The Challenge of Alignment

• Blog Post Archived
• Notes
  • Start with a story from the last two months
  • Feedback
    • Do a self review of pronoun usage
    • Zachary Fleischmann
    • Michael Koutsoubis
    • Andrew Spector
    • Friday Notes
      • Get rid of sleep part of the model
      • Service +1
      • Nix the hour chunking
      • Need to work on alignment, balance
      • lol change my friends
  • Garage
    • To accurately depict why this is a huge problem and how I intend to fix it, I want to introduce a concept I've been thinking about I'm calling the Four Arrowheads of Service.
    • The Mental Model
    • Each of the four arrowheads represents a distinct group of people that you could devote your time to service. The model makes the claim that you will not be able to effectively be of service to any higher level arrowhead until you've solidified the arrowheads below it.
    • REPLACE IMAGE
    • The 4 categories are:
    • • Yourself - Time spent helping yourself. This includes sleeping, working out, eating, health, and leisure
      • In Person - Time spent helping those immediately around you. This includes people you live with, the coworkers you see in the office, and others you interact with in person day to day.
      • Online - Time spent helping those you interact with on the internet. This includes your clients, friends made through social media, and those you see in person infrequently.
      • World - Time spent helping out the world in general. This includes work towards charity, steps taken to fight world problems that will affect everyone like climate change, and any user of your products that you don't interact with
    • There could be activities that serve multiple arrowheads. For example, putting out a tool on open source could have been inspired to help a friend be more efficient (In Person) but since it's public could be used by many others that you never interact with (World).
    • My Problem
    • 
    • How I Intend To Fix It
• Content {{word-count}}
  • "Vargas, stop being so lame, hang out with us!"
  • This is an example of the things I hear before deciding to go to bed at an obnoxiously early hour of 10pm. It reminded me of the rallying cries I used to yell during college. As someone who would be up drinking until almost sunrise, I was constantly trying to get friends to stay up and validate this decision making with me. Now, two years later, I was on the other side of that coin.
  • This type of interaction has been occurring far too often. In Florida, the rest of my friends planned a beach trip. Because of how I did not "make space for it" in my calendar, I ended up staying home while the rest of them went. In Detroit, my friends would often go and take mid day breaks to play basketball. Because of how I did not feel I could afford to give that break, I stayed back.
  • Each of these interactions, while insignificant in the moment, compound to a larger attitude. I'm taking my relationships with my friends for granted and not allocating the appropriate time investing in those relationships. It was a huge behavioral flaw I exhibited in my last romantic relationship and I was doing it again with the friends I'm now living with.