Mind Optimization Part 20: Bootcamp & Fractals
Small changes can lead to big changes. Snowflakes can become avalanches. You have to start somewhere small, to make something big happen.
This video is part twenty of twenty-six excerpts from a presentation hosted by SOUL Food Salon in March 2019.
You may check out the full playlist of this video series on The Art and Science on Mind Optimization here. Alternatively, you can also click here to watch the previous video and here for the next one.
Video Transcript
So what can we learn from fractals? Because the importance here is the importance of small rules and the example that always comes to mind is boot camp. I always ask the question why in boot camp do they care that you tie your shoes and you make your bed? Because you’re more likely to listen and charge to battle when you’re told to do so. Martin Luther King was known to have said, “A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And another manifestation of the power of small things is called the broken windows theory, which granted, it’s been debated, but they’ve argued that towns where there’s a broken window, graffiti and litter on the street are more likely to have higher level crimes committed as well.
I bring this back to the psychology lesson because the importance of these small things that we do every day cannot be underscored. Because we are biological systems, because we are part of a world that is possibly fractal, you have to understand that each little nugget of that Romanesque lettuce is tremendously important because it creates the complexity of that whole vegetable and that one single branching pattern has the ability to create the complexity of that tree.
