Harnessing Nature
Top-down vs bottom-up insights for a better life
"Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither reverse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on; it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the applause of the populace. Just as it was started on its first day, so it will run; nowhere will it turn aside, nowhere will it delay. And what will be the result?"
Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
There are two types of people in this world. Those who understand Nature and those who do not. By Nature I mean the universal laws that govern the world. These laws have not changed and they will not change, especially for us humans. Everything we’ve achieved, good and bad such as the Atomic bomb, air travel or the internet comes from understanding these laws.
I’m beginning to understand how Nature works and how I can use it to my benefit or at the very least, to protect myself. By understanding these universal laws you can give yourself an advantage.
We humans are incessant on learning, consuming and evolving. We need not only to know how something is but why it is so. This is what makes us human. We can step back and abstractly think. We can think about things that aren’t yet real.
The problem can be when we attach words such as good and bad, right and wrong, virtuous and evil to things that happen to us or other people.
Nature doesn’t understand good and evil. It just is.
"It doesn't make sense to call something good or bad in an absolute sense based only on how it affects individuals. To do so would presume that what the individual wants is more important than the good of the whole.
Ray Dalio, Principles
By using what we have best, our brain, to understand the world around us, the galaxy we are in and the universe that’s in, we can step outside of our limited beliefs that the world isn’t fair and that life isn’t fair. When you understand that first, life isn’t out to get you and second, understand some simple frameworks then you offer yourself an opportunity to get ahead.
Here is one such framework to help you understand better how Nature works and how it can help you.
Top-down vs Bottom-up analysis
I’ve been reading Principles by Ray Dalio. If you don’t know who he is he’s a self-made multi-billionaire who set up and ran the most profitable hedge-fund in history. Some $124 billion worth of capital. In his book, he describes how Nature taught him to use Top-down vs Bottom-up analysis when looking at almost anything.
"When trying to understand anything-economies, markets, the weather, whatever-one can approach the subject with two perspectives:
1. Top down: By trying to find the one code/law that drives them all. For example, in the case of markets, one could study universal laws like supply and demand that affect all economies and markets. In the case of species, one could focus on learning how the genetic code (DNA) works for all species.
2. Bottom up: By studying each specific case and the codes/laws that are true for them, for example, the codes or laws particular to the market for wheat or the DNA sequences that make ducks different from other species."
Why is this important?
This is a framework that you can use to understand almost anything seemingly complex in life. From your role in your job (bottom-up thinking) to how the corporation you work for integrates into its sub-economy (top-down thinking). Another example would be to imagine there’s a war. You will have small groups of soldiers on the ground in various places fighting small battles. These soldiers are in the thick of it trying to gain an advantage and survive (bottom-up thinking). Then you have your general. They see all of these battles going on simultaneously and have to think about the bigger picture. Where do the resources need to go? What’s more important at this moment in time? This is top-down thinking.
How can this help you?
Let’s say you're a business owner and you're not having a great time. Sales are slow and you feel helpless and stuck. You can use the 2-step approach above to help guide you into making smarter, less emotion-filled decisions. Let’s do this;
Your business is writing newsletters for people and you get paid based on how many paid subscribers you get converted from your free material. Using a bottom-up approach you can ask yourself these questions;
How can I create the most amount of value for each subscriber per article?
Can I be consistent with my content and my publishing? Are regular publishing routines favourable or not? What do I think as someone who reads newsletters?
What are my subscribers’ pain points, why would they come to me for help? Where is my authority?
Who else is within my small ecosystem and how are they working? Can I learn from them? Can I collaborate?
Can I detach myself objectively from my content and view it impartially? Is it good? Does it offer value?
There are 5 main questions you can ask yourself there along with sub-questions to those questions. It would be easy to bury your head in the sand as that business owner but by thinking about your situation from a bottom-up perspective you can map out what is within your control and what isn’t.
Let’s now look at looking at our scenario from a top-down approach;
What are the implications or preferences of choosing one platform (Substack, X, Facebook etc) over another? Is there an edge to choosing one over the other?
Who is my audience on a broad level? How do I define them? Where are they found?
Like a neural network, are there connecting ‘ecosystems’ to my niche that I can explore?
What are the trends in my area of expertise? How can I identify them?
How does my content interact, if at all and compare to others in the ecosystem? Am I prey or am I the predator?
Again, those 5 questions and sub-questions should be enough to get you going or at least thinking smartly about your next move.
Bruce Lee has a terrific quote ‘Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water’. When life seemingly gives you lemons, make lemonade. Use life against itself to get a more favourable outcome for yourself. Mother Nature is to be learned from, not feared.
***
A sidebar to this framework is adaptability. I will make an article explaining how it’s the adaptable not the strong that survive and thrive and how we humans are every single day outsmarted by something that doesn’t even have a brain.