This morning I managed to reach a personal goal in my physical strength domain. One month and 12 days ago I set out to improve my physical strength. I did this for a couple of reasons: a little bit of vanity and more importantly because I’m deskbound behind a computer screen pretty much all day long. As you might understand it’s not exactly physically draining to type on a keyboard. Over the years my back have been come increasingly bad and if I don’t do anything about it now I’ll be screwed when I get a bit older. I’d prefer to avoid that thank you very much.

Then and Now

42 days ago I could barely manage a meager 20 push-ups, today I managed to push through on to 50! Yes, I’m proud of myself, and I’m not shy of admitting that. For the first time, in … probably ever, have I stuck with something, continued through the shitty days and the good days, not once giving up. Why did I manage to follow-through this time? Honestly, I don’t really know. I think it might be related to all the introspection work I’ve been doing over the last year or so. I’ve thoroughly analysed myself to try and understand who I am and what I want from life. Achieving goals have never really been part of that and when I’ve tried I’ve given up at the slightest bit of resistance.

The lesson

Over the last couple of months I’ve learnt two very important things that have allowed me to build momentum and motivation. Patience and perseverance. These have been key to unlocking my potential and it sounds cliché, but, patience is a virtue. I’ve said to myself that it’s okay if I don’t notice results immediately. I’ve told myself that no matter how hard I try, results will eventually show up… it’s almost impossible for your body to actually become weaker.

While patience may be one aspect of reaching a goal, perseverance is another. There have been days when I’ve felt like total shit, barely wanting to get out of bed. I guess self-dicipline is also involved, but anyway. This morning I felt rather ill after coming back from my morning walk. Screw it I thought, let’s do it tonight instead. But, as quickly as I tried to dismiss my morning workout I said, screw that… do it now, not matter how bad you’ll be. Well, the rest is history.

Perseverance (I like the word, even the look of it) has really, and perhaps obviously, helped me to reach some of my goals. I’m quite excited to see what things will look like in a year from now.

For some reason I’ve hesitated writing about this topic, because I’ve felt, well, intimidated or something. In previous posts I’ve hinted, ever so slightly, at having a more ambitious dream than finding a guiding purpose. Perhaps that thing is my guiding purpose? I really don’t know. Any way, I’ll just blurt it out here instead of sitting here typing, erasing, typing… trying to make it sound amazing.

I want to unite thinkers across the globe, to enable the collective power of thought to solve our most eminent and difficult problems. The basic premise behind the idea is to have a portal where problems are shared, worked on, brainstormed, solved … collectively. Today we have universities working on similar problems or doing the same research, but have no effective way of sharing information with each other. There’s no easy way to collaborate.

My solution, which I for now choose to call (for lack of a better description) ‘Communal Collaboration for Distributed Thinking’. It sounds all fancy schmancy, but it’s really nothing spectacular. It’s a way to distributively do problem-solving, amongst a large group of people. My dream would be to have this not only apply to problem-solving but also innovation. I genuinely believe that society will never prosper unless we start acting as connected individuals. Thinking individually is fine, but we need to make the intelligent decision to consciously move towards a thinking where the society as a whole is considered, not only the benefits to one particular individual.

For those of you who have seen Star Trek you might be familiar with the Borgs. They have a superior way of assimilate and distribute the knowledge. Each borg is connected in a big mesh network and information is immediately shared amongst all peers. Each borg is capable of acting upon their own impulses and do their own thinking, but everything is shared with the rest of the hive.

Clearly, I wouldn’t want all human thought to be part of my own thinking, but the idea of sharing knowledge and wisdom without restriction very much appeals to me. A real world scenario of what results this could potentially yield is a natural catastrophe. At almost any such even people are forced to work together and the results are outright amazing. It would seem as if nothing is insurmountable when it comes to collective processing. The scientific community also have this very much ingrained. You share your research because claim to fame here is through your work and the knowledge your share, not how much money you can generate from it.

There is however a problem in reaching this ideal state of mind; ego. Most people are hesitant of sharing, what they consider are their best, ideas because they want to monetize them. Trust me, I’m no better, but I want to change this. I believe there to be no easy way to achieve this, but I would imagine that the first step has to be all about overcoming the way of thinking that ideas must always be monetized. The truth is that most ideas are never communicated to the public in fear of loosing out on it’s money generating effects. These ideas are never acted upon, what a waste!

Instead of encouraging and rewarding knowledge hoarding, we must instead encourages and rewards sharing. This is possible and it’s already happening in the software world where the Open Source movement is making headway in exactly this way, through sharing. Yet there are ample opportunities to make money and a thriving business supporting it exists through various efforts. And it’s all about sharing. To gain popularity you have to give away more, and you’ll generally receive more, it’s that simple.

This is why I have begun building on my portal that I intend on bringing to the world. I’ve started sketching on the blueprint for the architecture, writing documents to describe the idea. In due time I will share with you this whole, to me, very exciting idea. If you already feel this is something that appeals to you, please, let me know and I’d be happy to share with you the idea and everything that I have to say about it.

Whether this is something that can generate money or not, I don’t know. But what I do know is that if it could even support me partially it would be fantastic and if not, tough.