Action Potential

Ideas have this same quality.

A change you've been considering. Something that keeps nudging at you. Words you wrote at 11 pm and haven't looked at since. A shape you sketched on a napkin and forgot about.

These aren't just thoughts. They're action potential. They carry within them the possibility of becoming real. Of moving from the mind into the world.

But here's the thing about action potential in neurons: it only fires when it reaches threshold. And it only reaches threshold when enough stimulus accumulates.

Ideas are the same. They need enough attention, enough refinement, enough conviction, enough belief to cross from potential into action.

Most never do.

The practice: Examine. Try. Observe. Iterate.

You have to create a lot of net-positive action potential in order to achieve consistently net-positive results. Not every idea will fire. Not every fired idea will work. But the practice of generating, reaching threshold, taking action, and feeding that data back into the system? That's everything.

The flow has to be constant: Ideas → Action → Observable Results → Ideas

And it has to evolve. What worked before might not work now. The variables change. You change.

There's a balance here I'm still learning.

On one side: velocity. Keep firing. Keep trying. Speed is its own kind of intelligence. You don't know what works until you try it.

On the other side: attunement. Being in tune with the moment. Not forcing. Not firing before threshold because you want to feel productive. Some ideas need to simmer.

Action potential exists if you allow it to exist.

This sounds mystical. Maybe it is. But also: if you're not generating ideas, examining them, writing them down, talking about them, then there's no potential building. The neuron stays at rest. Nothing accumulates.

Action potential is realized if you do what's necessary to make it reality.

The gap between having the idea and doing the idea is where most potential dies. The almost-threshold. The nearly-fired. The thing that stayed in your head.

Levin talks about how cells communicate with each other through bioelectric signals. How they coordinate to build complex structures without any single cell knowing the whole plan. There's no blueprint. Just signals. Just thresholds. Just firing and not-firing, accumulating into something that somehow knows what shape it's supposed to be.

Every real thing started as a spark. An electrical signal in someone's brain. A "what if." A threshold crossed.

The difference between things that exist and things that don't isn't the quality of the initial spark. It's whether the potential became action. Whether the stimulus accumulated. Whether the threshold was reached.

Imagination into reality.

Or not.

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- A.H.