Bedrock

Bedrock

OR THE PREPARATION

“Step by step walk the thousand-mile road.”quotes

Let me start with a list of caveats:

I am not trying to prescribe a single set of solutions to your individual (or our collective) problems. I am naively attempting to describe a perspective and a path that has taken me a long way in what appears to be the right direction. I am sharing the path I have followed in the hopes that through others following this path or creating their own in similar directions we will produce solutions for the betterment of us all.

Perspective is everything. Everyone reading this book is reading the exact same words, but how they react to anything here can differ greatly. Your thinking result from how you’re feeling right now and the well run grooves of your feeling. Watch how you’re thinking, what default perspective you’re taking: For example, right now you could be skeptical, find these words off-putting, and suspect this will be just some superficial self-help book. If so, you probably feel suspicious or even annoyed. Or this may all sound intriguing and exciting and you may be thinking that this book might actually help. If so, you’re probably eager and hopeful. Perspective can be a choice you make. How you think and feel can be a choice you make.  The stronger your initial reaction to ‘a thing’ means a greater signal of your default perspective.  These strong signals are an easy opportunity to start observing and questioning yourself. Is this reaction helpful? Is there another perspective that would be more helpful in this situation? Am I addicted to a single perspective?

There are three meanings to everything here: what I want to say, how I’m able to articulate it with words, and how you interpret those words.  Producing clarity of thought is difficult, transmitting it clearly is extremely difficult, and doing it to be well received by a panoply of receivers is next to impossible. Expect to disagree or clash with certain sentences or viewpoints, expect to misread, misunderstand, or fail to appreciate something with sufficient depth. It’s ok and inevitable. Attempt to understand, revisit later, play with and roll these ideas around, integrate what you find useful. 

Words are magic.  They can act as spells that nowadays we call persuasiveness, why do you think we call it spelling.  This means there is a certain sets of words that unlock an idea for you and a certain set that put you off forever.  For example, notice which direction the use of the phrase “words are magic” pushes you.  I will try throughout the book to put ideas in different wordways and your job is to find which styles of words work on you.  My word choice could suggest that I find the romanticism of “magic” personally compelling, but while I might intend power or mysticism, you may associate it with cheesy stage magicians that completely turn you off.  Perhaps you prefer appeals to logic and reason or habit and emotion. Try different lenses for each idea, view from every angle you can imagine, speak it in different incantations before rejecting an idea completely.

I am a collection of cached thoughts and narratives derived from popular books, the news, that movie I vaguely remember watching years ago, and the opinions of those around me. These thoughts and narratives have been poured into me with loose or in-attentional editing on my part throughout my life. It is only recently that I have sought the best bedrock based on a narrative and set of stories that represent my own synthesis. Of course, this means that this book is yet another narrative pouring into you and your existing collection of loosely edited thoughts and pre-existing outside narratives.  This book is my attempted codification of the discovery, synthesis, and creation of my own narrative and hopefully a path for thinking and action that allows others to do the same.

There is not now, nor has there ever been, a single answer. As much as each of us would like simple answers, based on the diversity of people and complexity of society there are infinite shades of gray. For the chapter title metaphor I’ve chosen here, this means that the bedrock of your life’s landscape will be different from your neighbors even though the topography may appear superficially similar.

• This can be a good thing if it means you’re realistic, balanced, and can see the benefits of effort in understanding perspective and nuance. Sometimes matching another’s topography can be polite or socially graceful, a solid bedrock can support or withstand any situation
• This can be a bad thing if it means you aren’t willing to dig below the surface for more complex answers or if you feel other’s views tectonically clash with yours

Just through sheer numbers of people, the diversity of interest and outcome is near infinite. For every nuanced idea there is already at least a handful of people working on it and undoubtably someone is doing it better. This means the work here will come up short in areas when specifically compared to others.  

• This can a good thing if it means you are generating taste, sense of quality, critical thinking, and depth.
• This can be a bad thing if it means you throw the baby out with the bathwater, ignoring all at the cost of the bits that are good for you 

I am an economically-secure straight white college-educated male in his 30s from the Global North with many of the requisite biases and blindspots (note which way this language moves you).  What I write will be able to be analyzed at many different levels from many unforeseen angles and picked apart by any expert who cares enough to do so or armchair critic with an axe to grind.

• This can be a good thing if it means you have deep or nuanced knowledge and perspectives, if you can try a perspective on without hasty judgement to foster growth
• This can be a bad thing if you cannot see your own experiences reflected anywhere in this book, if admitting a fault is weakness rather than a strength

I have done my best to overcome the tendency to draw conclusions based on partial information or to leave assumptions unexplored but this book will never be thorough enough, whole enough, or complete.  It will ignorantly glance over areas that would make all the difference to a whole set of peoples and will expand on some paths already too obviously well trodden by others before me.  

• This can be a good thing if you can spot your own gaps in knowledge to fill with your own research
• This can be a bad thing if it means you have a narrow scope and use it as an excuse to attack, hacking away good growth for shallow and short-sighted reasons

It is my sincere effort to present this progress of life not as something that you just ‘ought to know’ but as something that is beautiful to understand and enthralling to act upon.  If the practice of ‘the thing’ is strained for you nothing will be achieved.  I want to show you how to fall in love with where you could go, what your life could look like, and make the process so enjoyable that any strained parts are worth overcoming. 

• This can be a good thing if you are willing to embrace the idea of a  path.  I wish you good fortune and hope that at the very least I make one small positive change
• This can be a bad thing if this already feels very strained, this might ultimately not be the way that works for you, give whatever did catch your eye a skim at the chance it could make some positive change however small.

I want to create more of what I want to see in the world.

I have it only to the extent that I can give it away.

Now the preparation has begun.

This is you.  

A glorious yet fragile being sitting on the thin line between life and death.  Attempting to maintain the balance between chaos and order.  

Chaos is messy, unpredictable, riots, hazards, fire, and inability, but also surprise, serendipity, resilience. 

Order is structure, stability, bureaucracy, ice, and efficiency, but also fragility, oppression, boredom. 

Ideally, you are balanced on a pin between the two inevitably wobbling with one foot in order for security and the other in chaos to be alert.  The more time spent in this state of balance means a better Path.

This balance is Aristotle’s Golden Mean, Confucian zhongyong, Heraclitus’ Unity of opposites, and Buddhist samatā.  Ideas, long surviving, that are pin pricks of old truths. This balance can apply to any and every part of your life if we can only discover the how and why.

Every single person must discover anew for themselves what it means to be human.  This is the indirect goal of cultures, the direct goal of well-intentioned parents, and the unlikely outcome of standardized education. Many before us have already discovered each piece of the near infinite answers and approaches of what it means to ‘be human’.  For each person, the collection of answers that satisfies can vary wildly.  You may already be clutching a few, but the rest will be as scattered to the wind as their discovery by others has been across time.  

The entire lineage of humans has struggled with this survival, asked the same big questions, and grappled with the glowing flickers of ideas staring at us from the deep.  

Put another way: “Ignorant men raise questions wise men answered a thousand years ago.” - Goethe

Put another way: “Being human doesn’t mean piloting your infinitely customizable meat suit through the realm of autonomous choice, it means acting in accord with human nature. The further you float from that inescapable tether, the more dysfunction you accumulate.”  - Alex Kaschuta

The best approach to regroup these ideas is to treat yourself as a mystery and make the discovery of answers your purpose.  Eagerly ask yourself, where is firm ground for me?

Put another way: Spend life meeting new aspects of yourself and removing question marks.

Put another way: “Your soul is a dark forest. Your known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. Gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. You must have the courage to let them come and go.”       - DH Lawrencequotes

Put another way: “Borrowing someone else’s knowledge really doesn’t give you anything remotely like the same power level required to discover that knowledge for yourself. Start rethinking the life experience as a road to internalizing new strengths, instead of just trying to keep people alive efficiently.” - Eliezer Yudkowskyquotes

Put another way: “Most people implicitly assume that their “map” of reality is supposed to be already correct. If they have to make any changes to it, that’s a sign that they messed up somewhere along the way… We all start out with wildly incorrect maps, and over time, as we get more information, we make them somewhat more accurate. Revising your map is a sign you’re doing things right.” — Julia Galefquotes

Where it is firm may surprise you and may not even be what you think you want. This is normal and ok.  It is a lifelong process to develop quality answers to this question. You will likely discover these answers by searching what it means to be a modern human as well as developing an affinity for the ideas of old.  A continuous merging and updating of the old values with the new.  

Put another way: If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations. What at one time are their most effective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease to carry a definite meaning. Language must be adapted to a given climate of opinion, presuppose much that is accepted by all men of the time, and illustrate general principles in terms of issues with which they are concerned.  - Friedrich Hayek, ‘The Constitution of Liberty’quotes

Unfortunately for us, reality is too rich. The brain is bombarded by millions of sensory impulses, but consciousness can process only seven or eight concurrently. These impulses need to be condensed, ordered, and interpreted often under the immense time pressure of daily life which causes errors, misses, shortcuts, and makes distortions unavoidable. Too much information or too little processing tips us towards chaos. Too little information or too much processing tips us towards order.

A seminal example of this bombardment is “sustained inattentional blindness” also known as the ‘invisible gorilla problem’ where when an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight, purely as a result of a lack of attention rather than any vision defects or deficits.  This experiment had subjects watch a short video of two groups of people (wearing black and white T-shirts) passing a basketball around. The subjects are told either to count the passes made by one of the teams. While the teams are passing the ball around another person wearing a full gorilla suit walks through them.  In most groups, as many as 50% of people missed the gorilla suit. Think of all the equivalents in your life, going about your hectic or lazy day and metaphorically missing the person in the gorilla suit because focused on counting the “passes”.

Put another way: We see things not as they are, but as we are ourselves. Every man has his own special dream that he thinks is the reality. - Immanuel Kantquotes

A foundational philosophical example of this is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, found in The Republic.

Imagine you are in a dark cave with your friends and you’ve been there your whole life. The only thing you can see in this dark cave are shadows on the wall because there’s a fire behind you and unseen objects are being moved in front of the fire. You and your friends think these shadows are real things because that’s all you’ve ever seen.

One day, you manage to leave the cave and step outside. You see the real world with bright colors, trees, animals, and the sun. You realize that the shadows in the cave were just a tiny, dull version of the amazing real world outside.

The cave where you had spent your whole life was like living in a world of make-believe, while outside the cave is the world of true reality. Plato’s story is telling us that most people are like those in the cave, only seeing shadows which are their limited, mistaken ideas based on taking their senses as truth instead of the real, true things which are abstract and not necessarily perceivable through the senses.

While inattention blindness is a literal and physical example of this ‘reality is too rich’ problem, Plato’s allegory of the cave also suggests that our senses give us a distorted understanding of reality. This awareness of ignorance is the first step up and the first step better towards realizing the limits of our attention, how and where reality may be constructed for us, and to question what is missing. 

We are all drawn to particular ways of thinking and working without being aware of it, which today we call heuristics. 

Heuristic is a fancy word for the shortcuts our brains take so that they don’t have to work hard.  Heuristics trade speed for certainty, like looking for an item in the last place you remember seeing it instead of searching room by room. These rule-of-thumb strategies allow us to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently without having to engage in prolonged thought, but they come at the cost of cognitive biases.

Cognitive biases are errors in judgement based on tendencies of the brain. Some biases are useless and irrational but they can also prop up helpful behavior.  An example is confirmation bias.  The tendency to favor information in a way that confirms or supports our existing beliefs or values. This is bad when new information is thrown away because it conflicts with what we think we know as true.

So our senses may not tell us the truth, they might miss the gorilla, they might only show us shadows and our brains brains like to take shortcuts ones that might deny the gorilla even exists or that assert that no one should see anything but shadows because that’s all we’ve every known.

Even more, each age of history has added fresh layers of complexity and uncertainty. Today we are adrift in an ocean of human information with whipsaws of scope and impact. A glut: 24-hour news, illimitable ever-spewing ‘content’, hundreds of global crisis, thousands of causes to care about, millions of people who need help, billions of hours of vlogs, podcasts, and documentaries, trillions of social media posts chronicling it all.  Each demanding a portion of our time and attention in our precious few and too simple sensory processes.

Even more still, we don’t understand ourselves.  With good modern intentions we tell ourselves from here on out I’ll wake up at 5am, eat right, exercise daily, be mindful, not yell at others in traffic, stop drinking too much on the weekend — and then consistently fail at each of those things.  You aren’t your own puppet. 

You are a collection of yous. Each you has its own goals, most short term some long term. Some yous you control and some yous control you and they all compete.  You are a vast cosmos of uncountable different interlocking systems.

Put another way: Only by admitting that what you consider your own mind is an accretion of memetic programs embedded by various interests across many timescales with disparate degrees of adaptive utility can you begin to write internal code capable of expanding your cognitive territory of Self.     - Matthew Pirkowskiquotes

Confusing? Complicated? Overwhelming? This is ok.  This is normal.  Everybody is dealing with their version of this.

So, we’re bombarded on all sensory sides, undercut by shortcuts and biases, adrift in an ocean of modern complexity, with barely our Selves for help, making too many assumptions about who we are and how we behave. Where is that firm ground we were talking about?

Know that every thoughtful person before you has noticed the same growing complexity and uncertainty in their own day and age, rest assured that will always be true. We have collectively advanced despite this disposition and would be better served the more of us are on Paths. 

Here we begin a process to formulate an underlying sense of cohesion and the meaning to contextualize it that will allow better navigation of any modern unknown. Using the metaphor of the path, in this stretch we’re packing our bag so that we have everything we need, mentally preparing for what might be a tough hike, and making sure we know where we’re headed, how to get there, and what the weather will be like along the way.

The first step towards firm ground is to take our best account of who we are right now and begin to notice each of the small things that appear firm to us. 

Our second step, we begin negotiating with ourselves to place ourselves on increasingly firmer ground

And our third step, we begin to intentionally play the neutral infinite game moving forward into the world by using and creating firm ground.

Step 1: Context

Here you become an active participant on the path.  You will be writing about your past, present, and future self in an effort to know yourself better, find out ‘where’ you are, and begin to tease out patterns. To gather the hints about where you tip too far towards chaos or order.    

                                     Money                     Social Life

You have been doing an informal and unconscious version of Context your whole life. Context is how you make every decision about how to act in the world. Your decisions up to this point about your job, your friends, what toothpaste you use have likely been messy educated guesses based on short term practical interests, impulses and desires, likely a couple foggy visions/goals, and navigating others wants and agendas. 

Put another way: Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate - C.G. Jungquotes

Actually write or type out your thoughts and answers, this pushes you towards clarity of thought and helps prevent your brain (or one of your other yous) from hiding important information. Writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Your initial answers will probably be shitty, messy, and incomplete. That’s ok.  As you go about your life, let this framework roll around your thoughts and you may realize or remember a new piece of an answer. You can and should return and refine them as you think and feel to capture wisps of your Self. 

These are simply an attempted range of example questions to get you started thinking and exploring your own Mind, Body, and Spirit.

Past

It is difficult to know who you are, where you should go, or how you should get there, unless you know where you came from. This section is usually the most difficult, time consuming, and the toughest to do well.

This is especially true the more old memories still intrude upon your thoughts, or that still evoke strong emotions such as fear, regret, shame or confusion. If this is happening, it means that your mind has not yet been able to fully process your past experiences, and that the brain areas associated with negative emotion still regard the past events in question as unresolved threats. Your brain reacts to unresolved threats with levels of stress up to emergency physiological preparation (fight or flight) and you may have a whole slew of these to wade through.

• Stages of Life

  • Divide your life into different time periods or epochs. A good rough number is 4-6 but can take any form that feels appropriate to you. 
    • This could be a standard childhood, schooling, first job, marriage. 
    • Or based on intensity like up until you got kicked out of your parent’s house, first serious relationship, those 3 months you were depressed, and since you’ve been sober.  
    • Or strict ages 0-9, 10-19, 20-29, 30-39, etc.
  • Identify the most significant events that occurred during each period and describe how each of those experiences has shaped who you are today. Try to hit at least 4 events for each.
  • Then select the most impactful from across the epochs What experiences haunt you? What is on your personal highlight reel? Reflect on these the deepest.  How do you feel about them now? How did it influence your relationships with others? How might it still be affecting your day to day life for better or worse?

• What are my current preconditions?  

  • Did I have emotionally abusive parents?  Am I overweight?  Were my teachers always condescending and I was bored by school?  Did I often excel athletically?  Did my last two relationships fail for particular reasons?  Have I spent hours of my time consuming social media?  Do I ascetically avoid sweets to signal my superiority to others? Do I feel ambitious but fail to meet my own expectations? Do I have a wide circle of friends? Am I careless with money?
  • Think about ways you often describe yourself - I’m terrible at parties.  I’m so forgetful. I never stop talking.  Dig into these a bit, what do you actually mean when you say it? Is it really true?  Terrible at parties may mean a big party with strangers is overwhelming or you just don’t like to dance in front of others or you take it too far when you have an audience.
  • Are you a visual learner?  Do you get lost in music? Could you not care less about small talk? Do you drink or smoke and want to quit?
  • As therapist Lucy Johnston puts it, use a paradigm that asks ‘what happened to you?’ instead of ‘what’s wrong with you?’

• How have I been feeling lately? 

  • Am I discouraged or unmotivated? Am I anxious or tense?  Am I joyful and hopeful?  Am I eager and pleased?
  • If it’s helpful start scoring how you feel each day 1-10 for a week.  Question why each day felt that way.
  • Is this a trend or a cycle? Does winter affect my mood each year? Does a traumatic event from that one March trigger strong feelings each spring? Have I been eating/exercising well?  Has the news been stressful?

Again, working through the past is likely to be long and difficult.  But from the stages of life you’ll discover which are your core memories that inform how you react to things now.  Your preconditions get you thinking about areas of ease and difficulty which are patterns in your actions.  How you’ve been feeling lately keeps you honest about your recents moods.  Each provides clues to trends, patterns, and cycles which should allow you to tease out and discover things about yourself. You don’t have to take corrective action just yet but it’s great if going through this has illuminated some of the darker corners of your self. Ask yourself more questions, find more firm ground.

Present

Who are you?

An answer could include your name, your job title, your role in your family, your hobbies or passions, and your place of residence or birth. A more comprehensive answer might include a description of your beliefs and values.  A complete answer is every thought and action and how they have changed over time. In a sense, you are just you.

Put another way: You are my friend
You’re special to me.
You are the only one like you.
Like you, my friend, I like you.   - Mr. Rogersquotes

Every one of us has a different answer to this question, and each answer tells a story about who we are. While we may have many similarities with our fellow humans, like race, religion, sexual orientation, skills, and eye color, there is one thing that certainly makes each of us unique: personality.

The Big 5 is the best model we have currently for describing personality.  It is best as language for “what is the most useful stuff I can get to know about this person” and not “intrinsic” “personality” “traits”. It is the best model so far and enjoys wide scientific support exactly because it is so damn broad.  This makes it less actionable but we’re ok with that here because we’re looking for the broad strokes and “this person” is just trends within yourself.  Just so we are clear, there are problems with universal models like these which generalize complex dimensions and struggle in accuracy across cultures, but again, our use here is to get you thinking in different ways about yourself.

Below is a description of each of the Big 5, use each description to imagine where you might fall on the low to high spectrum for each. 

1. Openness to Experience

Openness to experience concerns people’s willingness to try to new things, their ability to be vulnerable, and their capability to think outside the box. It has also been described as the depth and complexity of an individual’s mental life and experiences. Common traits related to openness to experience include:

• Imagination

• Cleverness

• Preference for variety

• Creativity

• Curiosity

• Perceptiveness

An individual who is high in openness is likely someone who has a love of learning, enjoys the arts, engages in a creative career or hobby, and likes meeting new people. It was also found to correlate positively with leadership, creativity, originality, and a tendency to explore their inner selves.

An individual who is low in openness probably prefers routine over variety, sticks to what he or she knows, and prefers less abstract arts and entertainment. It tends to correlate negatively with conservative political attitudes.

Mark below where you think you naturally fall:  Low      High

2. Conscientiousness 

Conscientiousness is a trait that can be described as the tendency to control impulses, delay gratification, act in socially acceptable ways, and plan and organize effectively.  All behaviors that facilitate goal-directed behavior.

Traits within the conscientiousness factor include:

• Persistence

• Control

• Reliability

• Planning

• Hard work

• Resourcefulness

People high in conscientiousness are likely to be successful in school and in their careers, to excel in leadership positions, and to doggedly pursue their goals with determination and forethought. They often seek order, conformity, and security.

People who trait low in conscientiousness are much more likely to procrastinate and to be flighty, impetuous, and impulsive. They tend to have a higher premium on stimulation and excitement.

Mark below where you think you naturally fall:  Low      High

3. Extroversion

Often the most familiar spectrum, extroversion and introversion, it concerns where an individual draws their energy from and how they interact with others. In general, extroverts draw energy from or recharge by interacting with others, while introverts replenish their energy with solitude.

The traits associated with extroversion are:

• Assertiveness

• Energy

• Articulate

• Fun-loving

• Friendliness

• Social confidence

People high in extroversion tend to seek out opportunities for social interaction, where they are often the “life of the party.” They are comfortable with others, assertive, gregarious, and are prone to action rather than contemplation. 

People low in extroversion are more likely to be people “of few words” who are quiet, introspective, reserved, and thoughtful.

Mark below where you think you naturally fall:  Low      High

4. Agreeableness

This factor concerns how well people get along with others. While extroversion concerns sources of energy and the pursuit of interactions with others, agreeableness concerns one’s orientation to others. It is a construct that rests on how an individual generally interacts with others.

The following traits fall under the umbrella of agreeableness:

• Altruism

• Trust

• Patience

• Tact

• Kindness

• Helpfulness

People high in agreeableness tend to be well-liked, respected, and sensitive to the needs of others. They likely have strong support networks, few enemies, and are affectionate to their friends and loved ones, as well as sympathetic to the plights of strangers. They tend to value benevolence, tradition, and conformity while avoiding placing too much importance on power, achievement, or the pursuit of selfish pleasures.

People on the low end of the agreeableness spectrum are less likely to be trusted and liked by others. They tend to be callous, blunt, rude, ill-tempered, antagonistic, and sarcastic. Although not all people who are low in agreeableness are cruel or abrasive, they likely only have weak ties beyond a chosen few. It is also slightly negatively correlated to creativity but a slight benefit in selfish opportunities for success, learning, and development.

Agreeableness may be motivated by the desire to fulfill social obligations or follow established norms, or it may spring from a genuine concern for the welfare of others. Whatever the motivation, it is rarely accompanied by cruelty, ruthlessness, or selfishness.

Mark below where you think you naturally fall:  Low      High

5. Neuroticism 

Neuroticism is not a factor of meanness or incompetence, but one of confidence and being comfortable in one’s own skin. It encompasses one’s emotional stability and general temper.

These traits are commonly associated with neuroticism:

• Pessimism

• Jealousy

• Anxiety/Fear

• Self-criticism

• Insecurity

• Oversensitivity

Those high in neuroticism are generally prone to anxiety, sadness, worry, and low self-esteem. They may be temperamental or easily angered, and they tend to be self-conscious and unsure of themselves. Components of neuroticism relate positively to hedonism (or seeking pleasure without regards to the long-term and a disregard for right and wrong) and negatively relate to benevolence, tradition, and conformity.

Individuals who score on the low end of neuroticism are more likely to feel confident, sure of themselves, and adventurous. They may also be brave and unencumbered by worry or self-doubt.

Mark below where you think you naturally fall:  Low      High

Assessing Where You Are

There are plenty of tests out there that can give you the most accurate results, but I find that knowing your ballpark is valuable. 

The first step in effectively leveraging your strengths is to learn what your strengths are.  The same is true of your weaknesses, note where you are pleased or disappointed at where you fall on each of these spectrums.  

In this way, looking at yourself through the lenses of the Big Five, you can understand a bit of your motivations behind your behaviors, habits, and interactions. 

It can also be useful to understand in relation or comparison to others - someone might trait high in neuroticism making them way more comfortable with chaotic/noisy/messy environment than you.  Or someone may trait high in conscientiousness and may require a tightly ordered environment.  It can be freeing to understand these aspects are partly part of me and partly learned and may be able to be shifted in one direction or another as well.

Here is an example of someone who has gone through this process: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12S0tANvwanT3V1HG49U_jmxe-0l6oaStfGlp8ybrXis

Beliefs and Values and Purpose

• What do I do?

• How do I do it?

• How do I know if I’m doing it well?

• What do I like about doing it?

• What do I dislike about doing it?

• What do I wish I could do more of?

• What do I wish I could do less of?

• How can I do it better?

• What’s working?

• What’s not working?

• How would it look if it were better?

• What do I truly care about? 

• What do I want to achieve? 

• What do I enjoy?

Future

• “What type of person do I want to become? 

• Or if that’s too daunting: What are common traits of people I admire?

• What do I want to avoid? What would your worst possible self look like in the future?

• What would I like to see more of?”

• What types of people do I want to surround myself with? 

• Imagine yourself on your deathbed and ask yourself, “What would I never regret?”

• What might my descendants wish I had done better for them?

• If I knew I couldn’t fail, what’s the biggest dream I can imagine achieving? 

Again, the answers to these questions will likely feel incomplete, bad, even wrong.  You’re just starting the work of noticing: where you’ve come from, where you are, and where you could go. You can revisit these questions to refine, add to, rewrite as you continue to think and then using these to inform yourself going forward in a compounding manner.

Your answers to these questions will be your guide: a map for your journey. They will help determine your goals and the types of people you need to build relationships with, the type of life you want to live and how best to pursue it. Whether it is through something like setting short and long term goals and developing a plan to reach them, building strong relationships, committing to lifelong learning, or carving out a unique path for yourself, stay true to your highest values and discover your own path to joy and fulfillment.

Now I know a bunch of you have read through this whole section and not written a damn thing. Go back and do the shittiest version possible that you find acceptable, I promise you the action is worth it.

Step 2: Negotiate

Now we know roughly where we are and how much we’re wobbling across most of our daily lives. 

The wobbling you is now nestled inside the framework of Health, Wealth, and Truth.  These will be the first three supporting corners of your bedrock.  The elements you can rely on at any time. Each core is supported by its own trio of supports.

You have likely been negotiating with yourself your whole life even if you didn’t recognize it.  A common one is the desire to lose weight.  This negotiation is between your current context and where you would like to go by navigating through Truth, Health, and Wealth.  

Taking the weight-loss example: there is a group of yous (the one who’s tired after work, the one who’s a fan of sweets, the one who remembers getting shamed way back in gym class) negotiating with other yous (the one who wants to look good in the mirror, the one who’s the image of your doctor, the one who dreams of playing pro sports).  You’re aiming to negotiate closer to where you would like to go.  

You will fail, you know this.  You can allow failure to be a good thing.  You’ve failed thousands of times whether you’re willing to admit it to yourself or not.  Reframe this kind of failure in a firm yet gentle way.  You are flawed and that’s ok, there’s no need to tyrannize yourself to perfection.  You can fail successfully and in a way that still makes progress in the direction you want to go.  Sometimes it’s useful to admit those things to yourself and sometimes it’s useful to hide them. 

You may not even know where it is you would like to go though hopefully you have some ideas from going through the Future section of Step 1.  I chose the weight-loss example because it’s such a common one across modern people.  The desire to is to ‘weigh less’ than you currently do and you think you want to lose 15 pounds.  You take a couple steps in the that direction and realize you actually want to weigh what you weighed in college.  You take a couple steps in that direction and realize you actually want to lose fat and gain muscle and remain about the same weight you are now.  You take a couple steps in that direction and realize you actually want to be whatever weight gets you the best time in that marathon you’ve always wanted to do.  And so on and so on.

Put another way: Most would-be climbers discover too late in life that the ladder they’ve been climbing is up against the wrong wall. Thankfully you are surrounded by nothing but walls and ladders

Every negotiation with yourself will be like this.  When viewed from this perspective with all the steps and changing of directions it may seem tiring and insurmountable.  But remember:

• You are already doing the unconscious version of this
• Your brain protects you from this complete view most of the time
• You aren’t seeking perfection or a strict logical foundation, you are just orienting yourself in the right direction and aiming to get further in that direction over time
• You can (and probably should) focus on improving a single area and there’s likely one that seem “easiest” to you. Perhaps you always been smart, or athletic, or kind. Rounding out that area within Health Wealth, or Truth should seem easiest and provide momentum for the other two.

For those that ‘begin with the end in mind’ you are orienting towards the ‘highest possible good’ and discovering what that is and how to get there in a spiraling upward journey.  The orientation framework aims to structure the initial negotiations to give firmer footing earlier.  

Put another way: “You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.” – James Clearquotes

In the framework, weight-loss would is most often negotiated under Health.  It will require negotiations in fitness, Nutrition, and even sleep .  But it will also likely require accepting struggle (under Truth) and help from others in bonds (under Wealth).

Many common issues from Step 1 can at least start to be resolved with the elements of Health, Wealth, and Truth. 

Step 3: Play the Set of All Games

Life isn’t a game, it is the set of all games. The word “game” maps to collective behaviors that simulate aspects of evolved adaptive systems that we (rightly) intuit as important in maintaining adaptive capacity.  Meaning: this idea of “games” allowed others to “play” well in the past, allows us to “play” now, get better, and to continue “playing” into the future.

A game is when the parties involved agree to a set of rules or a judge to mediate interactions and abide by the outcome. Conflict is when two people are sharing the same space, but not playing the same game. 

I’m not trying to trivialize things by using the words play and games. I wish there was a word that didn’t carry the semantic baggage. Instead this is to show that your life is filled with games (love, business, meeting someone for the first time, any task or chore, etc) and each has rules.  You can choose to play certain games or not but you cannot abstain from all of life’s games so it is important respect the rules.  Every game has explicit rules that are often man-made and implicit rules which are an expression of timeless principles to be uncovered by players through trial and error or education.

[Examples of tribesman meeting each other for the first time - interaction is mediated by trust

• [The first game we could imagine is two tribesmen from different tribes, seeing each other for the first time. Like two animals meeting each other in the wild, or someone trying to make friends with the birds in their back yard, the first interactions are mediated through a game of trust. The first step is to not attack or run away. This game may not be intended to produce a winner, though there is always a potential loser, so it is embodied at least to that extent. Through repeated interactions, distance is decreased while trust is increased. Of course rewards may speed up the process, if curiosity isn’t enough. Once one can move close enough to where the other could attack, even when focusing their attention, meaningful interactions can start taking place.

[Example of language as a game and as currency/trade so increase in complexity to a game of change? Evolutionary psychology of consciousness and evolving communication.  This results in more and more complex games to be played

• [The first common currency was arguably the word. Words allow us to trade ideals in the form of question and answer, and have agreements and disagreements. Words can appreciate or depreciate in value, depending on how widely they’re used. We use words as a map of our environment and experiences, both individually and as a group, while trying to incorporate different perspectives. We predict what others will say and how they’ll react in conversation. When a response doesn’t match our predictions, we change the words we’re using.

These initial games of old gradually evolved as enough trust and shared ideals are found to formulize rules (whether implicit or explicit) and create trade or competition. Some games create competitions. At the top of a competition sits a champion, who embodies the ideals of that competition by virtue of having won every test and trial, or in other words, having won the most games through fair play. If a competition is seen to be fair, many may be willing to participate. 

When a society comes to rely on a game’s competition to mediate certain interactions, it may become an institution. If a competition produces value for a society, then the ideals of the competition may change to produce more of that value. Using these definitions, we can explain society as a set of games and competitions.

[Religion as one of the oldest games we play

In this way, we begin to nest games of trust, ideals and markets inside each other, in order to mediate interactions at every level of culture and relationships. Once we’ve created competitions and institutions, champions become archetypes, whose virtues represent ideals and are imitated by the next generation. In this way, culture can be defined as a set of archetypes with a viable social dynamic, surviving in an environment. But we’ll get into this more in Chapter 3: World Building

Failure can stem from not respecting the rules or by playing with the wrong set. [ie conflict of two people not playing the same game [and/or could use driving as an example here of explicit vs implicit and respect/consequences] Competitions can also fail. If a competition isn’t seen to be fair, no one will participate. If a competition produces nothing of value, no one will be interested. If a competition doesn’t have clear rules, then being a champion doesn’t prove worthiness.

[Introduce and explain finite vs infinite games or embodied and unembodied games]

So how is this useful to you:

• Understand that everything is a game that can be played, played well and improved

• Consider video games and why they’re such a large industry.  They offer clear objectives, direct control, and immediate feedback, what’s not to like? The problem is that most many areas of life including jobs fail to give clear objectives, direct control, and immediate feedback. And we fail to create them.

• Playing Games for different outcomes

• Killers - Play to compete with others

• Achievers - Play to gain success and prestige

• Socializers - Play for the social aspect rather than the game itself

• Explorers - Play to discover new areas and possibilities

• The challenge of life is identifying which set of rules will provide you with the greatest benefit at a given time. As you progress and grow, the rules will evolve and that should be welcomed. Take time to pause and observe the games, define the rules of each, and prepare yourself for success

[Example simple social interaction: playing multiple simultaneous games, assessing whether this finite or infinite game (is this person normal or interesting or crazy, will I deal with this person again, if I engage with this person too much or not enough how will this affect things if it does turn into multiple interactions) I think this happens unconsciously and depending on your genetic disposition and social upbringing. Being high in extroversion makes  these situations like breathing.  Being high in neuroticism makes each one of these questions self-conscious in every interaction.

[Introduce and explain game theory?]

Now let’s dig into your core support systems of Mind, Body, and Spirit.

Mind Body Spirit