the "Beginnings are beautiful, but not special"
A node is initialized somewhere in some network. It is a node that attracts other nodes, but because it’s just a single node, the effect won’t be great. Maybe it attracts one friendly node at some point and couple more later on. Maybe by the end, the node is a hub. It acts as a seed from which structures can nucleate and grow.
The earliest claimed lifeforms are microorganisms that left signals of their presence about 3.7 billion years ago. Can you imagine those guys tracing back on what they turned out to be? “We didn’t expect this to be such a huge hit. We were just tinkering around.” From this simple lifeform, a great complexity of life as we know it was born. It was a seed for nucleation and growth.
Next follows the greatest startup (or general) advice I have heard:
“It's better to have 100 people that love you than a million people that just sort of like you.” - Paul Graham
Why is this such a great advice? Those 100 people will recommend you to others. Word of mouth, network effects. The exponential nature of the network effect is that which causes perplexity when we trace back and wonder how we got here — “We didn’t expect it to become so popular so fast…”
The “I sort of like” -person does not share to others. The “I sort of like” isn’t a seed.
I think the inception of anything is just a fascinating phenomenon. When you build even the tiniest thing, it can act as a seed to nucleate and grow structures from. Only when things are externalized, can they call for a place in the enormous network of our world. Until then, they’re stuck in the tiny web of our brains…
Generally, ideas take atleast 3-4 iterations to turn valuable. This is why you must release and externalize them quickly. If they are stored only in your brain, you are underutilizing external forces, sensory input, observations, networks and all the tools yourself and the world has to offer.
How many launches do we remember? Do you remember Google’s launch? Beginnings, inceptions? And if we do, what do we care? Birth of a child is a beautiful moment, but the lad needs a shitload of iterations to be a decent person. The iteration process is where the real money lies. Same story for pretty much anything, the starting point and externalization of ideas are best done ASAP, so we can get to the actual work.
Apes were pretty dumb, but after few iterations we got a decent version out of them.
Can you imagine fine-tuning apes for centuries before the release (whatever that means)? They would still be apes, but only after the real-world navigation, embodied experience, and the iteration process (evolution) they would shape up to be something other than just apes.
I think that’s it,
Things don’t evolve well in a small cage.
I guess that would be the moral of the story. It is a great gift to be under the influence of the open world networks. It is a sin to utilize only your brains for things. It is silly to try to think through things endlessly by yourself. The counter for influences in that case would be: 1 (your brain). The counter for influences when the thing is released to the open world: 10000000+. This is why things can’t evolve to their potential in a small closed place.
The beginning is dirty inevitably, iteration process is the king, embodied experiences rule, observations over rationalizing, evolution in the open space rather than closed space… Something like that. Release the kraken.