This Approach Affects How I See Everything
Having done many such studies in pursuit of timeless and universal principles, I’ve learned that most things—e.g.,
prosperous periods, depressions, wars, revolutions, bull markets, bear markets, etc.—happen repeatedly through
time. They come about for basically the same reasons, typically in cycles, and often in cycles that are as long or
longer than our lifetimes. This has helped me come to see most everything as “another one of those,” just like a
biologist, upon encountering a creature in the wild, would identify what species (or “one of those”) the creature
belongs to, think about how that species of thing works, and try to have and use timeless and universal principles
for dealing with it effectively.
Seeing events in this way helped shift my perspective from being caught in the blizzard of things coming at me to
stepping above them to see their patterns through time.[2] The more related things I could understand in this way,
the more I could see how they influence each other—e.g., how the economic cycle works with the political one—
and how they interact over longer periods of time. I also learned that when I paid attention to the details I couldn’t
see the big picture and when I paid attention to the big picture I couldn’t see the details. Yet in order to understand
the patterns and the cause-effect relationships behind them, I needed to see with a higher-level, bigger-picture
perspective and a lower-level, detailed perspective simultaneously, looking at the interrelationships between the
most important forces over long periods of time. To me it appears that most things evolve upward (improve over
time) with cycles around them, like an upward-pointing corkscrew: For example, over time our living standards
rise because we learn more, which leads to higher productivity, but we have ups and downs in the economy
because we have debt cycles that drive actual economic activity up and down around that uptrend.
I believe that the reason people typically miss the big moments of evolution coming at them in life is that we each
experience only tiny pieces of what’s happening. We are like ants preoccupied with our jobs of carrying crumbs in
our minuscule lifetimes instead of having a broader perspective of the big-picture patterns and cycles, the
important interrelated things driving them, and where we are within the cycles and what’s likely to transpire. From
gaining this perspective, I’ve come to believe that there are only a limited number of personality types going down
a limited number of paths that lead them to encounter a limited number of situations to produce only a limited
number of stories that repeat over time.[3]
The only things that change are the clothes the characters are wearing and the technologies they’re using.