Upcoming events:

• Saturday April 4: open IS Connection Call
• Sunday April 12: Community Season 22 kickoff

Last week's newsletter was Surprise lovability and last Sunday was a rest day for Community Calls. (Easter is also off.)

There is so much that we could do. And there is so little of it that we can do. (Buckle up, this is an inward journey edition...)

I'll start with a classic @visakanv tweet:

... Effectively everything is resource-constrained, & seasoned practitioners are especially sensitive to this

Which Visa illustrates like:

Excited newbie: let’s do all the things!!

Grizzled veteran: we have limited time, energy, morale, goodwill. Keeping this in mind, let’s pick one demonstrably good thing we’re confident we can achieve, and get it done decisively so we unlock more resources to do more things

I see this play out EVERY DAY as "biting off more than we can chew", or more generally a kind of motivated reasoning that's basically wishful thinking: letting what we wish for color our perception enough that we start to lose attunement with the constraints of reality and confuse our desire with our ability. (Narcissism of small differences relies on this too, ignoring the costs of striving for perfection.)

Lest people around me think I'm judging only them for not doing better, let me list some ways I've been out of attunement with my own personal capacity just this week:

I forgot to send until tonight (Thursday) a spreadsheet link I meant to send to IV members on Tuesday. I said I'd write two briefs in two days and then let the second slide for four more days without communicating. I scheduled the next Community season to start on Easter Sunday (months ago, before finally fixing it this week). I barely saved one commitment by working past midnight, not because I truly ran out of time but because I failed to keep three things in my head on the same day. I have multiple emails to respond to that are more than two weeks old so people are wondering if I forgot. I've left someone on read for two days thinking I'll do a two-minute task first.

Don't worry, friends, I'm not beating myself up — I assure you that I am successfully doing many more things than average, that I know this, and that I am proud of myself and accepting of my imperfection. And yet sometimes I feel like that little low-battery falling-over phone guy, ya know? My eyes are bigger than my stomach, despite everything I've learned throughout my whole life up to this point.

Well, "A lot of visible problems that you can't seem to solve are secretly solutions you don't want to admit to adopting to problems you don't want to admit to having." -David MacIver So, what is this tendency a solution to?

Asking this, I sense something like "If I'm overreaching and partially failing, then I can know that I'm at least trying hard enough" and thus am a good person or something. Or is it even "seen as" a good person trying hard? No, this case seems self-generated and about self-seeing. There's something there that's a desire to see myself as the more capable version of myself that I wish I already were, and so that leads to the overextension, relying on my reliability to pull me through.

Ah yes — yet another layer of "should-ing on myself" which comes from the generally-useful "lean into being who I want to be" that I really value! And what I've been unconsciously-willfully blind to is that I'm clouding my seeing of my own capacity constraints — trying to stretch, push, "try to live up to" in a way that's not fully clean fuel.

"a man's reach should exceed his grasp" says Browning's del Sarto. Hyperstitioning/manifesting as warp of self? Wishing as warp of faith? In truth, acceptance of my real capacity and motivations is my trail to positive fuel and the 10x clarity that attunement brings.

Let me bring this concretely back out to IS: What good is talking of "A new era" if we can't clearly point to and rally around the "one demonstrably good thing we’re confident we can achieve, and get it done decisively so we unlock more resources to do more things"? So can we, can I?

Well, one thing that the relational web launch process has clarified is that it's not just about "adding doing to being" — it's about adding asynchronous connection to synchronous, at a new level of scope. That's helpful clarity, and the reason why building our own software to do this is the one big bet in this phase. If it fails, we have a standard network with a Quarterly Convening and yet another crappy social app. If it works, then we unlock lots of latent aligned-but-undirected energy (which then enlivens our Community? Yeah, I'll admit that) in the form of (what outcomes could we see?) coordination and trust-deepening and satisfaction and accomplishments.

The one thing again: Build an async relationship-backed network that's energy-giving to participate in (with low time cost being part of that equation), helps you be who you want to be (including the doing parts of you), and helps you do that with others. How? Something like "cultivate the crew within the crowd" comes to mind. It's not quite that simple (can't ignore inner development, can't ignore the relationships outside the network) but this direction already feels like some hard-won clarity improvement.

Hitting midnight again — but this time it was mostly a positive pull. Until next time,
Cheers,
James