Using the power of simplicity to pursue your dreams
Chapter 3
Nature Versus Culture
“Nature is the world at its most basic level. It is the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the ground we walk on. Every tool and technology that we use today is made from materials found in nature.”
“Theia teaches us an important lesson about nature. All too often, we look within our own perimeters for the forces that allow us to do big things. But sometimes natural forces can come from the outside”
“Whereas nature created us, culture has been created by us. It is a concept that we have created to try and bring order to our increasingly disordered world. It can make the world better or worse, depending on how we use it.”
“But when people perceive outsiders as a threat to their culture, everyone suffers. We see this front and center in the world today. Diversity however always brings new and interesting perspectives to companies and to countries, provided we respect each other’s cultures.”
“One of my favorite examples of human nature’s power is the idea of a collective intelligence that we have evolved. It is a concept that is known as the Wisdom of the Crowd. This is the simple idea that large groups of people are smarter and more effective at solving problems than any individual member of that group.”
“When culture and nature converge, we manage problems simply, clearly, and powerfully. Nature has a way of rejecting complexity and finding the simplest solutions to big challenges. In other words, nature focuses only on what really matters. Culture on the other hand has a way of adding complexity in the form of politics and social relationships. This brings more complexity but also many benefits. The principles of The Sequence can align them.”
“We are a sequence….. Since we are based on a Sequence and we have evolved to see it in our world, it stands to reason that we have also built our technologies on this sequence. In the same way that the DNA in our cells carrying The Dream of life consists of a code of four chemical bases, we have also designed our digital technology on a simple code of 0’s and 1’s. Everything that we store and communicate digitally is based on that simple code. It has become The Sequence of our modern world. This is not a coincidence.”
