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Sink > Swim > Surf > Sail (4S)
Sink (no growth): the sensation of reaching the end of our resources, and feeling so overwhelmed that you are thinking to give up trying
Swim (linear growth): the ability to use your muscles and body to stay afloat and to explore the world around
Surf (individual exponential growth): using tools, human nature (flow) and nature (waves) you are able to move quickly easily and confidently
Sail (collective exponential growth): with your team and leveraging technology you are able to move upstream and against the wind
Exponential growth is free, democratic, and available to all of us. It just requires common sense decision making, some focus, and time.
These phases are the phases of learning. All of us will perceive sinking if we don't take the right decisions at the right time. And all of us already experienced the ecstacy of the exponential growth as individual or as a group. My mission is to develop a technology where everyone of us, especially our children have the knowledge on how to quickly unlock the exponential phase in all of their tasks. To join me in this mission, the first thing to do is to convice your Self that it's possible. I did just that in the last 3 years. Now not only I'm certain, but my story is the living evidence. I hope you wuld join me in testing and developing this technology together, because I'm sure I need a big team to accomplish my mission! If you feel you want to join forces, please sign up and I will add you to the growing 4S community all free!
Who Am I
My name is Marco Rossi. I have a PhD in EE majoring in signal processing and information theory. I've studied human and machine decision-making for more than 20 years. I've been working at the forefront of AI for almost 10 years (for the last 6 at Microsoft Research). I've been playing soccer professionally 5v5 in Italy while in high school: I've shared the pitch with incredible players (world-champion and Inter Milan legend Youri Djorkaeff, AC Milan legend Daniele Massaro, NBA legend Steve Nash). I believe that in life, as in soccer, the real key is not just who you are, or how skillful you are, but the quality of the team you are able to build around your Self, and the ability of that team to execute in the difficult and transformational moments. This is leadership. When every player is leading the team, success is just a matter of time! My mission is to empower any person and any organization to elevate their decision-making.
Anchors
I'm certain that what is not in your control cannot define who you are. And yet, we let the opinions of other people dictate our goals and ambitions, or the meaning we give to our experiences. In particular this is how trauma is created:
You live through a traumatic experience (e.g., Covid, breakup, job loss, injury, childbirth is traumatic for the body of the mother)
You perceive helplessness
You create a victim narrative about such traumatic experience (i.e., Self-limiting beliefs that I call anchor).
While this anchor stabilizes your image of your Self during the traumatic experience and in its aftermath, it will inevitably prevent your growth at some point in your life. It will control instinctive behaviors that you are not proud of - like interrupting other people while in a meeting, failing to communicate properly with your partner, or procrastinating on an important project, and with time it usually leads to some kind of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the most usual symptoms are anxiety and depression.
Antifragility
Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.
― Winston Churchill
I believe that anyone of us can become antifragile. A fragile system breaks under stress. An antifragile system thrive and grow under stress. Our muscles grow when we exercise. It's well known that traumatic experiences can be used to grow: it's Post Traumatic Growth. Therefore, I'm more optimistic than Churchill and I say:
Success is the ability to go from failure to failure increasing your enthusiasm.
Take Responsibility
Your goals should be mostly in your control otherwise it's foolish to invest your resources (i.e., time and focus) in pursuing them. Would you spend your time flipping a coin to count how many heads you get?
Take responsibility of the only goal that is fully in your control
That is: take responsibility to walk toward the best version of your Self. It all just start with 5 simple questions you can ask your Self today. You can find them in the next page together with an outlook of Take Responsibility method:
To give you a concrete example, at Microsoft, after coming back from my paternity leave in September 2021, I sat down and wrote down my core values and a moonshot: present to the CEO of Microsoft within 1 year. While I missed that goal, striving to achieve it in some of the most brutal circumstances a human being can emotionally endure - which I call my personal holocaust, I created innovative patents, I led my team through Covid, I'm now the PM of a group of 20 people leading the AI revolution, and just recently my team presented to Bill Gates. The best part of all of these achievements is that I got every single one of them thanks to my team, and I helped others to achieve great success to. I grew and the people around me also grew tremendously. For instance, I got my PM role by convincing (with my actions) my mentor to take a better job for her and giving me her past role. Likewise, people in my team got more responsibility too. Leadership is like the rising tide, everyone gets elevated by it if they learn to work together! And taking responsibility is the key first step for every one of us no matter our role. Taking responsibility is even more crucial in this new AI era. Here is why...
In the AI era, content creation becomes instantaneous and democratized. The value of any artifact is diluted by the amplification of skills enabled by AI. Most goods and services are now a few prompts away. Your value is given by your uniqueness.
Only discovering what makes you unique and what gifts you alone can give the world will fulfill you in the long-term and will make you irreplaceable. To do this you need principles and systems to take good decisions, day after day, leveraging time and focus.
I fully believe that no matter your current situation, with the right tools in just 3 years you can achieve dreams you believe are impossible today. Moreover, investing your Self in this way, you'll ensure you'll grow tremendously as a human being, you'll actualize your unique potential becoming irreplaceable (by AI or other humans), and you'll be of invaluable service to your family, your community, leading them by example. I did it myself in less than 3 years.
What if you could make those dreams a reality while having incredible joy, fun, and meaning along the way from day 1?
You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
― James Clear
The aim of the Take Responsibility (TR) course: help you access what I call continuous exponential growth (CEG). You'll learn to leverage all of your past (yes, even traumatic) experiences to become antifragile and irreplaceable. You trigger more and more flow in your days, growing at an increasing faster rate due to more awareness and more openness to experiences.
The word antifragility was coined by Nassim Taleb: the more stress an antifragile system receives, the more it grows (i.e., it learns better skills).
Work is stressful, relationships are stressful, life is stressful. Paraphrasing the core message of Elizabeth A. Stanley in Widen the Window, you can learn to thrive during stress and recover from trauma. The TR course will teach you the right principles and systems to do this.
What to expect: since long-term growth necessitate habit formation, working on your Self alone is not enough, you need to give time time. You should see initial results in a few weeks, habit change in a matter of months, and a profound transformation in 2-3 years, depending on your situation. This method is only if you want long-term results, and you are willing to invest your Self. I believe there is nothing better you can be doing for your Self.
I fully believe that no matter your current situation, with the tools in this method in just 3 years you can achieve dreams you believe are impossible today. Moreover, investing your Self in this way, you'll ensure you'll actualize your unique potential becoming irreplaceable (by AI or other humans). I did it myself in less than 3 years. I'm here to help you make those dreams a reality and have incredible joy and fun along the way from the first week - and it's all free no strings attached!
Anyone that lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. ― Oscar Wilde
The big challenge in life: You can get more than you have because you can become more than you are (start of the video below)
Accepting full responsibility: it's the day you know you have passed from childhood to adulthood.
― Jim Rohn
If the above resonates with you, please take a few seconds to hear these sentences from Jim Rohn himself. The first sentence is the start of the video below. The second sentence is at 26:14 of the same video.
I can single out 3 major sources of inspiration behind the Take Responsibility (TR) course:
How humans and machines learn (leveraging many concepts including flow, leadership, experimentation, and mathematical optimization)
Logotherapy: The philosophy that enabled Viktor Frankl to survive the horrors of the holocaust and to dream of a Statue of Responsibility.
Stoicism and Zen teachings
Using the principles and systems discussed in the TR course, I achieved results beyond anything I've ever imagined. In the last 4 years alone:
I was blessed with two boys, born and raised during the pandemic
I'm experiencing success beyond my dreams at Microsoft (first as a Data Scientist and now as a Technical Program Manager) investing less than 30 hours per week.
I'm developing this course and writing a book on Responsibility.
I'm surviving a very contested divorce (with terrible allegations against me from my wife) that I came to believe is my personal holocaust.
I'm playing soccer daily developing new skills and techniques at 40 years old, having more fun than a child!
Becoming your True Antifragile Self means that you'll find meaning in anything that happened and that will happen to you - good and bad. Becoming grateful for everything that contributed to make you the person you are today. That gratitude in turns creates the conditions to work on your Self and achieve the life that you deserve. That's the promise behind this course. It's not easy, but it's simple.
Medicine and disease correspond to each other. The whole earth is medicine. Where is your true Self?
— Yunmen/Ummon (864-949) - Blue Cliff Record Case #87
Take responsibility
Take responsibility
sink > swim > surf > sail (4S)
sink > swim > surf > sail (4S)
go from sink to sail
go from sink to sail
using common sense
using common sense
To develop the TR method, I've studied key ideas from more than 300 books. Below are the essential books:
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
Viktor Frankl: Will to Meaning
Abraham Maslow: Toward a Psychology of Being
Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi: Flow
Robert Greene: Mastery
Robert Greene: Laws of Human Nature
Scott B. Kaufman: Transcend
Cal Newport: Deep Work
Steven Kotler: The Art of Impossible
Elizabeth A. Stanley: Widen the Window
Shunryu Suzuki: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
A. Ericsson and R. Pool: Peak
Ryan Holiday: The Obstacle is the Way
Erika and Mike Schultz: Not Today
James Clear: Atomic Habits
M. Scott Peck: The Road less Traveled
Nassim N. Taleb: Antifragile
Nir Eyal: Indistractable
S. R. Covey: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Jim Rohn: 7 Strategies for Wealth and Happiness
Angela Duckworth: Grit
Carol S. Dweck: Mindset
Lisa Feldman Barrett: How Emotions are Made
Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow
Alain Berthoz: Simplexity
David Brooks: The Second Mountain
Roman Gelperin: Self-Actualized by Poker
Leidy Klotz: Subtract
Chris Voss and Tahl Raz: Never Split the Difference
Michael Hyatt: Free to Focus
Rory Vaden: Procrastinate on Purpose
Laura Vanderkam: 168 Hours
Eckhart Tolle: The Power of Now
Simon Sinek: Start with Why
Scott Belsky: The Messy Middle
Robert Glazer: Elevate
Tal Ben-Shahar: Happier
Anne Duke: Thinking in Bets
Beside books, online courses, book summary apps, and meditation apps have been essential for me, in the TR method page you'll find links and suggestions on how and when to incorporate these in your life to sustain your long-term growth. A short list:
Blinkist
Mindvalley
10% Happier for meditation
Waking Up for meditation
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