Lessons from Nature Podcast

Long Game Framework: Observation 55. Practical Dreaming. 2027

Mark Rubin Season 1 Episode 55

Observation:

The most important observation in the story is the protagonist's unique ability to create the future they envision using a structured approach called the "Long Game Framework." This framework, converted into software, helps organize thoughts and ideas, setting clear rules, visions, outcomes, and progress steps. It emphasizes the significance of learning from both successes and failures, and its systematic nature allows for the efficient transformation of dreams into reality.

The Lesson:

The essential lesson is that structured planning and learning from experiences, both good and bad, are vital for turning dreams into achievable goals.

How this is Helpful:

  1. Planning: Emphasizes the importance of organized planning in achieving long-term goals.
  2. Learning: Highlights the value of learning from every outcome to improve future endeavors.
  3. Visioning: Encourages the practice of clearly envisioning and articulating one's dreams as a step towards realization.


Questions for Reflection:

  1. What's My Vision? How can I clearly define and articulate my dreams and goals?
  2. How Do I Learn? What can I learn from my successes and failures to improve my future efforts?
  3. Am I Organized? How can I better organize and structure my plans to effectively achieve my goals?


For more ‘Practical Dreaming’, visit https://www.markianrubin.life/practical-dreaming 

00:00

My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality. I've always been able to create the future that I imagined. And I've been, I've been creating the future I imagined since I was a kid. People that know me in this way, asked me things like, you always seem to say something. And then like years later, it happens. Or you always seem to be able to like, you know, manifest, as they say, they manifest like this future, you imagine, because I'll say something like I'm gonna do in 10 years, and then I do it, where it happens. It's because I have a framework for creating a future, I don't have things that I say in front of the mirror every day, but I use a framework. And it's called the long game framework. And the long game framework is something I'm going to be explaining in this project. In around I think it's 2027. And I'm going to convert this framework into software, this process enables me to organize the models in my mind in a sequential way. And in a way that improves learning, doing it this way, creates cross functionally connected opportunities for things to work. And I'll explain that I'm gonna go through this, the different components of it, this is going to be used later, you know, in software for other people to be able to enter their ideas. And what will happen is that this software will spit out a project plan with dates and milestones, and dollar costs and time. And then the person would then just track their progress, and their learning, and the proof that it worked. And I learned this by paying attention in my life to things that work and things that didn't, and looking at people that were able to create the future and trying to model how they did it. What were their steps. I mean, there's two possibilities here for world builders, a world builder is either lucky, and it's magic, or they're doing something, I'm talking about increasing the probability of success by doing something in a certain order. So here's the way I do it. This is the long game framework is a series of modules, and modules. The first module is rules. It's important when creating a game, like a life game, to know what the rules are. And it's important to share those rules with other people. Because there'll be other people in the game of life, making sure that the people in the orbit are aligned on these roles is critical to having a harmonious relationship with the people. So Rules are made up of three things, which is values, principles and practices. Values are easy. When I think of people that I like spending time with wonder of the top three characteristics of those people that I enjoy. And those are my values. That's what I value by definition. That's what I value about other people. So what do I like the most the top three things I like the most about other human beings. The next one is principles. I have 12 principles now, which are basically the way I operate with other people. I'll say the first three. First one is I value time by valuing my health, exercise, weight, sleeping, do try to avoid destructive behaviors, things like that. The next principle I have is I meet people where they want to be met, I am sensitive to the way people interact with me. And what they say to me what they tell me, and I try to match that level of either interest or detail to try to stay calibrated with other people and their vibe with me. And the third one is called help the willing, which is I only help people that ask me for my help. And I never give advice. I only share experience. I know I have nine more. But basically those three things are, I think, a good place to start, at least for me. And then practices, which is one of the things I do every day, every week, every month every year, those are things like I go to I go to sleep every night between 930 and 10. I walk every day I spend time outside every day, those are practices. And I think defining the values, principles and practices and telling people what they are is a great way to interact with other people. You know, when I think through of conflicts I've had with people, it's because either I wasn't living my values, principles or practices. Or the other people didn't know though, or care. By defining these things. It makes it very easy to interact with other people in a way that feels aligned with my vibe vision. So the next module is called Vision. So the first one is rules. And the next one is vision and visions are made up of dreams. And one thing I've learned most people I know have no idea. They don't know how to dream. They don't know they have permission to drink. They don't know you can imagine anything you want to imagine anything. Anything. Your permission to imagine anything. You also have permission to make anything as long as Zin, the rules of like legal system. But the number of things that are possible to imagine is infinity. And the number of things that is possible to agree, is not infinity. But it's a lot. And often a fascinating thing about people are asking people like, what do you want to do doing such the worst way to ask somebody this question? If you ask somebody what they do my experience almost all the time, they start by telling you what they don't want to do. I don't know what I want to do. But I can tell you what I don't want to do. And that's living life through the process of elimination. And if there's a near infinite number of things that you could do, and you don't know what it is that you want to do, then all that life is is subtracting things that don't feel right. What How is that a useful way to spend time subtracting things doesn't mean that you can't change our mind, it doesn't mean that something that felt right for a long time won't be won't feel good later. I mean, that's part of learning. But where this starts is dreams. My framework starts with a simple fill in the blank sentence, the world I imagined, the world I imagined is a world where people fill in the blank. What are people doing in the world that you imagine? What are they doing? The world I imagined is a world where people live in harmony with the rest of nature. And all this stuff I'm doing here is to create that world. I think having a dream is good. Sharing a dream is even better. Because then when people hear the dream, two things happen, at least one they might be inspired to share their dream. And that's good. And to, they might help. Maybe they imagine the same world or a component of the world. See, if I say the world, I imagined as a world where people live in harmony with the rest of nature. That's like a kind of like, I don't know, philosophical thing. But for the right person, like a yoga person, or like a meditation person, or a person that likes to like Cook, like natural foods from their surroundings, they'll get what I mean, those things are all components of what I'm saying. And so having a dream is important and sharing the dream is important too. Next, is outcomes. And the question is to define three to five outcomes of this vision, what are the outcomes? What are things that will come out of this vision, which good things will happen? For me some outcomes, at least one of the one of the parts of it is that people will learn about business, people will learn skills, people will be part of a community and habitat will be created. And those are outcomes of some of the things that I'm doing. The next part of the outcomes is what are the goals of those outcomes. And a goal is a thing that can be measured by a certain date. For example, I'm going to create 10,000 beekeepers by the year 2030. Through this, and in doing so those four things that I mentioned will occur. So that's a series of goals. The next module is strategy. And that defines relationships. And that is defined by the structure of the dome of dreams, geodesic structure, everything in my mind is organized in a coordinate system, or can be organized in a coordinate system that's based on this geodesic structure. And the reason this is better than like a list is that the things are cross functionally connected. What that means is that if you have a list, like a sequential list of things that has to happen when something doesn't happen, you can't make it to the next step. especially well for things that have dependencies, which in life is most things so by designing a series of steps that are cross functionally connected, based on the structure of how everything connects in my mind that covers three sides of creating value, creating value for the world, which is business, creating value for yourself, which is about learning and self awareness, and creating value for our tribe, which is around communities. Our communities are designed around different things. Knowing how those things connect together, and then doing little projects to move information around between the components of the structure and using the relationships between things. To maximize the chances of success improves the outcomes. If it's possible to know the rules have a vision, know the outcome of the vision and Oregon As a strategy based on these relationships, it just improves the chances of success. Next is people. Now let us strategy has been defined, who are the people that are necessary to execute each component in the strategy. Now, if a specific person is known, like their name, that can be added, or if a type of person is known, that can be added. And you can add the name later. It's like if you need a marketing person who does branding of Ico projects, I don't know anyone that does that, but somebody does. So I could add the kind of person and that helps me find them later. And when people see the model, they think, Oh, I'm a marketing person that has this particular skill branding, ego projects, I should give mark a call, or send me an email. So after the people are defined, the next step is to make a plan, all a plan is, is taking the elements on the Domo dream and putting them on a sequential time order. So there are some rules with this, that I've observed when I create the future, using the long game framework. There are things called this is the order campaigns, strategies, tactics, and maneuvers. A campaign is like project it like strategy is what's defined on a dome of dreams, which is a whole bunch of series of things. A tactic is like a project that I'm doing, that's going to launch a story. The maneuvers are like last minute adjustments to things. Because often, you know, things in real life happen in different speeds than I imagined. And so I have to adjust up downstream things based on the timing of events. And the plan simply organizes those things in a way, in this cross functionally connected way, to maximize the chances of success. The next module is called progress, progress and maps the trajectory, I talked earlier in this series about momentum, things that have a trajectory, you know, have a position and a direction, they're going in in speed, and they're carrying energy with them in the form of momentum, the ball going through the air is carrying momentum along a path. And that's called a trajectory. And knowing the trajectory of ideas is important because because when you're creating the future, you're intercepting the future, where it's going to be later. And a way to explain this is if you ran to where a ball was going to be, and you caught it. And then you ran that in reverse the video of that in reverse, and you saw where you were the step before, and the step four, and the step before the step before you got to the time before he started running. When you get when you caught the ball, it will be obvious where the ball was going to be because you could see it moving in the air, and you could see a person moving to intercept it. And by by mapping the trajectory by managing the progress against the plan. And so when you're tracking the progress, they're tracking, is the person the right person to start on time that end on time? Or will it end on time to call some more or less than I thought, for every single thing that's occurring. And that's the same thing as watching hundreds of people run to where the ball is going to be. So imagine, imagine you've got I mean, I probably have hundreds of things cooking now on this plan, who knows what will happen, but some balls will be caught, and some balls will be dropped. And some balls will be caught re thrown later. And that's just like throwing the ball. And that's part of creating the future next, about learning and optimizing. So this is something that I've observed about people about learning is most people learn through trial and error, which means they something they want. They try it and either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't, maybe they learn and maybe they don't planning to learn at each step. So when I when I designed these things, I asked myself What three things will they learn if this works? What three things will I learn if it doesn't work? By doing this? I can learn twice as fast and in more detail. See what I think what happens at least people I know is like if something works out the way they imagined. They don't ask themselves like three to five questions of like, why did that work? Or what could I learn from that working? Or how can I double down on what I learned and amplify it times 10 The next time think most people check the box okay it worth but they don't have a framework for integrating that lesson into their life. They just think oh, it didn't work. I'll do better next time. I'm so between planning to learn when things work, planning to learn when things don't work, and then using a framework for learning along the way, is critical for optimizing the system, and reducing time or reducing costs. So learning how to learn is important. And the final one is called Proof, which is the end. And what's important when imagining the future? Is seeing the end? What does it look like? Who is going to be there? Where's the sun? Where are the shadows? How does the wind feel? What's the temperature? has a feel on your skin? What animals are around you? What can you hear? Can you hear the birds? Can you hear the foxes running around, and you know, these different things. And having a clear vision of where a sequence ends is important, because that's what you're mapping that trajectory against. So I bought this land, you know, when I was 15, to do this project in West Virginia, and this honey Lake glamping is 1050 feet from the original piece of land that I bought, the proof that I was creating, because I knew no one would ever believe any of this stuff. Because I thought was to get my name on a deed, which is a permanent record from 1985. That proves that I that I plan this when I was a kid, and mapping backwards from that, knowing that that was the end that one day I was gonna show people a deed and be like, I'm launching Miko project based on all these ideas. And I planned this when I was 15. And here's proof. And having an endpoint is knowing where the ball is going to be. So like if someone throws a ball and nobody catches it, but you're pretty good at like watching balls move around, you can pretty much figure out plus or minus a little bit where it's gonna be. But you can do this with ideas. You can do this with life. You can do this with creating the future as long as you have a framework to get what it is that you imagined to the end. And that's the long game framework.

People on this episode