Step 2: Blue-Footed Booby Birds, ESS, & The 500 Year Old Mind

Lesson Summary

This lesson is about adaptation. Things aren't black or white. You can't believe, that someone or something is wrong, relying on your archaic 500 year old brain.

Use the "Evolutionary Stable Strategy", which is an evolutionary concept that is simplified in the "Cow and Grass Example", where the cows saliva is healing the grass, so that the eaten grass gets healthy through the cow. Thus both the cow and the grass have adapted to the situation, that the cow loves eating grass.

How to find out, when you need to adapt? You know from the signals you are perceiving and receiving. Don't wait for months or years. You get signals? Adapt to it. To leave the safe harbor, because you get signals that something is going to get worse, needs courage, because it isn't safe on the sea, till you arrive at the other port.

Many people don't adapt to situations and then get their heads cut. Similarly every person runs around, believing in their ethics and morals and how things should work out. Then they meet other people and want to tell them how the others "should" do stuff. But this is not how things work out.

You need to adapt to the situation. You've got a partner, business partner or friend whom you think SHOULD behave differently? How about you adapt to the situation and change it accordingly.

Questions

  1. What's the #1 area that you haven't evolved and changed as quickly as you should have?

    My personal believe was, that things are going to work out with my SO. But I believe now, that I should have adapted earlier, seeing the signals. I always thought that either I am going to change for the better, or she is. And partly we both changed for the better. But she is not the person I need right now, nor in the future. The best thing would have been to adapt to the signals within a few months. Now it costed me years and I am still not adapting fast enough, because I have my hope and dreams, that this relationship will still be a healthy, stable, supportive and loving relationship, someday in the future. Fuck. But I still have hopes. This is the part where I need to adapt.