“Intentional Attention” - Utopia in Beta
“The right kind of warrior takes on his own internal demons before he sails out to take on those of others.” -Paul Kingsnorth
Inner work is outer work.
There’s a narrative floating around Silicon Valley that minimizes the importance of working on ourselves.
Some claim that we’ve put too much emphasis going to “inner space” and not enough going to “outer space”. Others state that their goal is “zero introspection”. An increasing number of startups are adopting the "996" norm of working 9am-9pm 6 days a week—leaving little time to realistically attend to all of the core pillars of our health.
I know from experience how much dedication it takes to build a successful organization, but another thing I know is how dangerous it is to discount wisdom in our criteria for success.
Is it any coincidence that we've found ourselves in an AI arms race that incentivizes competition over cooperation, comorbid with an increasingly lonely and isolated culture, largely manufactured by Big Tech’s two-decade race to the bottom of our brain stems? Does this sound like a culture that has properly attended to its inner life?
Isabelle Castro digs into these issues in an article she interviewed me for on mastering our attention in the age of AI. A key question every founder should sit with is: how does my inner work affect my outer work, for better or for worse?
As many wisdom traditions have stated for millennia: the divide between "inner" and "outer" is illusory.