The Grind

The one key lesson from nature is creative collaboration.

It is cross-pollination.

Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, started out on Earth quite a while ago. Possible fossil examples have been found in rocks that are around 3500 million years old, in Western Australia.

Choanoflagellates are single-celled plankton and the closest living relatives of animals, including humans. Molecular biologists have found that these organisms form colonies only when triggered by previously unknown bacteria. The discovery suggests that early single-celled organisms may originally have come together in the presence of bacteria, perhaps to make more efficient feeding machines that eventually evolved into multicellular life leading to the evolution of life as we know today.

None of this happened in isolation.

This was a change that took millions of years.

Today we measure time, and it is sometimes difficult to imagine waiting for things to happen.

It doesn’t take us even minutes to get impatient and then there was life that took its own sweet time to evolve.

Complex moves for a simple outcome

All the animals including humans look like very efficiently put together machines that are self-sustainable for survival.

However, what goes behind in the factory is much more complex as you can imagine from the text above explaining how bacteria evolved through a process of collaboration.

Herein lies the secret.

We take several decisions every day from simple ones like what to wear or eat to complex ones related to our job, relationships etc.,

There is always a heuristic that guides us take some decisions quickly.

The decision is made quickly, however the picture can be missed.

Every decision is a learning opportunity to improve the heuristic but that requires us to break the heuristic which is contradictory.

The only way of-course to know is to do.

Imagine if human had 3 legs because bacteria used a heuristic that showed 3 legs being more efficient than 2.

The reason evolution took so long was because instead of using heuristic, evolution went for detailing.

Knowing what you are building is the foundation for building it well and while it might be iterative, the results will be more satisfactory even if not perfect all the time.

The Grind-Hard but necessary

When you don’t know where you are going any road will take you there.

That’s what happens when decisions are made slave to heuristics.

Good news is you have a choice.

You can change you unwanted outcomes into good choices in the future.

Whether it is life, relationships or investing.

Bottomline is that no sustainable way to journey has been created through a shortcut.