Soundbyte Psychology

While working at a certain fruity company, I remember the effect it had on me when I saw an entire cluster of plants literally killing themselves to reach the little amount of sunlight that reached them during the winter day. They stretched so far towards the light that they were uprooting themselves. One had already lost too much rooting and fallen. Some of the plants were reaching over other ones and likely blocked out light to those, but they were killing themselves over this limited resource of light. Then, looking out onto the field, I saw a single tree out in the light. It had grown into an almost perfect half-circle, completely balanced. It had non-finite resources and no competition. It was whole.

I have a personal ethic that, as long as something matters to me, I will push myself to be the best. One immediate effect is how much resistance surround this effort externally. The more you move forward, the more resistance. It trains the psychology over time to expect resistance (whether that be competition, management, natural or otherwise). When you take first, however, everything changes. The psychology has been prepared to expect greater and greater resistance, yet suddenly there is no interaction at all. Silence. It was only while working for Apple that I realized that this was because there is a concern about any interaction causing a decrease in performance. Before I realized that, I would create stories and illusions about the silence being caused by competition working behind the scenes to overtake me. Again, still trained to expect that. Instead, as I have seen time and again, you begin noticing that your own work and methods are being adopted by others (even passed out between others as some super secret message that must be destroyed after reading). It has become the very solitude and absolute freedom that I now seek in all I do.