Six Forces × Seven Depths: Who Is Pushing You at Each Step

The seven depths answer "how deep do you go." The six forces answer "what is passing through you." Cross the two and growth becomes a force diagram: you are not climbing a ladder alone — a different force is doing work on every rung. Some lift you, some drag you, and some do the work you thought was yours.

Start with a fact: most people stall at step three (thinking), not from laziness but from maximum force turbulence — technology's convenience retrieving for you, finance's metrics scoring you, religion's inertia marking no-go zones, government's permission queueing you. Four forces interfering at once with the one step that requires solitude. See the forces, and you see the blockage.

Step One: Learn — technology works, religion blocks

Learning welcomes technology: search, translation, simulation — it presses acquisition cost to zero. The saboteur is religious force: believing before asking why turns learning into recitation. The move here is to let technology power the step and cut religion's current: trace every conclusion back to a primary source once.

Self-check: When did you last go to the original paper or doc for something you learned? Never — religion has taken over your learning.

Step Two: Win — finance ignites, and bites back

Winning needs resources, feedback, opponents — financial force is legitimate fuel here: prizes, markets, bids all amplify input. But its measuring stick quietly swaps in for the goal: you start optimizing the score instead of the win. Use its money, never its ruler.

Self-check: If this victory had no witnesses and no record, would you still want it? More than three seconds of hesitation — the ruler has already been swapped.

Step Three: Think — the step where all six forces must be muted

Thinking is producing your own judgment, and any force doing work here is contamination: technology's filter bubble, finance's position, religion's presets, government's frame, land's identity, AGI's ready-made answers. The practice of this step is not acquisition but blocking — return regularly to a zero-input state and process only what is already in your head.

Self-check: Can you push a hard problem forward for two hours without consulting any device? If not, thinking has been outsourced to the input stream.

Step Four: Find — land gives coordinates, AGI gives blind spots

Finding is defining the problem. Land force (region, language, community) decides which pains you can see — nine-tenths of your problem list is drawn by it. AGI force cuts both ways: it scans more domains than anyone, but its ranking of "worth doing" inherits its training data's biases. Use it to widen the view; use your own ache to set the weights.

Self-check: On your direction list, is there one item nobody in your community has done and AI ranks outside the top? If yes, finding has begun.

Step Five: Act — government paves the lane, technology accelerates

Acting needs a lane and an engine. Government force (rules, permits, compliance) draws the lane's edges — the cost of going around it usually bills in year three. Technology is the engine: automation, collaboration tools, deployment pipelines thin out execution cost. The discipline: every rule bypassed, book a debt; every layer of automation, keep a manual brake.

Self-check: In your execution, is compliance designed in or patched on after? Patched — the debt is already accruing interest.

Step Six: Build — all six forces become material

Building is making something new. The shift at this step is the flip in perspective: through the first five steps forces were interference or fuel; here they all become construction material — technology for the skeleton, finance for the blood, religion for the narrative, government for the contract, land for the scene, AGI for the amplifier. The builder's mark is not avoiding forces but assembling them into the work.

Self-check: In what you've built, can you point to which part used which force? If not, you just grabbed a piece of driftwood from the flood.

Step Seven: Lead — becoming a conductor of forces

Leading is defining a field's direction. At this step you yourself become the sixth medium: forces pass through you to reach others. The standards you write become technology's rails, the prices you set become finance's anchor, your judgments become a group's no-question zone (watch that one). The leader's practice runs both ways: conduct the force, and dismantle the parts of yourself that have hardened into religion.

Self-check: How many people no longer question a certain class of things you say? If that number is rising, the religious force in you is hardening — time for a self-reset.

How to Use the Force Diagram

Draw it monthly: seven steps on one axis, six forces on the other, mark the dominant force at each step. A healthy diagram flows — forces switch with the steps. A sick diagram congeals — one force occupies every step (finance from learning through leading: certificates to learn, prizes to win, funding to find, valuation to build). The brightest cell on the chart is the wall you tear down this month.

The seven depths and six forces both come from the tech-civilization framework at psyverse.fun. This is the first crossing of the two chapters.