Over the past couple of years I've been mulling over what I want to do with my life. Many ideas have come and gone, but the one that keeps calling me back to it is exploration. Exploration is a complex topic, full to the absolute limit of all that human potential provides, both positively and negatively.
Here is an entry I made on 12/16/22:
I want to build a team. I want to build a team of people that are dedicated to the mission and to the team. I want to be a good leader, and perhaps not to be the sole authority figure, but be able to help guide a synergistic team that each feels empowered to lead and make decisions in their own way. Ironically, I need an objective for these people. I need a vision that is solid through and through, and that people can get behind. I also don't want to forge a vision now and hold onto it forever inflexible. I want to recognize change where it needs to be, and to build a team that can help me see that and help guide the vision forward. Maybe think of the vision as a boat, a vessel we are all pushing forward (carrying?). As we go, the boat may need refits, may need modifications or to go in different directions or assume different strategies for making progress in difficulty. I'd love to explore. I'd love to be united with an enthusiastic team pushing forward a vision that I truly believe in. How can I imagine a better world? How can I see what I'd like the world to look like? If I can do that, I can create a path to it. Maybe. What do I want to see in the world? I want to see people that think. I want to see people that are willing to engage with one another when it goes against how they feel. I want to see humanity relate to itself well, to care for each other, to build one another up, to support each other. Not to tear down and destroy. I also don't like things that masquerade as building up but can easily be converted into tearing down, especially if orchestrated by an entity like the US government that has a greater track record in deceiving and damaging than it does in building and generating good things. I want to see a world where people are the change they want to see. Be the change you want to see in the world. Mahatma Ghandi. I may not see a path in that vein for getting mass percentages of the world on board, but I can start with the people I do have around me. I can influence a few people at a time, maybe just one at a time. That will have some effect. I want it to be a massive effect, but it may not be an effect I can see, either because it happens after my lifetime, or because it's simply opaque in my own. I hurt for the world's problems, but I cannot heal them all instantly. I can engage on a small scale to start, with an eye to caling quality change as I go in the future. I want humans to find something to unite around. I want what I do to never be politicized. I want to fight that. Things like climate science have been politicized, and thus have been robbed entirely and thoroughly of their unifying power. I think exploration could be a field in which humans can engage their curiosity across boundaries and learn more about the world and universe we exist in. It is effectively limitless, this world we have. Limitless things to learn, a bottomless well of mysteries to explore. I cannot wait for interplanetary, and eventually interstellar, travel to not only happen for the first time, but to become affordable and achievable. There are limitless worlds to explore.
Exploration can be a vehicle for unification. Can it be? I'd like it to be. Is human curiosity that universal of a characteristic?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/boomers-30/202012/the-10-universal-human-traits
This guy seems to think curiosity is a universal human trait.
I think all ten of those things that he lists in that article are elements I want in my team, my crew, my vision forging set of people.
So how do I go about creating such a team? How do I learn to be a good enough leader? Is this something where I need to learn as I go, as I don't want to go about it in virtually any way that is taught that I be ever heard of?
Okay. I can work with that.
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My thoughts on the matter have become massively more in depth since I wrote this (including some changes, but the heart of it is still there), but that is for a future blog.