A|C|E

I've been thinking about this for some time now, and it seems that others have been having related thoughts as well. I'll get into the factors that are driving the consideration of these things in another post, and focus on the 'what' in this post.

In my opinion, any given person has two things that are of value to exchange with most other people: Attention and Creativity.

Attention | Perception by an aware mind has value. It is how ideas spread, markets form and shift, opinions develop, and how people know the world and each other. The focused attention of a person is therefor worth much more than passive and incidental awareness. By choosing what we pay attention to, we determine which ideas can affect us most profoundly. (Whicken has some amusing fiction that's germane to this idea on his blog)

Creativity | The generation of new ideas, or the synthesis of novel constructs out of existing concepts is the other half of the equation. Creativity drives change, changes the rules and rules the markets of attention. Creative content will often draw a disproportionate share of attention in the world, and thus the market speaks.


The interplay of Attention and Creativity (and indeed, many other aspects of life) can be seen to be modulated by Effectiveness.

Effectiveness | Effectiveness is the measure of impact, relative to the desired outcome, that any given action has. Effectiveness is of far greater importance than Efficiency (as so eloquently put by Tim Ferriss), and should always guide our efforts.

How does one become more effective? By maintaining awareness of (and Attention to) the process of action and the results thereof. By constantly tuning and refining (and experimenting, ie being Creative), it is possible to constantly improve the quality of action taken. This concept is core to the paradigm of Agility that I so often tangle with in the world of software development, but it is of far broader reach and importance than just that industry, as some simple exercises can confirm (again, in posts to come).


Attention | Creativity | Effectiveness

The choice of how to use each of these is up to each individual, and the outcome of adjustments to our decisions relating to them can be realized as profound changes in our lives.

For the next day, watch yourself: what are you paying attention to? what are you creating? how effective are your actions?

How can you improve?