The Plan for Action #7: Focus on what moves the needle

    This kicks off our final section of The Plan for Action:

Change Yourself

Change Your Family

Change The World

    At this point, we've discussed the personal qualities that can potentially hold you back, and we've turned those into opportunities to grow.

    So the question is, what do we do now?

What moves the needle

    The expression "what moves the needle" refers to any measuring dial where you read the position of a needle. If you are trying to achieve a healthy weight, progress isn't a theory about health, nor is it some virtue-signaling action. Its the needle moving in the right direction. If we're talking about changing the world, then we should see the Facebook user base decreasing, we should see more quality candidates in more places, more corrupt officials going to jail, or a measurably larger number of people breaking free from the Matrix.

In other words, an actual change has to take place.

    What this means, is that mere noise or a few headlines, on their own, is meaningless. The Hollywood myth is that there's a great big protest, and then the politicians have a change of heart or there's an election with the "right people" voted in, and then everyone goes home, Happily Ever After. That's a myth. Protests, most of the time, are a big waste of energy. The one case they can be useful is to recruit people who are still going to be active after the protest is over.

To move the needle, you need a needle

    It sounds obvious, but the first question you have to ask is "what does progress look like?" From an earlier post, How to make and win a moral argument, I discussed the concept of "Arguing from zero" versus "arguing from 100." A goal like "dismantle Facebook" would be an argument from 0, you are destroying something and planning to replace it with nothing. "We need a revolution" is the same thinking - you want to tear down the status quo, but outside of some vague, virtue-signally future, you don't really have a plan for what comes next.

    To improve on "dismantle Facebook," you could go with either "we want to move people to a better social media platform," or you could take the idea a step farther by saying "we want to change the way people use social media, such that Facebook's model would be obsolete." In the case of Minds, for example, the platform is extremely good for setting up an anonymous account, putting your ideas out there, and getting feedback or meeting like-minded people. Self-hosted platforms like Diaspora would allow people to create much smaller, privacy-first platforms such that you only have the platform open for, say, your family.

    Once you have that goal in mind, and you now have a "needle" that shows you are starting at -100 and heading toward 100, you can now start making concrete steps to get there.

Priorities

    In order to move the needle, you must understand that "If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority." For example, my main action goals have to do with education, the environment, and developing radically inexpensive lifestyles that will lead to a debt-free society.

    These are all big areas, and if I tried to do all three at once, I would burn out and accomplish nothing meaningful. So I picked just one, education. The "needle" in this case is people trusting state-run schools and student loans to get them a job as the  -100, and the +100 is the return of a mentorship-based education system. Progress is made every time someone is hired based on a recommendation from a mentor, or from their own portfolio of work.

    My particular method, because I'm good with programming, is to provide platforms for people to make and deliver courses. For the sake of simply making money, there are multiple directions I could go with platforms, but given the goal, every decision is in terms of "how does this platform get us closer to mentorship-based education?" At the point a course delivery platform cannot do any more, its time to move on to the next goal, or the next method. If another method, the question remains the same: How will this method move the needle toward better forms of education?

Now that we're getting into the actual methods of taking action, I wanted to ask y'all for comments about the kinds of "action" you are looking to take. I'm willing to tailor some of the upcoming posts to projects other folks on Minds are trying to carry out.