2 Hearts
Part1. My heart
Context
We’ve got one intuition. Our intuition knows things before our mind knows it. With intuition there is no way to overanalyse or overthink things. Therefore, relying on our intuition allows us to make faster and better decisions.
Following our intuition is harder than we might think. It isn’t given that intuition leads us the right way. To have it guide us the right way we have to do some work. But what is that work?
Intuition comes from the heart. By following our intuition, we are following our heart but if our heart gives us the wrong signals we can’t trust it and can’t follow our intuition. The job we’ve got and the work we have to do is to take care of our heart, make it be as healthy as possible, so that it can perform some work for us in return.
I believe that:
If the heart is not ok some people do not function, but if it is ok these people function better than anybody else. This depends on our overall sensitivity. We are all more or less sensitive to the state of our heart but the more sensitive we are the more important it is to have a healthy heart and the bigger the returns and advantages the heart will provide us with. On the contrary, if a sensitive person does not take care of their heart, they are screwed.
There are things that nourish the heart and can make the heart as healthy as possible. These things are worth paying attention to. I will get into this later on.
Heart & Mind
The mind, in the context of the heart, is mostly a medium of communication. It allows to communicate to ourselves or to other people what the heart has already “thought through”. The mind has the ability to listen to the heart and process the information into something that can be communicated to other minds of other people.
Science for example is a listening process first, a reasoning process second and a communication process third. Scientists follow their intuitions, use sophisticated measures and procedures to reason around what they came across and process it into something that can be communicated to other people.
Tech is a listening process first, a reasoning process second and a communication process third. Technological breakthroughs are, I believe, primarily a materialization of the heart and therefore our intuition. Breakthrough technology that changes the way we live and operate is a piece of our heart that some geniuses have been able to identify. They listened, then reasoned around it which allowed them to come up with some tool that us humans call technology. The use of that tool by us humans is prove that the communication process between the technology inventor and the intuition driven human beings that we are, has worked. Technology says more about who humans are than we usually believe.
The heart & mind dynamic is what we humans need to find consensus and to acknowledge that things are “real”. What would it look like if we just went: “I feel like the climate is changing.”? Our discussions between human beings happen on a conscious, rational level and to communicate efficiently we do need to give the mind processed reasons. This does not mean however, that the outcome wasn’t already known intuitively, before hand.
The Heart
The heart is what informs our intuition, what connects us to all other human beings and everything else that is natural, and the thing that makes us feel. These three points are what should make us realize that taking care of our heart is probably the most important thing for us to do.
Intuition is the fast track towards making good and fast decisions, giving us an edge over all “thinking” people.
Connection to other beings and everything else that is natural, wanting to truly belong, is probably the thing that all natural things have in common. This connection is what binds everything together and in us human beings its the heart that provides this connection to everything else.
Feeling is what besides reason and understanding/awareness makes us conscious beings.
I believe that these are reasons enough to convince us about how crucial it is to take care of the heart. Taking care of the heart is to live in a way where you realize that the heart connects to a lot of things and your job is to optimize these connections. Whether it’s the connection to other organs, our mind or other people (community, friends, partner, family), we should do everything to optimize and balance out these connections between our heart and these things.
“Our heart starts beating and it doesn’t stop until it’s over.” - Laird Hamilton
What does the heart “need” to keep beating?
Physiological needs, often misunderstood, give us the most essential things we need to have a healthy heart that keeps beating for a long time. For an average person in the environment I grew up in, most of these needs should be attainable in one way or another although its becoming harder and harder to actually remain conscious about how important these needs are.
The basic needs that we got but forget about quite frequently:
Breathing: exercise is about breathing & air. It forces you to breath and you should see exercise as a breathing exercise.
A healthy diet: nutritious food is at the basis of it all.
Reproduction: sex is also one of the most basic needs, and by that we speak about sex not watching porn or anything else that is supposed to replace it. Reproduction is also about actually reproducing, having kids is a good thing.
Sleep: we are the only species on earth that doesn’t get enough sleep on purpose. That should make us think.
Water: basically everyone is dehydrated these days. Barely anyone is drinking enough water (besides Philip).
Love & belonging: this is a lower level of belonging than what I described above but important for a healthy heart.
Safety needs: just feeling safe and not having to worry about getting killed by anything external, continuously.
Esteem: the drivers that push us to do whatever we do in our eyes and the eyes of other people.
Self actualization: being able to work towards becoming the best we can in whatever we choose to pursue.
The more fulfilled these needs are, the more we are able to trust our heart and act upon it. Since this is a pyramid, we got to make sure that the lower levels are the strongest and remain strong. If the base breaks, the rest will break too. Its probably starts out as a house of cards and over time, the more the needs are fulfilled, it turns into a rock solid pyramid.
Acting Upon The Heart
Having a healthy heart can be summed up in 3 steps:
Continuously taking care of our personal needs in a way that it truly fulfils them leads to authenticity since we got to fulfil them in our way fitting who we are, and consistency since we got to do it continuously. To achieve that we can’t lie to ourselves or to anyone else. We have to stick to the truth. Committing to that drives performance which in turn provides the proof that leads to trust. Trust is what leads to belonging.
Humility, leaving pride and arrogance aside, always fires compassion, which in turn fuels reciprocity- an empathetic, sympathetic human exchange. And through reciprocity we find balance.
Through balance and belonging we are able to create a healthy heart which leads to (a) an intuition that we can rely on, (b) relationships and connections that all things that are part of nature are craving for and (c) new doors that will continuously open to us since we are now being perceived by and perceiving things that we couldn’t before.
From here on lets leave (b) and (c) aside and focus on (a) intuition. A healthy heart allows us to listen to our intuition to make decisions and since the intuition knows things way earlier on than the mind we need to be able to follow the heart and make our decision based on that. There are two steps to that: listening to the intuition and then have the courage to execute on it 100% of the time, without even being able to rationally explain it at first. That’s what gets you ahead.
Once again, this shows that the most important part of it all is to have a healthy heart at first. From there you just got to have the courage to follow your heart 100% of the time. Steve Jobs was, I believe, almost right when he said:
“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” - Steve Jobs.
Maybe we got to make sure our heart is healthy first and then do exactly what he suggested.
Part2. Hani’s Heart
The first part of this post explained how the heart was the centre piece of establishing a good intuition and the from it resulting decisions. All pieces that I described in the context of human beings can be used for Hani since Hani itself is in it’s own way, an organism that aims to make better decisions than any other organism out there, in its specific niche area.
As a reminder: Hani is a mission driven investment network, focused on solving real life challenges, with the goal of becoming the most impactful investment network in the world. It’s strategy is to use geographical decentralization and process automation, to make better decisions in allocating resources. The magic that Hani creates: its decisions will be better and more accurate then every other investment network.
We will be going in detail of how the different elements I described in Part1. can be implemented into the investment network and what they represent in that context.
“A leader needs to believe in his own code. Embedding cultural elements you don’t subscribe to will eventually cause a cultural collapse.” - Ben Horowitz
I truly believe that the view I got in part one truly represents the way we humans function and how we can optimize our decision making, therefore I’m persuaded that if we manage to implement and scale that within Hani we will reach our goal of becoming the most impactful investment network in the world. This “heart” approach could be seen as the culture that I would like to see within Hani. To implement that culture everything needs to be designed to optimize towards it, this includes the people, the rules, every action and myself. What I don’t want to see is that Hani has values that are not directly implemented into the design, incentive structure and the from it resulting behaviour of network participants. I want to see virtues not values at Hani. In other words: What must network members do to survive and succeed at Hani? What behaviours get them included in, or excluded from, the network? What gets them ahead.
Time to describe how Hani’s design transforms “the heart’s” values from Part1. into virtues for all network members.
Reminder:
Translating values into virtues within Hani
1.
Predicting human nature vs shaping human nature: within the investment landscape, there is a tendency of trying to predict the future. In other words that’s: human nature is predictable. The smartest people in the space know however that that’s not the case, predicting the future isn’t the way to go. That’s why at Hani we don’t try to predict the future but to allocate resources towards changing the future through the accomplishment of missions guided by the intuition of the network of which directions to take.
Fulfilling needs: there is a certain amount of needs that an investment network has, such as: good ideas, good people, projects/people/companies to invest in, funds to invest and returns. The network is designed in a way that incentivizes good ideas to join the network through an educational newsletter, good people to join the network through a human connection focused podcast/show, projects/people/companies to be identified through discussion and the mission driven approach, funds to be invested from the revenues of the newsletter & podcast as well as from a traditional investment fund or fundraising approach (maybe), and finally returns by working with the people/projects/companies that we invested in. These are the main needs that the network has and that need to be fulfilled. By doing that consistently through a defined time/rhythm element that will be embedded into the design of the network, we are creating authenticity. Committing to our authentic self will create performance which in turn leads to trust for more and more people to join the network through one of the needs that the network got. Once trust is achieved, the element of belonging will be added to Hani and that’s when the needs of the network will get fulfilled faster than you could have ever imagined. To get there it takes time.
Trust: to add to the trust element we are using complete transparency for all transactions and holdings and opensource everything from discussions and conversations, to votes and decisions that Hani has made or is making. This allows the network to not lie to itself or to anyone else and to just stick to the networks defined truth. Sharing and open sourcing everything isn’t a disadvantage since what makes us special is the network itself and the culture we got.
Belonging: to add to the belonging element we are using tokens, that are given to the participants when they have proved to be an asset to the network as a whole. These tokens will exist on a permission less blockchain and allow for identification of the network members thanks to the underlaying consensus mechanism.
2.
Humility for network participants: to insure humility Hani is designed in a way that insures that the success of the whole network is the only way for individuals within the network to win and be recognised. In this setting, pride and arrogance would pull the entire network downhill. The fact that we want to make the best decisions possible within the network for the best overall outcome, incentivizes people to question themselves about what they know and what they don’t know, where they can contribute and where they can’t. For each decision that the network has to make, only the best inputs are wanted and needed, and participants will sooner or later realize that. By being part of a whole and having skin in the game through the initial work necessary to join the network without any direct returns, participants are proving that they are willing to be part of a whole and that their importance only exists in the light of the importance of the network as a whole.
Humility for the network as a whole: this is quite simple, if the network as a whole doesn’t show humility in the world of investing (such as thinking that they can predict the future), when partnering with people/projects/companies and pursuing a common mission with these actors, sooner or later the entire network will crumble, and all the money and other resources will be worthless.
Compassion: I’m not gonna lie, how to create compassion in the digital space is quite a challenge. In the current social media or social network’s world there is non at all. Well, at Hani, it starts with humility which I explained above. However, I would add to that, that the best digital environment that allows for compassion to show in humans is through long form podcast discussions, that pretty easily exposes the people who are on, for who they are. Compassion can be seen as a proof that a person can connect with other people whatever the circumstances. This is an element that could become crucial for Hani since its geographically decentralized and primarily digitalized. This human side will hold our network together even over long geographical distances and initial shitty mediums of communications. These podcasts will show quickly who pealed back the layers of humanity already and is aware of the longing that the whole of humanity feels for each other. That’s the only way we can make sure this network is holding together at the beginning.
Having long form podcasts, within the network design will allow to show and test compassion from the earliest days on.
Reciprocity for network participants: showing compassion as a network participant and being recognised as such by other participants will lead to productive exchanges within the network and create the necessary balance within the network.
Reciprocity for the network as a whole: showing compassion to people/projects/companies will lead to investment opportunities with these parties. It will lead to a balance between inflow and outflow of resources into and out of the network.
3.
Through balance and belonging Hani is able to create a healthy heart and culture which leads to (a) an intuition that Hani can rely on in guiding its direction of what missions to pursue, (b) relationships and connections within and with Hani that all things that are part of nature are craving for and (c) new doors that will continuously open to Hani since it is now being perceived by and perceiving things that other organism couldn’t before.
Now that we have gone through the theoretical implementation of a healthy heart at Hani, and therefore the broadly defined culture that I wish to see, we can now refer to a general checklist that should be kept in mind overtime when seeing the culture evolve and change. These are from Ben Horowitz’s book: “What you do is who you are”.
