Entropy is easy. One just has to sit idle on the sidelines for entropy to prevail. But syntropy (the famed “negative entropy” essential for living systems) takes intelligence and work.

But work at what?

I’ve just spent a couple of hours thinking about good mental habits for people who want to be the most effective and consistent leapers! they can be. I’m pretty sure that the following activities need to be considered necessities for people who want to maximize the availability of “the power of next” (that is, the power of syntropy):

1. You need to stay pragmatic!

2. You need to avoid the utopias and the Utopians. They mean well but . . .

3. You need to look closely at what’s happening, what’s changing, what’s available and what’s suggested.

4. You need to favor results now as opposed to possibilities later.

5. You need the power of the pod—numbers but the right kind of numbers! (Use tools like the social media discriminatingly.)

6. You need to stay on message, work your vision, be clear on your purpose.

7. You need to avoid confusion about waves. More than ever in today’s world, you are being called on to juggle the old waves, the current waves and the incoming waves all at once.

8. You need to stay riveted on the sharks! Watch them, analyze their moves and their plots, out-think them, outmaneuver them, out-swim them.

9. You need to do your own reporting. (There is seldom a single source you can depend on for a sufficient picture.)

10. You need to exercise caution when you are around the “woe is us” folks (the carpthinkers), the “you need to be afraid” folks (the sharkthinkers) and the “all we all need to do is love and trust each other” folks (the not-quite-fishing fish, or NoQuiff thinkers).

11. You need to be ever-watchful for signs of brain bias—in your own thinking and decision making and in everyone else’s, too.

12. You need to beware of voodoo economics and those who are urging it on you.

13. You need to do anything you can to help people experience momentum because it’s much easier for people to cooperate when everyone is moving forwards.

14. You need to do anything you can to improve human nature and human intelligence, even by a little bit, so as to encourage people to think on a wider scale, even by a little bit.

15. You need to be careful of thinking in terms of smooth progressions. (Those who foresee upward curves continuing ad infinitum, almost as a matter of faith, are no better grounded than other transcendentalists and predictors of rapturist fulfillments.)

16. You need to help find solutions to power juggernauts like the health care industrial complex and the military industrial complex. (History shows that it is typically the overextension of the military that eventually does the empire in.)

17. You need to find a way to keep the sharkthinkers from hoodwinking the carpthinkers into thinking that The Great Shark Way is for everyone’s benefit instead of mostly the sharks’ benefit.

18. You need to constantly steer things toward the middle and moderation.

19. You need to pioneer in finding mind changing experiences, the kind that will alter how the brain is wired. (We humans are usually capable of changing our mind if the experience is profound enough.)

20. You need to encourage the quest for synergy, understanding that its betrayal is what sends most promising opportunities off the track.

Me, too.