A hundred and fifteen years ago, Christian Larson wrote one of the first popular self-help manifestos. The Optimist’s Creed argued that it was a choice, and a useful promise. Not to promise the world, or the boss, or the market. To promise ourselves. Optimism is not a mood. It’s a discipline.
Last week, Reid Hoffman reminded us that the urge to build is also a choice. That we are homo techne, the species that shaped the tools and is shaped by them in return.
Each of these ideas argues that the future is not something that happens to us. It’s something we make, together, on purpose, or not at all. A potential promise, or a series of promises, that enable a better future.
In the words of Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems: The future begins tomorrow. Perhaps we can show up to make it better. In fact, we must.
Promise Yourself
1. To see optimism not as a prediction but as a choice. Pessimists are sometimes right, but they rarely build anything.
2. To remember that the future is not a place we’re going. It’s a thing we’re making. Every day, with every choice, whether we admit it or not.
3. To be so busy making things better that you have no time to explain why things can’t improve.
4. To understand that “it might not work” is not a reason to stop. Plan for the downside and commit to the contribution.
5. To trade the comfort of certainty for the possibility of contribution. Certainty is for spectators.
6. To be too generous for hoarding, too curious for cynicism, too committed for despair, and too busy shipping to permit the presence of Resistance.
7. To stop waiting to be picked. The world doesn’t care about your credentials. It only cares about what you create.
8. To begin. Before you’re ready. Because you will never be ready.
Promise the Work
9. To ship. Not because shipping is easy, but because unshipped work helps no one.
10. To make the tool serve the human, and not the other way around.
11. To remember that every tool is a teacher. The hand shaped the stone and the stone shaped the hand.
12. To fight and refuse “at scale” as an excuse for “without care.” Scale is a multiplier. It multiplies harm as it multiplies good.
13. To sign your work. Not to take credit but to earn trust.
14. To fix the thing, not the blame.
15. To honor the boring parts. Infrastructure is effort made invisible.
16. To know the difference between building something people need and needing people to want what you built.
Promise Each Other
17. To ask, every time, possible for whom? A lever that lifts only the people holding it is not a lever.
18. To be just as enthusiastic about the success of other builders as you are about your own. Scarcity is a story; possibility compounds.
19. To remember that four billion people got the phone before they got the library or the bank. The phone became both.
20. To teach what you know. Generosity is the only moat that makes the world bigger.
21. To take responsibility for the means as well as the ends.
22. To welcome the skeptic without becoming one.
23. To argue about the how without abandoning the whether. We can make things better. Let’s argue about how.
24. To measure what matters. It doesn’t matter how much money you raise, what sort of buzz you were able to generate, or which bridges you trolled under. What matters is the benefit created. Not engagement, but enrollment.
We are not users, we are people.
Promise the Future
25. To embrace the real choice between the possible and the likely. When your work has impact, playing the lottery is not a moral option. The downside may belong to other people.
26. To take the long view on the purpose and the short view on the action. Plant trees. Ship today.
27. To remember Socrates was right that writing would change memory. He was wrong when he insisted it would diminish us.
28. To notice that every era has its printing press, and every era has people who burn the books.
29. To hold the lever of possibility and technology with both hands. One hand for ambition, one for responsibility.
30. To remember the mistakes of the past, learn from them, and press on. Guilt is not a strategy. But experience, repair, and commitment are.
31. To realize that the whole world will never be on your side, and yet we must commit to building for the whole world.
32. To understand that this creed is not about technology. Technology is just the newest name for the oldest promise: that tomorrow can be better than today, and that it’s ours to make.
The stone is in our hands. It’s already shaping us.
What are we shaping back?
HT to Reid, Christian, and Kevin Kelly.
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