Thread by @tom_morganKCP

I've spent all of this year learning about "the pursuit of wisdom" and there's one core concept I just can't get out of my head.

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This is “RELEVANCE REALIZATION (RR).”

I find @vervaeke_john to be the most interesting voice of wisdom. One definition of RR he has used is:

“The ability to ignore vast numbers of options (hopefully poor ones) and focus on a small set of potentially fruitful ones.”

I would summarize the key benefit of RR as “knowing exactly the right thing to do at exactly the right time.”

It’s consistent with my favorite definition of wisdom: “knowing what information is important.”

Author @BobbyAzarian talks about how the goal of any living thing is to get increasingly more statistically correlated with the flow of its environment.

I think RR describes the physical and psychological manifestation of that efficiency.

A recent meta-study of 30yrs of wisdom research found it’s correlated with both “hedonic” and “eudaimonic” wellbeing.

Hedonic wellbeing describes our pleasure and happiness in life.

Eudaimonic wellbeing describes adjustment, growth, and the fulfillment of one’s potential.

Vervaeke also makes HUGE claims about the importance of relevance realization. He believes it’s fundamental to connectedness, meaning, and our overall flourishing in the world.

As a collaborator of Vervaeke’s, @BrettPAndersen uses a unique mix of complex systems theory and evolutionary psychology to argue that our participation in relevance realization is “biologically and psychologically optimal.”

How do you IMPROVE it? "Expertise expert" @ejames_c believes that the key is: "lots of repetitions in simulations of real world environments with good feedback loops, preferably from an expert."

This is a decent description of an "infinite game."

Vervaeke talks about his own ecology of practices (meditative, contemplative, and embodied). He recommends Vipassana, Metta, and Tai Chi....

...I’ve also focused on boundary practices that facilitate ease communication between conscious and unconscious.

The most dramatic incremental benefits for me this year have been from heart-centered meditation and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

But more generally: how do we know what's relevant?

The short answer is: where our environment guides us.

The same 30-year meta-study found that wisdom is correlated with openness, or “the appreciation and tolerance of new ideas, values, and experiences.”

Openness means cultivating a receptivity to which paths or games are specifically desirable for us.

The bottom line, as always, comes back to attention: a balance of what first GRABS our attention, then HOLDS our attention.

It's your own unique infinite game.

“Attractors” in our environment help signal to us what to pay attention to. This “pull” to places that are relevant to us has a feeling attached to it. It is variously described as attraction, interestingness, bliss, or love.

The path feels MEANINGFUL.

My suspicion is that our heart is central to the process of relevance realization.

Many other cultures regard the heart as an organ of perception, but we tend to treat it as metaphorical.

The heart is associated with elements of ultimate relevance: truth, guidance, and love.

The key balance is to find a positive-sum game to play: where what you can do meets what the world needs. You need BOTH.

Brett's argues that the archetypal hero is the best at playing and preserving the game for others.

It's like @GrahamDuncanNYC's "steward of the game."

I've spent months on this and honestly I feel like I'm just scratching the surface. Here's my longer-form examination of tools and practices for cultivating the skills discussed....
thekcpgroup.com/insights/the-i…

...And because all truly big ideas are applicable at multiple scales. Here's my paper examining this idea through a societal lens, specifically Brett's argument that we are evolving to play positive sum games at ever-greater scale. thekcpgroup.com/insights/at-th…