Field note · Logos → Actual
Speak in the Past Tense
Future tense asks for attention on credit. Past tense arrives carrying evidence.
00 / The practice
Bring an artifact.
Here is one of the most useful practices I can give you.
When you are talking to another human being, speak in the past tense.
Not exclusively, obviously. Language would become ridiculous.
I mean something much deeper.
Notice what tense dominates your identity.
Listen to yourself for a week.
“I’m going to start a company.”
“I’m going to write a book.”
“We’re going to completely change this industry.”
“I’m working on something enormous.”
“Once we get this launched…”
Future tense.
Future tense.
Future tense.
Hopium.
You have laid a pile of hopium on the table and invited everyone around you to get high with you.
You want them to experience your imaginary future strongly enough that they temporarily grant you the status you would deserve if you had actually made it happen.
Stop doing that.
Speak in the past tense.
On attention credit
“I’m going to…”
“Once we…”
“We will…”
With receipts
“I built it.”
“We shipped it.”
“I tried it.”
01 / The artifact
What changed?
“I built it.”
“I called him.”
“We shipped it.”
“I wrote it.”
“I tried it and it failed.”
“I changed it.”
“I sold the first one yesterday.”
“We finished it this morning.”
Something peculiar happens.
People listen differently.
Watch their bodies.
Their attention comes toward you.
Their feet point toward you instead of toward the exit.
They ask questions.
They become interested.
It can feel almost magical.
It isn’t because the past tense is some linguistic persuasion technique.
It is because you have stopped asking another human being to finance an imaginary world with their attention.
You brought an artifact.
02 / The beginning
In the Beginning Was the Logos
There is something much older underneath this.
In the beginning is the Logos.
The Word.
The idea.
Before something can be actualized, there must be a condition for its existence.
That is what I mean by a condition: a prerequisite for something to happen or exist.
The idea is such a condition.
An idea creates a distinction between what is and what could be.
But the idea is not the artifact.
The Logos is not the finished history.
It is the beginning.
This distinction matters because humans have a remarkable tendency to fall in love with the Logos and never complete the actualization.
They worship the idea.
They describe it.
They defend it.
They tell everyone about it.
They polish the vision.
And because language itself is powerful, talking about the idea begins to feel remarkably similar to making the thing.
It isn’t.
The idea is the invitation.
Your job as an actualizer is to answer it.
Not by architecting the future.
Fuck no.
Not by creating reality.
Hell no.
Reality is given to you.
Your job is to take what has been given and leave something behind.
History.
Artifacts.
03 / The carrier
Ideas Have People
This is why the strange power of past-tense speech is not entirely a human phenomenon.
We like to say that people have ideas.
I think that formulation is backwards.
Ideas have people.
An idea finds human beings capable of carrying it into Actual.
For some period of time, you and the idea enter into a relationship.
The idea supplies direction.
You supply actualization.
That is the symbiosis.
And this explains something important about the respect we naturally give to people who make things happen.
We are not merely admiring the person.
We are witnessing successful actualization.
Something that previously existed only as possibility now has history.
There is evidence.
The idea found someone capable of carrying it across the boundary.
That person can now speak in the past tense.
Open the evidence drawer
- Direction
- The idea supplied it.
- Crossing
- The actualizer carried it.
- Receipt
- History kept the evidence.
04 / One week
Try the Experiment
For one week, listen carefully to yourself.
Every time you start telling someone what you are going to do, notice it.
Do not punish yourself.
Just notice.
Notice how intoxicating it feels to describe the future version of yourself.
Then try something else.
Stop announcing it.
Go make some history.
Come back when you have an artifact.
Then tell the story.
“I thought this might work, so Tuesday morning I tried it. It didn’t work. Wednesday I changed this. Thursday someone bought it. Here’s what I learned.”
Feel the difference.
That person is interesting.
Not because they have better dreams.
Because things happen in their vicinity.
That is a reputation worth building.
Be the person around whom ideas become artifacts.
Be the person who increasingly has stories rather than plans.
Make better history.
Then speak about it in the past tense.