Nature vs Nurture vs Self Authoring: determined not to be determined
/By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.
Reading time: 7 mins
Summary
IMO you don’t choose where you start life, but IMO you can have a strong say in where you end up.
You have biological set points and your environment matters a lot… but IMO these two don’t determine everything. I believe in a modern developed economy, most people, through hard work, can self author to where their start points become effectively barely relevant.
IMO the best people in almost any field have cultivated themselves massively, ie are majority ‘self-authoring’.
IMO Michael Jordan wasn’t always going to be ‘Michael Jordan’. He put in the hard work necessary to go from ‘good raw ingredients’ to ‘greatest of all time’.
IMO Taylor Swift wasn’t always going to be a megastar. She put in the hard work to ‘self author’ from a very young age.
IMO if Einstein had instead worked as a farmer he wouldn’t have come up with relativity. He had to toil away at it for thousands of hours.
IMO physical starting points matter much more than mental starting points.
Race horses haven’t gotten faster in 100 years, they reached the limit of breeding and training 100 years ago.
Today a human can build a rocket that goes to mars., 100 years ago there was no internet, no computers, only ~50% of houses had power.
While an oversimplification: the body is limited, the mind is limitless.
IMO mentally you start with personality traits etc… but you don’t start able to speak let alone do math etc.
IMO your mind is your ultimate possession. IMO, with hard work, your mind can be your ultimate creation!
Jingle: I don’t believe in determinism, I don’t believe life is fated… I believe, with hard work, a good life can be created!
Visualisation of what I think is possible across a life
Effectively I believe you can grow your mind indefinitely.
First you learn to read, then you read to learn.
IMO the point of the education system is so that you can eventually educate yourself.
You go to school but eventually you are hopefully ‘self authoring’. I’ve put a step change in the amount of self authoring possible post 18 as typically that is when the formal secondary education system stops.
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Details
The work of Harvard Developmental Psychologist Robert Kegan
Duncan’s adaption of Kegan’s framework
Definitions
Nature (biology): everyone has a different mind start point, eg serotonin levels etc and different personality traits at birth. IMO these of course affect you but they don’t necessarily determine the rest of your life.
“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.” - Betrand Russel
Nurture (environment): the more a child is spoken to the better their language development. If you are born in a christian country you are very likely to be christian. If you are born in a muslim country you are very likely to be muslim.
“If you put someone in a cult they become a cult member. If you take someone out of a cult they stop being a cult member.” - Unknown.
Feral Children Documentary - what the opposite of ‘nurture’ is :(.
Self authoring: yeah this is the same bloody name as one of the levels in Kegan’s taxonomy so is confusing. Effectively for my definitions you don’t get to choose your biology, often you can have little say in your environment (eg don’t choose to go to school or that you have to learn maths) but IMO you can choose / have agency in some areas.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” - Viktor Frankl
“A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances.” — James Allen
Model 1:
According to Kegan the majority (58%) of the adult population are ‘3rd Order Socialised Mind’, 35% are ‘4th order: self-authoring’, and 1% are ‘5th order: self-transforming’. 6% are 1st or 2nd order.
For the purposes of this thought experiment, I’ve left nature (biology) as flat from birth. Yes apparently some people are more susceptible to alzheimer's etc but I’m just trying to have a model that helps add colour.
Kegan posits that ‘3rd order: socialised mind’ happens post adolescence so effectively once someone is ‘grown’. For this thought exercise I’ve left the effect of ‘nurture (environment)’ to be flat from this point onwards. I think that modern society is ever increasingly complex so the amount of its effect on someone today is, all else equal, greater than 200 years ago. Basically humans know more and have more access to information than ever before so the effect of ‘nurture (environment)’ slowly increases.
I’ve made it so for my definition of ‘5th order: self-transforming’ that one is ‘majority self authored’. I don’t think you’ll ever not be affected by your biology or eg your childhood but I do think that it can become an ever smaller portion of who you are.
Model 2:
What is possible if one proactively self authors continuously across one’s life. AKA gets to ‘5th order: self-transforming’.
Kegan purports that the majority (58%) of adults are at ‘3rd order: socialised mind’. Something like this.
*aside: in some ways this blog is a rearticulation another blog I wrote of ‘Brain upgrading: there is no such thing as intelligence’.
Model 3:
Nature is obviously non-controllable. Someone biologically programmed to be short will never be able to be a champion basketballer
Nurture is both controllable and non-controllable. Some aspects of nurture are controllable e.g. choosing to read as a kid. Other aspects are not controllable, such as one’s material wealth, education, supportiveness/attentiveness of parents and so on. Unfortunately, these latter aspects of nurture can have a major influence on one’s mind potential as well as nature.
In other words, someone who has two wealthy, educated parents is far more likely to have greater space for mind development and an easier road to ‘self-authoring’ later in life.
In this way, ‘hard work’ is not the only barrier to achieving one’s self-authoring potential and overcoming the barriers to success. Material circumstances in nurture are also important
Example 1: Michael Jordan
IMO Michael Jordan clearly started with quality biology (nature).
However one could argue that he was one of the hardest working at improving himself (self authoring) and his team in the history of the NBA. The Last Dance documentary is just epic.
IMO Jordan was getting mentally better and better at Basketball his entire career… it’s just that he was fighting the inevitable physical decline...
… but what about pursuits that don’t involve your body?
Example 2: myself (Duncan Anderson)
When I was 18, in hindsight, I had ‘the innocence of youth’... which is a nice way of saying ‘I was ignorant AF and didn’t know it’.
I honestly thought I was ‘my own person’ when I was 18, aka that I was something like 90% ‘self authored’. I had no idea of most of the concepts in this blog.
In hindsight I didn’t choose which school I went to, what I studied, my best friends were the ones with houses closest to my parents house… etc etc!
I don’t think I’m ‘a different person’ to what I was when I was 18, but I do like to think I’ve grown a lot. Mentally I like to think i’m 10x what I was when I was 18… which isn’t saying much as in hindsight IMO 18 year old Duncan had done stuff all self authoring.
I don’t think I’ve ‘changed’, I like to think I’ve ‘grown’.
Visualisation 1
Visualisation 2 - Duncan at 18
Visualisation 3 - Duncan at 36
Done well, I find time spent growing (AKA self authoring) to be super rewarding. An example of this is the CloudStreaks blog.
I think when I was 18 I did zero proactive ‘self authoring’ hours a week.
I think I probably do 10-40 hours a week today of proactive ‘self authoring’.
I like to think I’m majority self authored today.
Example 3: Elon Musk
Musk went from trying to buy and refurbish russian intercontinental ballistic missiles to building SpaceX and reusable rockets.
Do you think Musk was born able to design reusable rockets? IMO Musk was born like the rest of us, unable to talk, no maths ability, no engineering skills.
IMO each year Musks abilities grow. One reflection of this is what Tesla and SpaceX are able to do. IMO almost everything you see is the product of human minds growing. Eg a skyscraper, a road, the self driving capabilities of Tesla cars.
In some respects the internet is the hive mind of humanity. I believe the average human mind today has the possibility of being wildly more capable than a human mind of 100 years ago.
If you only take away one thing
We all have different start points in life (eg socioeconomic status, biology set points, some personality traits, supportive or not so much parents, etc etc).
*aside: I think one path to meaning is to try and, in aggregate, improve the start point of humanity. On average, I think humanity is much better off than it was 200 years ago.
While of course your starting point matters, IMO it doesn’t entirely determine where you can finish. IMO through hard yet hopefully rewarding work I think you can slowly self author more and more to build yourself into mentally what you want to be. From undoing behaviour traits, to forgiveness, to relativity, to building companies.
“Be the change you want to see.” Gandhi.
“Build yourself into the person you want to be.” Duncan Anderson.
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Education addendum
IMO one articulation of the ‘Edrolo fuzzy north star’ is trying to get people to ‘5th order: self transforming’.
If Kegan’s numbers are right only 1% of humans currently get there. I think maybe we can try and have 90% of humans get there.
200 years ago only 10% of humans could read, now 90% can.
IMO self-transforming is being able to build yourself into the person you want to be, is being able to build your own values and live by them.
First you learn to read, then you read to learn.
IMO in some respects I think the point of the education system is so that you can eventually educate yourself.
As a society, we are slowly ascending Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
In some respects I see self-actualisation = self authoring. I think we can level up the existing education system to where hopefully 90% of people can self-actualise / self author. IMO money helps well with the bottom part of maslow's hierarchy (eg more food) but money doesn’t help well with the top. The education system done well can help well with the self actualisation.