I am having the time of my life. This new role I am in is incredible - the people I get to work with and learn from, the ideas, the challenges... I miss trading and technology, but this new role... it seems like everyday I have a new peak experience. There's so much to learn, so many exciting ideas and opportunities to have a real impact.
At the same time I get this pit in my stomach if I think too much about what I need to accomplish -- how will I ever do it? I have 5 months to assemble a book on Market Based Management. Fortunately I have access to some of the brightest minds on the planet. But the writing part is torturous -- it's like turning blood into words. I write five pages, I end up with a couple of sentences. Even those might not be acceptable to the editorial board.
I think Soren Kierkegaard wrote that if one wished to write the truth, one had to first become the truth. That gives me pause.
But the ideas... how could I have been so ignorant of these writers and thinkers I am reading today -- Polanyi, Hayek, Mises, Maslow, Horney... one book after the other... the experience of reading them is ineffable -- every page leaps out with incredible insights. All my synpases seem to fire at once... This is what I've been trying to say -- this is how the world works - I've seen it but didn't have the words / concepts / framework to explain -- YES! YES!
Example: today I am reading The Constitution of Liberty by F.A. Hayek -- in part 2 of his chapter, "The Common Sense of Progress" he is talking about how progress in our normal sense is purposeful -- that we as individuals or groups have an goal in mind and organize our resources and plan our efforts to achieve what we see as attainable. But that isn't "social progress" -- our society doesn't advance like that. It evolves -- progress is a discovery process, searching into the unknown with unpredictable consequences. Human reason cannot predict or shape its future -- not even in science can this be done (I've seen this theme in Polanyi's Republic of Science) -- to attempt to corral scienctific discovery towards some deliberate aim is to hinder progress.
He then points out that "progress" might mean achieving what we've been striving for - but that we might not always like the results and not everyone gains from it. The result is a state, progress is a process. And here's the payload: the states don't matter -- it's the process:
"... What matters is the successful striving for what at each moment seems attainable. it is not the fruits of past success but the living in and for the future in which human intelligence proves itself. Progress is movement for movement's sake, for it is the process of learning, and in the effects of having learned something new, that man enjoy's the gift of his intelligence."
He continues to build from there to make that case that it is progress - this evolutionary discovery process that is the never ending quest for future understanding - that makes society, "most cheerful," as Adam Smith coined it -- and that it fundamentally requires maximum individual liberty to work, and that this by necessity means there will be inequality in society... but that we're all better off by it.
This stuff hits me so hard I have to be careful who I talk with in the hours after I read it... I worry sometimes that I come across like a Dennis Hopper character, "it's like... WOW man... like all this stuff is like interconnected with the great cosmic flow man do you groove on that?" -- or from Apocalypse Now when he says stuff like, "Do you know that 'if' is the middle word in 'life'?" -- Hands waving in the air, wild-eyed, hyped on caffeine and ideas.
Back to reading.
