Hierarchy of Agency
THE HIERARCHY OF AGENCY
KNOW THE TRUTH
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BE ACCOUNTABLE TO YOURSELF
Understanding Agency, Recognize and Understand how you lost it, Who profited from taking it? Own your agency. To do this you have to get beyond the reptilian part of the brain in the limbic system, and into the neocortex where you can think, rationalize, create, and find optimism. Go Deep. When you hear negative information dig deeper. To know the truth you must go beyond the traditional media, politicians and candidates who profit from terrifying you. Limit the Darkness. Because human instinct are more drawn to threats than opportunities, news networks, and social media companies have a financial incentive on nightly news, to promote “if it bleed it leads.” If you allow the negative to be your only news you will not lead a happier life, and you miss opportunities. Discover Your Truth: Invest in yourself. Understand yourself. Identity the codes that you live by. Stop Lying: You cannot live a lie. Stop lying to others, and most importantly stop lying to yourself. You cannot advance if you continue to lie to yourself or others. American Optimism is justified. The World is better than you think. The US is better than you could possibly imagine. This is not a slogan. You can find evidence of this.
Good vs Evil: Each of us have good and evil inside of us. We have to acknowledge our own evils to control them. Ideologies are a Dangerous Addiction: Addictive Ideologies, especially those that focus on the collective allow us to transfer the evil in ourselves to groups. Once we allow ourselves to see others as evil, we begin to justify our actions that harm them. Do not surrender you. Do not surrender your individuality to any organization, politician, or political party. You are entitled to dignity. What is inside of you is unique. It deserves to be treated equal, with dignity, and respect. This is the basis of an individualistic society. But this only works if you give others the same. To receive respect and dignity you have to give it to others. You can always begin anew: No matter where you are, what constraints are placed on you, you can begin a new. The one thing you always have the ability to control is you. Tell the Truth especially to yourself. Telling yourself the truth is the beginning to recovery. Make commitments to yourself, only in increments that you can build habits of delivering to yourself. Abundance over Scarcity: The mindset of abundance or scarcity determine how we look at life. A scarcity mindset will cause you to lose opportunity and give you an inability to lead. Leadership and power is misunderstood. The mindset that all powerful people, only serve selfish ends, or even most powerful people searches only selfish ends, so misunderstands power. The result of this misunderstanding of how one acquires power handicap their ability to obtain power. Power comes from what we give. Any other power is temporary.
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FINDING MEANING
Know the Dark Passenger: All of us have a dark passenger. This alter ego lives inside of us, and it drives us towards a victim mindset. The victim, the persecutor and the savior, all wind up being in a trapped role. Victims cannot find Meaning. Victims are powerless by design. The opposite of being a victim is being a creator, a survivor, a coach. Understand Free Will: Viktor Frankl is the prophet on meaning. He was brutalized by Nazi’s in concentration camps, but found and helped others find meaning. The beginning of this journey is recognize the last thing that can be taken from you is your free will. Be the Creator: The Creator is the opposite of a victim. You find your way out of the victim triangle by creating options. Options are created by innovators. You create opportunity in your life. Through this you create products, businesses, music, art, a family. Creation is one of the three steps to meaning. Find Love: Love is the second place we find meaning. This is important enough that love itself is part of the Hierarchy. But you can love children, a romantic partner, your family, your friends, your customers and even people you don’t know. Embrace the Struggle. Struggle, according to Frankl is the third place we find meaning. In even intense struggle, we can find meaning through confronting the struggle, surviving the struggle, being relentless in the struggle. Create Your Mantra. A mantra is different from a code. A code are the values you live your life by. A mantra should be designed towards your meaning. What two or three things gives what you do a sense of meaning. But meaning is subjective, and so each of us have different mantra’s.
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LEVERAGE POWER
Strength over Safety. Life does not necessarily become easier, we have to become stronger. Intellectual, spiritual, and physical growth requires challenges. The greater the challenge the greater the growth. Far too many people want safety, but for safety one gives up growth and strength. You can only gain Resilience from adversity. Cancel No One. Cancel culture wont fix the problems we have today, but learning to communicate with those we disagree with can. Human Rights, Civil Rights and Equal Rights, demand that everyone has a right to free speech. Attack the free speech of one, you attack the free speech of everyone. But more importantly, when you cancel out adverse opinions you harm your ability to become more resilient. Political Correctness Paves the Way to Authoritarianism: It is important to be polite. To try and address others with dignity and respect. But to weaponize politically correct language, ostracizing those you disagree with, results in making some people in society invisible. Making people invisible paves the road to authoritarianism. Be Prepared: Know yourself, know the issue, know the inside group who are the decision makers, know the outside group who are the influencers. The more information you have, the higher your likely hood of success. Work Harder: Be relentless, disciplined and work hard. Master Your Emotions. emotions often over power our good judgement and can have detrimental impacts on our future. Mastering our emotions makes us more emotionally available to others. You emotions play a huge role in the kind of life you will experience and you don’t want to eliminate them, you want to control them. The Long Game: Don’t take short cuts. If there was a short cut it would be called the way. Don’t sacrifice your reputation for short term results.
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FIND POWER IN LOVE AND CONNECTION
Hate & Envy hold you back. Love lets you go. Beware of Labeling others. of the box we build for ourselves through labeling others. The loss of connection is fatal. Poor social relationships related to 29% increase in heart attack and 32% increase of stroke. Social media is the graveyard for love and friendship. You can’t find love or connection on line. Multibillion $ corporations have created business models on idea of friending and liking others. That’s not really connecting you, and other groups have used the darker side of this Nirvana to divide us. Social media is the petri dish for addictive ideologies, political positioning, corporate sales. Don’t give up on people you love for people you don’t even know. We have entered an era where people are picking the sides of party or ideologues and in there defense, they make damaging comments to people they love. Make great connections. This only happens by focusing on what you do for them. But these connections we make, drives who you are. So pick wisely. Be fearless with Love. Martin Luther King was fearless using love as a weapon. Indifferent to “In the The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon said “Violence, is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction.” In opposition to this, King taught us how loving our enemy was a powerful weapon of change, in that it was sustainable and there was no defense.
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BELEIVE IN YOU, BELIEVE IN US, AND ACT WITH BELIEF
Our greatest power is believing: If you believe in a better tomorrow, you can be one of the ones who helps create it. We have to believe a better tomorrow is possible to see opportunities to create it. You have to believe in yourself, in who we are, in what you are a part of, and of our unbelievable possibilities to have the potential of the full life that your are deserving. Put the Oxygen Mask on Yourself First: You cannot help others if you are out of oxygen. You have to find your meaning, find love, find Agency, and find optimism. Everyone has periods when they begin to lose hope. When this happens, you have to do the things that restores your human spirt so you can help others. Hate & Envy hold you back. Love lets you go. You always have the ability to begin anew. But you must do so with love. Thins includes love for yourself. Continue Education to See the Possibilities: Motivation requires challenge, affirmation and growth. This requires education. Education can come from a institution, books, publications, podcasts, mentors, on going training. You gain almost no education on the nightly news, and what you do see, may result in the opposite of believing. Learn from history, from the wisdom, shortfalls, greatness and failures of others. Self Esteem comes from challenging yourself. Work and entrepreneurship builds self esteem, but only if it is challenging you. The challenge of creating a better product. The challenge of working with others. The challenge of satisfying a customer. Price’s law, is that 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work. Ask yourself, are you in a position to create a substantial value in your current profession. If not, move to a place where you can. And most important to building self esteem is don’t lie. Don’t lie to others, but more importantly don’t lie to yourself. Take Risks: You only have one life, take risks to fulfill your meaning. Not just financial risks, but risk on yourself. Challenge yourself, push yourself, and then take a risk on yourself. Do not fear failure. Failure builds character, and teaches us what doesn’t work. But don’t let the fear of failure keep you from discovering your full potential, and the benefits you can bring to the world. Find Gratitude. To let go of the negatives of the past, and the challenges of today, find gratitude. There is so much to be grateful for, but sometimes, especially when conditions are hard, you have to look deeper. You can find it in the stars, a sunset, your breath, family, and life. Everyday, find blessings. They exist.
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YOU ARE PART OF SOMETHING AWESOME!
The Greatest Thing Our Government Did Was Empower the Individual over itself. You live in the greatest time in history, in the greatest superpower ever. Never have so many shared so much prosperity. From our beginning we alone, in the world, empowered the individual over government, over the king. It is true, and use by our critics, that while we were more advanced than any others, not all individuals, were empowered in the beginning. However, the more people we empowered over time, the more prosperous we became. The liberties that evolved with our country on Free speech, Free Markets, Civil Rights, Equal Rights, Human Rights, all empowered the individual over the collective and as it did, we built something amazing. No One Came Alone. The greatest display of hubris is from the individual who believes they made it on there own. The billionaire who ignores the liberties that gave him the ability to own what he creates, or the Woke Culture advocate who diminishes the role of founders who created the structure they enjoy their liberty from. We all stand on the back of giants. On the backs of our founders, pioneers, those who fought in the military, or served as first responders, teachers, civil rights leaders, and so many other hero’s of liberty. Before your criticize it, maybe take a moment to thank those who help create a place where criticism was a right. The Power of Patriotism. Significant studies link patriotism and optimism. Psycology calls it Social Identity Theory and they point out significant benefits of belonging to a group. This is indifferent to identity politics where instead of identifying with principals that unite us, we identify with what makes us different. There is great power in owning your claim to be an American. But you can’t be patriotic by insulting other Americans. We have to listen, understand, empathize, but never, ever waiver from the belief in who we are, and what we have done. Hold our Hero’s Dear. Our current liberties were built incrementally from men and women who sacrificed to our great benefit. Jefferson, Madison, Fredrick Douglas, Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Rosa parks, Martin Luther King. From “all men are created equal,” to the LGBTQ movement today, the rights of individuals have a long history of connected hero’s. Judge them not by their lives being perfect. Judge them by how they drove forward the issue of the rights of the individual in times when they were the pioneers. These American hero’s, are uniquely yours. We give them an exalted position in our history, even recognizing they were not perfect, because they stand for the cause that places the rights of the individual at the center. They make up who we are. They make up who you are. The Collective Benefited from Individualism. Through free speech, free markets, private property rights, Civil Rights, Equal Rights and Human rights we have seen individual s do amazing things. The ability to own what you create, to follow your own path, to challenge the status quo, have moved human progress forward farther than any other place at any other time. It’s not perfect, but you can’t find its comparable. And what we will accomplish from this will include driverless cars, reducing deaths and injuries on our freeways, curing cancer, reducing poverty and hunger and even dramatically increasing the human life span. These are not the folly predictions, if you look you will see that these things will actually come about. We not me. There are many ways to give back. Through a not for profit, a charity, a religious group, or even as a business that focuses on your customers. As Americans who believe in individualism, we have an obligation to not only own our agency, but to use optimism, charity, love and kindness to help others get their agency. The Leaders Are Determined by What We Give. There is an amazing power when individuals give back to others. Giving promotes gratitude, takes you out of your own misery, and it builds self worth. But imagine from the begging of time, who were the real leaders of the tribe? The one with the biggest kill? Or was it the hunter with the big kill that shares it with those who can’t hunt for themselves? Leaders give away the credit when things go right and take the blame when things go wrong.
In Addictive Ideologies, Dr. Emily Bashah, a clinical psychologist, and Paul Johnson, entrepreneur and former mayor of Phoenix, Arizona, offer a word of caution. Their belief—that today’s world of runaway identity politics, nationalism and cancel culture is setting the stage for a loss of individual agency and liberty—keenly shows why we can’t take democracy and civility for granted. Fortunately, it is still possible to learn from history and to regain one’s agency, self-empowerment and life purpose.
READ ADDICTIVE IDEOLOGIES
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