My Top 5 Takeaways from the Book Thinking In Systems by Donella H. Meadows

hey Mike here and if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company Legion athletics which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements including protein powders and protein bars pre-workout and post-workout supplements fat burners multivitamins joint support and more head over to WWE on a flex that's le GI o n athletics calm now to check it out and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps

use the coupon code MF L at checkout and you will save 10% on your entire order and it'll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States and if you're not it'll ship free if your order is over $100 so again if you appreciate my work and if you'll want to see more of it please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love like producing podcasts like this hey this is Mike from muscle for life and I'm often asked about books people ask me for book recommendations on various topics they

asked me what book I am currently reading and what books I have recently read and what my favorite books are and so forth and as an avid reader I am always happy to oblige and get some book recommendations in return as well I also just like to encourage people to read as much as possible because I think that knowledge benefits you much like compound interest benefits your bank account in that the more you learn the more you know and the more you know the more you can do and the more you can do the more

opportunities you have to succeed and on the flip side I also believe that there is little hope for people who aren't perpetual learners I know that might sound a little bit pessimistic or cynical to you but let's face it life is overwhelmingly complex and chaotic and if we look around we can find plenty of evidence that it simply suffocates and devours the lazy and ignorant so if you are a bookworm and you're on the lookout for good reads or if you'd like to just get into the habit of reading more then this book club is

for you the idea is very simple every week I'm going to share a book that I've particularly liked and I'm going to tell you why I liked it and give you several of my key takeaways from it I'm also gonna keep these episodes short and sweet so you can quickly decide whether or not a book is likely to be up your alley or not okay let's get to the featured book which is thinking in systems by Donella H Meadows now I follow a genre rotation in both my personal my work reading so I read one

or two books per Chandra before moving on to the next and my personal rotation includes be smarter slash better and this book thinking in systems was one of my choices for that genre and was actually one of the best be smarter slash better books I've read this year because systems thinking is a powerful tool for gaining a deeper and more practical understanding of how you and other people and the world around you tick and I was surprised actually how much I got from this book because I wasn't familiar with systems thinking before diving into it

I just had heard good things about it and figured hey why not and something else that surprised me was just how pragmatic the information in the book can be it's not a self-help book so it's not geared toward checklists and action items but if you can take the information understand it and transfer it to the functional level in your life you can absolutely gain a greater ability for effective and meaningful action in change in fact I'd go as far as saying that understanding how to envision and then create productive and efficient systems is one of

the highest leverage life skills you can develop and so many personal interpersonal and social failures out there are not so much the result of inherently flawed people but of faulty systems now to understand why I think that let's first define systems thinking which is the art and science of understanding forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems and what our systems while Meadows defines them as sets of things like people cells molecules whatever that are interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time all right so what are

some examples well you can find systems everywhere you look our bodies and our minds our systems animals gardens trees forests those are all systems businesses our systems local national and global economies our systems how even diet exercise and lifestyle regimens our systems and moreover all of those systems and all other systems are comprised of different types of elements and relationships that can take an infinite number of forms in other words all systems have common denominators that can be isolated analyzed and modeled and the better you do this the better you can understand and influence the

many systems that you interact with in your life now that realization alone can be powerful it can have profound effects in your life as you begin to understand that many of the desirable and undesirable outcomes that you are experiencing and that you will experience or the result of functional and dysfunctional systems and not lock feet randomness that is many of the situations and circumstances in your life both the good and the bad ones are the direct consequence of systems that have finite and knowable structures and that are very good at producing exactly what you are

enjoying or enduring these systems are real they are there and they're working either for or against you every minute of every day therefore if you want to make your circumstances markedly better you need to be able to consider more than just the first-order actions and effects the obvious things that you can see an experience and think more holistically think more systematically otherwise it's very easy to fall into the trap of chasing your tail and wondering why things are just not going your way and that for example is exactly why some people many people work very

hard at goals any goals any type of goals yet make little progress oftentimes they're boring all of their resources all of their effort and energy and time and money into defective systems that simply have a very low probability of success and a simple example of this is diet and training no matter how diligent Li you follow a poor system for diet and exercise you are probably gonna wind up disappointed in the end right we've all been there well the same goes for literally any other goal and activity in your life whether it is getting a

job learning to play the piano or finding a partner there are many ways many systems of going about those things but some of them are far more likely to work than others so once you have formulated a goal the very next step should be careful meditation on the system that is going to get you there and of course you're not gonna figure it all out in the beginning but you need to start with something start with the semblance of a workable system and that's not always easy that's one of the reasons why many people don't

do it it often requires quite a bit of study and creative thinking and bright ideas but it is also the proverbial aiming the arrow moment where just an inch of miscalculation can all but guarantee you are never gonna hit the target no matter how many attempts you make and so to continue that metaphor by continually working on the systems in your life you are nearly calibrating your aim so to speak which will then allow you to eventually hit the bull's eye again and again and that's why I recommend you read this book if you want

to live an orderly productive enjoyable life of course you have to be willing to put in the work there's no getting around that but you also have to know how to design systems that work design systems that can transform your raw effort in whatever direction into real results okey-dokey let's get to the takeaways the first one quote a systems function or purpose is not necessarily spoken written or expressed explicitly except through the operation of the system the best way to deduce the system's purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves

and my note here is in other words it's safe to assume that the purpose of any system is to produce the results it's producing now think about that for a second in the context of many of our current social political and economic systems which were purportedly created to do so many great things that somehow never really came to pass for example a school textbook might say the Federal Reserve System was created to provide Americans with a stable safe and flexible financial system that's nice but how has it performed well the Fed presided over the crashes

of 1921 and 1929 the Great Depression of 29 to 39 the recessions of 53 57 69 75 and 81 the Black Monday of 87 and about 1000 % of inflation that has destroyed about 90% of the dollars purchasing power as evidenced by the fact that in 1990 it required $10,000 to buy what took just one thousand dollars to buy in 1914 and all of that is to say nothing of the staggering level of government debt that would have never been possible out the Fed and so you got a wonder where the people who created the

Federal Reserve incompetent or have they actually gotten exactly what they want it has this system simply realized its actual purpose well considering the primary architects of our central banking system were six men who represented approximately a quarter of all the wealth in the world including agents of the notoriously mercenary financial houses of Morgan Rockefeller Warburg Rothschild and Kuhn Loeb & Company if you truly believe these guys just made a boo-boo that accidentally enabled them to exponentially increase their wealth and power at the expense of American taxpayers please reach out to me regarding a highly profitable

portfolio of Nigerian bonds that I'd like to sell you limited time opportunity the easiest money you will ever make I promise anyway my point is when you see a system working in a certain way your first assumption should be that's probably its true purpose regardless of what's stated otherwise now that may turn out to not be the case but that is the most likely case without further information that is the probabilistically accurate assumption and similarly you should also be very interested in who created a system and what they're likely motives were as well as who

is working to perpetuate this system and what they have to gain as well hey quickly before we carry on if you are liking my podcast would you please help spread the word about it because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word-of-mouth so if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well please do tell them about it it really helps me and if you are going to post about it on social media definitely tag me so I can say thank you you

can find me on instagram at muscle for life fitness twitter at muscle for life and facebook at muscle for life fitness all right the next takeaway number two quote language can serve as a medium through which we create new understandings and new realities as we begin to talk about them in fact we don't talk about what we see we see only what we can talk about and my note here is a story on this point so once was a guy named Malcolm little and Malcolm dropped out of school in eighth grade after his teacher told

him that his ambition of becoming a lawyer just wasn't realistic because he was a black kid and by the time Malcolm was 13 he had lost both of his parents his father died and his mother had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized and then a few years later in 1943 Malcolm was 18 and he was living in Harlem and he was involved in drug dealing gambling racketeering robbery prostitution and burglaring the residences of wealthy white families then in 1946 he was arrested for larceny and Breaking and Entering and was sentenced to 8 to 10 years

in Massachusetts state prison now at this point Malcolm was 21 years old and had no skills and could barely even read he said that every book he picked up had few sentences that didn't contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might have been in Chinese in prison however Malcolm met a self-educated man by the name of John Elton Bembry who was a well regarded prisoner and this is a guy that Malcolm would later describe as the first man that he had ever seen command total respect with words now these two guys

became friends and Malcolm decided to educate himself as Bembry had done and painfully aware of his illiteracy Malcolm decided to start by just getting his hands on a dictionary and copying every entry in the dictionary out by hand and it took him a day just do the first page but every day he would work at it and he would copy out a new page and then he would go and read back read aloud each of the words that he had copied and their definitions this was slow going at first but as Malcolm continued to do

it he started to remember words and remember what they meant and he realized that his dictionary was actually a little encyclopedia that taught him about all kinds of things taught him about people and animals and places and history philosophy science and as Malcolm's vocabulary grew so did his understanding of life and the world around him and his interest in it and he then found that he could pick up a book and start to understand what the book was saying and from there he was hooked he said that from that point until he left prison every

free moment he had he was reading if he wasn't reading in the library he was reading in his bunk he said that you couldn't got him out of a book with a wedge and so Malcolm read and read and read and he devoured books on history and was astounded at the knowledge that he obtained about the history of black civilizations he read books by Gandhi on the struggle in India he read about African colonization and China's opium wars he read about genetics philosophy religion and he later said that he often reflected on the new vistas

that the reading was opening up to him and he knew right there in prison that reading had forever changed the course of his life now in 1952 Malcolm was paroled and he was released from prison and this new course in his life led him to become Malcolm X one of the most prominent figures in the American civil rights movement and something he will be forever remembered for now think about this story for a minute by 21 years old Malcolm's fate should have been sealed he was an illiterate black drug-dealing pimp stuck in prison living in

the harsh realities of 1940's racial relations so where should have he gone he should have gone nowhere of course his destiny should have been a cold insignificant death in the streets of Harlem but by using the power of language Malcolm literally rewrote his destiny in a way that almost defies belief who's to say you can't do the same or at least make things a little bit better than they currently are all right my next takeaway it's a little bit a longer one so I apologize but it's a good one quote one everything we think about

the world is a model every word and every language is a model all maps and statistics books and databases equations and computer programs are models so are the ways I picture the world in my head my mental models none of these is or ever will be the real world to our models usually have a strong congruence with the world that is why we are such a successful species in the biosphere 3 however and conversely our models fall far short of representing the world fully that is why we make mistakes and why we are regularly surprised

so my note here is this is one of the reasons that continually educating ourselves is so so important if we want to do well in life the more we understand the more our mental models will accurately represent reality which is how things really are and how they really work and the more accurately our mental models represent reality the more we'll be able to effectively interact with and influence real and by the same token many mistakes and missteps that people make come from perfectly good reasoning applied to faulty mental models in other words we can only

be as rational as the information we have and if we aren't actively working to not only acquire important information we are missing but also to improve and often correct a lot of the information that we do have we are going to be at a huge disadvantage in our lives all right next takeaway number four quote at any given time the input that is most important to a system is the one that is most limiting and I note here is when we want to grow something whether it's muscles or income or social capital or whatever we

tend to think in terms of merely strengthening factors that can drive growth you know do more volume in the gym work longer hours attend more meetups and get-togethers and so forth what can often go unexamined however are the factors that are most limiting our advancement which may not be volume work hours or meetups instead the most limiting factors might be eating too few calories if we're talking about building muscle or having poor financial controls if we're talking about let's say owning a business and the businesses not very profitable or maybe it's poor conversation skills and

that's why we're not connecting with people in the way that we want to and you see these types of bottlenecks can be insidious because if you are unaware of them you can expend a tremendous amount of effort for very little additional return think of it like driving around with your parking brake on now what's more is growth itself can deplete or enhance limiting factors and therefore change what is limiting and so when you learn how to pinpoint and address the limits of a system you can gain real understanding and real control over it alright my

fifth and final takeaway again this is another long one but I liked it a lot here his quote if something is ugly say so if it is tacky and appropriate out of portion unsustainable morally degrading ecologically impoverishing or humanely demeaning don't let it pass don't be stopped by the if you can't define it and measure it I don't have to pay attention to it ploy no one can define or measure justice democracy security freedom truth or love no one can define or measure any value but if no one speaks up for them if systems aren't

designed to produce them if we don't speak about them and point toward their presence or absence they will cease to exist and my note here is criticism and intolerance of everything that is evil and ugly and immoral and degrading is a contribution toward the preservation of high personal social and cultural standards and this is one of the reasons why I speak out so harshly against the Charlatans of the fitness business including fake Natty's dishonest spill and powder pushers fake gurus and the like and why I'm equally quick to denounce the different aspects of society that

I feel are most destructive to our collective well-being and this is also why we all have a social responsibility to embody and uphold the virtues and values that are truly admirable honourable and beautiful because if we don't who will and if nobody does a drift toward low performance will inevitably result that's referred to as goal erosion in systems lingo now some people scoff at this idea who are you to judge they say well this is a bit of a non-starter and a red flag for me because many of these people who are so virtuously against

judging others no matter how degenerate and depraved aren't doing so out of compassion or tolerance per se but self-preservation that is these people these virtue signaling people are degenerate and depraved themselves and they want to live in a world that gives them a free pass hence their insistence that everyone including them should just be able to do whatever they want so long as it makes him happy and so I'm always highly skeptical of people who advocate for the acceptance of obviously rotten and dysfunctional ideas and behaviors under the guise of personal liberty and equality and

the like hey Mike here and if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company Legion athletics which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements including protein powders and protein bars pre-workout and post-workout supplements fat burners multivitamins joint support and more head over to WWE X that's Ellie GI o n athletics calm now to check it out and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps

use the coupon code mal at checkout and you will save 10% on your entire order and it'll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States and if you're not LLL ship free if your order is over $100 so again if you appreciate my work and if you'll want to see more of it please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love like producing podcasts like this you