🚙 TREE 699: Traffic works???

I was driving up the M5 on Monday and I thought about how simple it would be to turn the steering wheel hard, flip my car, take out myself and probably a few other people too. Just one little flick.

Obviously, I didn’t.

I really like being alive. I like other people being alive too. But I still spend an oddly large amount of time marvelling that traffic broadly works even though every single driver on the road has the ability to cause death and significant mayhem with very little effort.

This is true for most of society. There’s nothing physically stopping you from jumping on the table at your favourite restaurant and hurling food at your fellow diners. (And there’s a part of you that would absolutely love to.) But you don’t. Neither does anyone else.

It’s kind of amazing.

Two thoughts:

1. Kindness is a real thing and most humans show some kindness every day. Your kindnesses (and refrainings from meanness) connect you to this big cooperative human thing we all do that means we can drive and eat out and negotiate a crowd and take turns. It’s a beautiful thing. Notice it with gratitude.

2. Because people are invested in making things work smoothly, disruption is not as hard as you think. Disrupting creatively takes more work than disrupting destructively, but it’s totally doable if you are willing to do things that aren’t normal. I’m thinking about making your message/product visible.

This is from a one of my favourite pop albums. I consider it to be a work of genius.

Grow slowly
Jeff

P.S. Remember to say thank you by buying my book for every single person who’s ever taught you something.