The Adjacent Possible
A few years ago, I fell in love with this concept called “The Adjacent Possible”.
Imagine you’re at the front door of a house. You’ve never been to this house before. You open the door, and a new part of the house emerges. You see the kitchen, the living room, a piano in the corner. You walk further and you see 3 more doors. But you only could have discovered these 3 doors only by opening the first door. These 3 doors, where each door can lead you down its own discovery process, were only discovered by opening the first door.
Ideas are discovered through exploration.
In any field that you’re in, any project you’re working on, as you embark on that journey, you will get new ideas. These new ideas emerge from certain “combinations” with your mind, and the external environment.
Maybe its your mind and some ideas you discover on the internet, or your mind and an AI that you’re talking to, or you’re going for a walk and suddenly the environment of nature synergizes with your mind to spark up some new idea that came out of god knows where.
Ideas are everything.
The power of a single idea to transform your life is under-appreciated. The right idea, when actualized and taken far enough, can change your entire reality. So the more ideas you can incubate in that mind of yours, the more emergent “winning” ideas emerge that you will naturally act on as they’ll be a powerful motivating force in your life. You wouldn’t even be able to help it. It’ll just take over you, when you find the right ideas.
This is why I built Life Base. Centuries ago, Leonardo DaVinci not only put words in his notebook. He put a leaf in there. A leaf! Think about how profound that is. He took a physical object, that has its own meaning in the universe, and re-contextualized the object from a physical object -> to a conceptual idea.
The leaf became an idea. Or was it always an idea? What if the world around you is just a set of ideas? What if the world around you is not only just a random set of ideas, but the ideas that “fought” for survival, that are the most innovative and “won out”. The bed that you’re sitting on, is a product that won in the marketplace. The tree outside is the lucky idea that spawned by a lucky seed that won out of many other seeds.
What if you could capture these ideas in your notebook? What if these ideas not only take on a singular form, a “description of the idea”, but you represent ideas in different “mediums”. Leonardo may have been one of the first to represent ideas in different mediums, like a leaf, or doodles, or lists.
In Life Base, I made a whole set of apps that are different mediums for holding ideas, so you give your mind a new medium of exploration of ideas: Whiteboards, Typewriters, etc.
Ultimately, with Life Base, I want to give you a “space”, a playing ground, to explore your own private adjacent possible with your projects, and your life. More potential apps and mediums allows for more avenues of exploration, but exploration that is tied deeply to your projects.