Book preview
lunge: An algorithm for progress
This book is for anyone with a desire to progress or to help others progress. No matter if it’s in your work, your social life, your community or a hobby you pursue: progress is a tricky thing. Yet we are wired for it. Even if it is your low stakes bottom league weekly soccer match, the meal you cook for your partner, or the e-mail you anwser: you put in some effort and you hope you might win, cook a tasty meal or write a better e-mail than last week. Progress is motion towards a destination you might never reach, but it feels good when you get closer. In rare moments the forward motion seems to come naturally, occasionally we manage but it takes immense struggle, and sometimes the energy we put in blows back into our faces. Luckily we have an immense amount of content available to guide us. For any problem a solution is just a quick search engine prompt away. How to lead, how to change, what goals to set, how to work, what to design, what to install. This is not strange. We never had as much progress as we have now, so we also have a lot of educational and inspiring content about it. Except there is one problem: it is not about you.
This does not make it false, it just means you cannot CTRL+C CTRL+V the advice to your situation. Anecdotes give us zoomed in inspiring stories and practical examples to emulate. But they are very path-dependant on the person who experienced it. Anecdotes work like an elevator. It shows you how the higher floor looks like, but not how the people walked the stairs to build the elevator in the first place. Science helps us with reliable and repeatable steps, but it is based on what is on average optimal or expected across populations. It is zoomed out. But you are not a population, and sometimes you have to do the suboptimal so you can be optimal later. So you’re stuck with either replicating what led people down these wonderful anecdotes, or picking the average optimized path which is hopefully better than average for you. Good luck.
The way we consume content nowadays adds an extra level of difficulty. Our digital society enables hyper-optimized, no-waste, time-efficient communication. It turns everything into a crash course because it can. But you don’t become a pilot by doing a series of crash courses. Pilots can only crash safely when they deeply learned aircraft systems, aviation regulations, navigation, flight planning and weather. The same applies to progress. You can only learn how to progress by understanding its constituent elements. Your elements.
At its core it starts with the work you do and the purpose you set. This gives you to the impulse to do something. But progress requires more. You have to bring something new in your environment, you create. The concept of entropy represents your perception on how you can leverage your environment, the potential you can see. But creation is not enough. Progress implies forward motion, going into the unknown and turning potentiality into possibility. This is your ability to change, to reconfigure your surroundings. These are the 4 ingredients of progress.
In real life these ingredients constantly fluctuate. Work can be rewarding until it its suddenly not. Your goals are amazing but the next day you throw them in the bin. Your environment feels chaotic until you see patterns. This week change seems your superpower, next week things are stuck and won’t budge. When you look at successful people their progress looks like a straight line to the top. Research on career hot streaks shows it is anything but a straight line: exploration and exploitation alternate. Successful people explore, get lost, wander and fail before focus sets in, things start to click and progress happens. This is why we cannot copy success and expect the same outcome, it would require you to get lost in the same way as well.
Peter Jackson made biographies and horror-comedies before Lord of the Rings. Nobel prize winners like John Fenn dabbled in various fields before finding a niche in which they generated breakthroughs. Albert Einsteins wanderings, including early work in a patent office where patents on synchronization of clocks passed by, set the stage for his later breakthroughs. Van Goghs paintings were all over the place until he honed in on his famous colourful and impressionistic sunflowers and night-time café’s in France. You are doing whatever you are doing now, so you create your breakthrough later. You just don’t know it yet. The only thing you can figure out is what step to take next.
Lunge is the namesake of this book because progress is exactly that: small forward next steps. Progress is ultimately a long series of steps where sometimes things happen to you which don’t make sense, or you do things which don’t make sense. Its ups and downs and back and forths like a lunge-exercise. Only in hindsight we can rationalize which steps were beneficial and which weren’t, but in the end you had to take them all to make you end up where you are now.
The lunge algorithm is the ultimate summary of this book which captures this cyclical motion as it happens. You can see a sneak peek with the core definitions on the right. You need to tune all 4 to progress. Without work you are inert, without purpose you aimless, without change you stagnate, without considering entropy you operate in a vacuum. But even if you do everything right, progress naturally becomes harder and harder to accumulate. Time for a reset button, a reorientation. I define this as the ‘hourglass flip’, signaling your start of a new iteration.
The 5 principles of lunge give you the insights and tools to fully tune your algorithm to help you navigate these cycles of progression:
Laughter: Reframe your situation like a comedian. To progress you need a crystal clear and honest assessment of your current situation. Laughter is the most powerful low-stakes shortcut to honesty we have, we should use it. We can learn from the masters of laughter: comedians.
Understand: Ask questions like a child. In a age of endless answers we sometimes forget to keep asking questions. We need relentless curiosity to keep learning. Children have amazing steep learning curves because they questions everything, we should do the same.
Negotiate: Decide like a computer scientist. Questions lead to answers and answers lead to decisions. Algorithm-building computer scientists are the master-deciders of this age, they can filter through the huge amounts of data we have to fuel decisions. We can adopt the same mindset.
Germinate: Tend to your situation like a gardener. Decisions naturally require follow-up and commitment in order to progress. Your collection of decisions are like seeds you plant in your garden, they need they right circumstances to germinate. To make your decisions bear fruit, you have to tend to them like a gardener.
Engage: Investigate your surroundings like an archaeologist. When things progress you create evidence of it along the way. Evidence of what worked, what didn’t, what can be a stepping stone for the next step and what you will throw away. Close engagement is required to figure this out, you cannot do this from a distance or through a screen. You need to examine your evidence like an archeologist.
There is only one thing I must leave to you: running the algorithm. You will know yourself why it works.
lunge: An algorithm for progress © (2024) . Bart Vreeman. All rights reserved
