Run Yourself Like an Information System
Strip a person down to components and you get something suspiciously like an information system: inputs, outputs, feedback loops, causal cycles. Mathematically, we are random variables searching for a function. This framing sounds cold, but it is surprisingly productive — and surprisingly honest about why some people seem to move through the world efficiently while others thrash.
Start with the systems view proper. You interact with other systems constantly. Some interactions are reinforcing loops — they amplify whatever you’re doing in either direction. Others are balancing loops — they push back toward equilibrium. Health, reputation, skills, savings: all of these behave exactly like stocks and flows in a systems diagram. Once you see yourself this way, vague self-help language (“be consistent,” “invest in yourself”) resolves into concrete mechanics: identify the loop, decide whether to reinforce or dampen it.
The next step is treating yourself as an enterprise. A company is just a bundle of functions, and each one maps onto personal life:
- Product development / HR: your core output — skills, work, character. If the product is bad, nothing downstream can save it, so training and psychology come first.
- Marketing: making people aware of what you do. This works regardless of product quality, which is why it should never wait for perfection. Awareness, consideration, conversion — the funnel applies whether you’re selling software or yourself.
- CRM: maintaining relationships so people stay engaged over time, converting acquaintances into genuine supporters rather than one-time contacts.
- Finance: managing capital — earning, investing, keeping enough slack to take risks.
Run all four deliberately and you become, functionally, an agent optimizing toward goals instead of a passenger hoping things work out.
Here is where it gets uncomfortable: the unethical version of this system is brutally effective. Mining your social circle for information and tailoring yourself to each person’s interests. Trolling and shitposting as cheap audience acquisition. Profiling everyone you meet, documenting everything automatically. Pareto-selecting only the relationships that serve the goal. It is easy to be successful when you aren’t ethical — and our current ethical norms look increasingly like social constructs that AI-era tools (of the “do anything live” variety) are actively renegotiating. Laws that were unthinkable a generation ago are normal now; the Overton window moves, and it moves because someone pushed it.
But after building the whole apparatus, I hit the wall every systems thinker eventually hits: optimization requires an objective function, and I don’t have one. Knowing how to run yourself like a company is worthless if you don’t know what game is worth playing. The standard advice — “just be useful” — collapses under scrutiny. Being useful is trivially easy; a corpse feeding maggots is useful. What I want is to be significant, and significance has no metric.
There’s also a flavor problem nobody warns you about. Life as an RPG character sheet — allocating points between attack and defense, balancing stats within constraints — is accurate and boring. Balance is boring. Maximization runs into constraints. Either way the game feels off, and success inside a boring game doesn’t feel like success at all.
So the conclusion is double-edged: yes, run yourself like an information system — find your loops, manage your functions, market honestly, compound your skills. But know that the system will faithfully optimize whatever you feed it, including nothing. The machinery is the easy part. Choosing the goal is the part no framework solves, and pretending otherwise is just procrastination with dashboards.
Drafted with AI assistance from my personal journal (2025-07-22), then edited by me. See On AI Assistance.