A friend was explaining to me recently. Life was good, he felt lucky, and grateful. He'd had opportunities and seized them. He liked his job, loved his family, and knew how blessed he was to have what he has.

And he was wondering if he was in a local minimum.

What's that? I asked.

Let's say you want to program artificial intelligence 🤖💻 so that it's a turtle that's been placed on a mountain top, and it wants to go to the sea. It can't smell the sea and doesn't know what direction it's in, but it does know that the sea is lower. 👇

So it turns around, picks the direction that has the biggest vertical drop and takes a few steps in that direction. Then it stops, turns around again, picks the direction that now has the biggest vertical drop, and then takes a few steps in that direction.

If it's lucky, it's a straight shot down the mountain and it gets to the sea. 🌊

Lucky 🐢

But most of us know that the world isn't quite so simple. You go down, you go up. And most mountains are surrounded by valleys.

So you walk down the mountain, improving your life. We go lower. If we land in a valley, we tend to keep walking along it, since climbing the sides would be too steep. If we're lucky, we find a stream ♒ and follow it (the water always flows down). If we're really lucky, we make it to the sea. But the earth's terrain is so varied, most of us don't.

We end up in a local minimum.

The area on either side goes up, so we think we're as low as we can go. But really, it's only the lowest point when you evaluate it on a small scale.

The valleys are the "life tracks" we find ourselves on.

Go to (law) school.
Get a (good) job.
Find a partner.
Settle (down).

We tend to just walk forward rather than go through the effort to climb the sides of the valley.

Most of us don't know what's over the ridge, we only know what's in front of us. This is one of the big advantages of surrounding yourself with people you look up to. People who live how you want to live. Who are who you want to be. It expands your scale, so that instead of finding the lowest point in your immediate vicinity, you can push the boundaries further and further.

If you don't have those people in your life, find them. Now.

And (perhaps most) importantly:

I think of the streams ♒ as our deepest values and passions. Water always flows down, so you know you're going in the right direction. As the stream finds more water (and our love and passion builds) it becomes more of a force, carving through the mountains around us. And when you finally reach a local minimum - just let your passion build until it's filled up. You now have a lake, and there's a run off somewhere, pointing you in a new direction towards the sea. 🌊

We've got a bit of a problem in our society. We expect that the valleys lead us to the sea because that's what we're told.

They don't always.

Instead, find your streams, expand your horizons, and trust your journey.

With love 💙💜, go forth.

You'll find me walking out there somewhere. Following my own river. 😊

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The Local Minimum 🤖💻