, then
more and more people will join us. They'll want to be a part of
what we're doing.
If we build it, they will come.
However, the crucial word there is we. Bryan and Hunter have
many, many failings. That is the great freedom they have. There's
no need for them to worry about trying to seem like they have it
all together. They don't. And probably nor do you. In fact, no one
does. That's the nature of the world. There are 130 million books.
There are so many terabytes of data. It's all far too much for an
individual human mind. That's why we have to get together a crowd
to solve all these problems. Heaven is High and the Emperor is Far
Away. The challenge is in pulling together the orchestra in the
greatest improv jazz in history. We're doing that. You should
join.
And here is where it becomes important to realize the
challenge we face: identity. You have been told stories about
yourself. We tell stories about each other. And who we are and how
we behave changes often within minutes. We get cut off in traffic
and we get road rage. Someone opens the door for us and we feel all
is right with the world. We get hangry and become snappy. We have a
nap and want to give everyone a hug. And we all have our
Fundamentalisms. We have things that trigger us and make us freak
out. The challenge for all of us is to say sorry and kiss and make
up.
So, let me say I'm sorry. I'm sorry if I've upset any of the
people I've called Fundamentalists over the past few months. As
I've said before, I'm sure you're lovely people and I could tell
many wonderful stories about you. Every hero has a thousand faces.
Why did I do this then? Because the world is in the grip of a lot
of bad stories right now. And the way you beat the bad story is
with better stories. And one story is a variation on the story of
that Ukrainian grandmother. Most people are nice but there is a
small number of people who are so hung up on their one thing that
they are getting in the way of the orchestra playing together. And
so, I called them out. Now, it's time to tell a different story.
The story of us. The story of that big shared human experience. And
that's why us Mixed Mental Artists want to make a series called
#CultureMatters. We want to take everything we've learned in over
200 episodes and turn it into a series of fifteen videos that in
two to three minutes will sum up everything we've learned. It will
allow you to massively update your cultural software and drop
#knowledgebombs all across the internet. It will make you an
intellectual terrorist.
So fund intellectual terrorism by supporting us on Patreon.
(
https://www.patreon.com/mixedmentalarts) When
we reach $10k, we can make these videos and you can go blow
people's minds. And when we shatter those echo chambers, we will
unleash the greatest idea orgy in human history.
Oh yeah! Let's get it on!