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About Steve Spalding

Steve Spalding is a consultant (linkedin), writer, thinker, traveler (photos), Netflix watcher, Audible listener and all around Internet-type person who is obsessed with transforming normal folks into hyper-interesting, hyper-efficient, data-driven super-folks — starting with himself.

He spends his free time tinkering with websites, and his not so free time writing, researching and thinking about tinkering with websites. He’s convinced that tinkering with websites and unlocking human potential are materially identical.

This is where he comes to stretch his legs, send him an email at sbspalding [at] gmail [dot] com.

Extremely Strongly Held Beliefs (Subject to Revision)

1. The ultimate condition of the world is uncertainty, so the ultimate rule must be adaptability.

2. Life, all of it, is complexity — understanding begins when you realize that simple solutions, while often useful, are always wrong.

3. Knowledge is your most valuable tool, hunt for it with zeal, look for it in the world and in yourself, and scrape it from the bones of every experience.

4. The world is imperfect, all life is imperfect, find some part of it worth fighting for and daily use your strengths to do so.

5. Be robust, prepare for change, in all things predict that conditions will be slightly worse tomorrow than they are today.

6. Understand the weaknesses of human logic, the irrational heuristics on which our rational minds are built.

7. Accept that to affect a mind you have to understand it, to be willing to think as it does, and to speak in the language of its thoughts.

8. Respect the limits of your abilities, find and recruit those to your cause whose limits do not match your own.

9. New knowledge arises from old knowledge through testing, have the courage to test your axioms, your thoughts, your ideas against the world.

10. Understand that genius, if such a thing exists, is the ability and desire to see a few steps further into the future.

11. All things change slowly, but life is a long game, have patience enough to make good decisions even if they are not felt in the instant.

12. At all points in human history our knowledge of the world has been incomplete — yesterday, today, and tomorrow — realize in all cases, no matter your current certainty, you could be wrong.

13. Think of your affects broadly, how they will affect everyone they touch, now and in the unforeseeable future.

14. All problems have a context, to make a change you have the change the context in which that problem exists or produce a new one for it to exist within.

15. Be gentle with people, especially when you don’t have to, especially when you are the only one who will ever notice.