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Act Before You Think
Ideas lead to actions, but actions can also lead to ideas.
A few days ago, I tweeted a quote from Austrian American scientist Heinz von Foerster, “If you want to think differently, first learn to act differently.” Foerster was also known as a pioneer in the field of cybernetics, which investigates communications and automatic control systems in machines and living beings. I’d included this in my book Creative Doing, in a prompt entitled, “From action comes progress.”
I received a great response to this quote, “Action presupposes thought. Different action requires different thought… Any action directed at a desired result must start with a thought. If it’s arbitrary, how can you expect your desired outcome?”
In other words, in this perspective or paradigm, any action requires a corresponding thought. How can one act differently before one thinks differently? In this case, thinking causes doing; there is no doing without thinking. It’ll look something like this:
