[Book Notes] Emergent Strategy

"This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real."

After finishing Emergent Strategy, I feel as though I am washed in a way of operating that is beautiful and applicable in many domains. It helped me understand my dreams. It taught me to think about how the little practices in my life can connect to larger movements. It gives permission and instruction for how to organize differently. I'm going to gift this book going forward. It's so tactical that I'll keep it nearby and return to it repeatedly.

Highlights

• "One of my favorite questions today is: How do we turn our collective full-bodied intelligence toward collaboration, if that is the way we will survive?"
• "When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient."
• "How do I listen to others? As if everyone were my teacher, speaking to me her cherished last words."
• "I listen to random invitations... to artists who inspire me... I listen to my dreams and the books I am reading..."
• The more I pay attention, the more I see order, clear messages, patterns, and invitations in the small or seemingly random things that happen in my life.
• "I meditate on love."
• "When I fear the universe, I fear myself. When I love and am in awe of the universe, I love and am in awe of myself."

This has been an obsession of mine since I began journaling. I thought I needed to be great, but it turns out I just needed to create.

"I must walk my own path." As I get older, I understand that it is in the unknown where the most exciting parts of life happen. This is my leap into the unknown.

Birds feel a call in their bodies that they must go, and they follow it, responding to each other and being in their adaptations. Nothing is wasted, or a failure.

I must read Octavia Butler and dissect her vision of leadership. The want and attempt to change the world is science fiction behavior.

If we can't articulate more viable futures and adapt, our human future is pretty hopeless. What Butler's work holds together: a coherent visionary exploration of humanity, and emergent strategies for being better humans.

It is so important that we fight for the future, get into the game, get dirty, and get experimental. We embody, we learn, and we release the idea of failure because it is all data. But first we imagine. We are in an imagination battle.

We must imagine new worlds that transition ideologies and norms so that no one sees Black people as murderers, brown people as terrorists and aliens, but all of us as potential cultural and economic innovators. This is the point of so much of my current messaging: these worlds that seem so far off are not.

— Jay