Stories and Wisdom from a Life Fully Lived

Author: Charles Tutt

  • First Principles

    First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge

    First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibility. Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles,” the idea is to break down complicated problems into basic elements and then reassemble them from the ground up. It’s one of the best ways to learn to think for yourself, unlock your creative potential, and move from linear to non-linear results.

    This approach was used by the philosopher Aristotle and is used now by Elon Musk and Charlie Munger. It allows them to cut through the fog of shoddy reasoning and inadequate analogies to see opportunities that others miss.

    “I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”

    — Richard Feynman

    The Basics

    A first principle is a foundational proposition or assumption that stands alone. We cannot deduce first principles from any other proposition or assumption.

    Aristotle, writing[1] on first principles, said:

    In every systematic inquiry where there are first principles, or causes, or elements, knowledge and science result from acquiring a knowledge of these; for we think we know something just in case we acquire knowledge of the primary causes, the primary first principles, all the way to the elements.

    Later, he connected the idea to knowledge, defining first principles as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”[2]

    First Principles

    The search for first principles is not unique to philosophy. All great thinkers do it.

    Reasoning by first principles removes the impurity of assumptions and conventions. What remains is the essentials. It’s one of the best mental models you can use to improve your thinking because the essentials allow you to see where reasoning by analogy might lead you astray.

    The Coach and the Play Stealer

    My friend Mike Lombardi (a former NFL executive) and I were having dinner in L.A. one night, and he said, “Not everyone that’s a coach is really a coach. Some of them are just play stealers.”

    Every play we see in the NFL was at some point created by someone who thought, “What would happen if the players did this?” and went out and tested the idea. Since then, thousands, if not millions, of plays have been created. That’s part of what coaches do. They assess what’s physically possible, along with the weaknesses of the other teams and the capabilities of their own players, and create plays that are designed to give their teams an advantage.

    The coach reasons from first principles. The rules of football are the first principles: they govern what you can and can’t do. Everything is possible as long as it’s not against the rules.

    The play stealer works off what’s already been done. Sure, maybe he adds a tweak here or there, but by and large he’s just copying something that someone else created. Most writers are no different.

    While both the coach and the play stealer start from something that already exists, they generally have different results. These two people look the same to most of us on the sidelines or watching the game on the TV. Indeed, they look the same most of the time, but when something goes wrong, the difference shows. Both the coach and the play stealer call successful plays and unsuccessful plays. Only the coach, however, can determine why a play was successful or unsuccessful and figure out how to adjust it. The coach, unlike the play stealer, understands what the play was designed to accomplish and where it went wrong, so he can easily course-correct. The play stealer has no idea what’s going on. He doesn’t understand the difference between something that didn’t work and something that played into the other team’s strengths.

    Musk would identify the play stealer as the person who reasons by analogy, and the coach as someone who reasons by first principles. When you run a team, you want a coach in charge and not a play stealer. (If you’re a sports fan, you need only look at the difference between the Cleveland Browns and the New England Patriots.)

    We’re all somewhere on the spectrum between coach and play stealer. We reason by first principles, by analogy, or a blend of the two.

    Another way to think about this distinction comes from another friend, Tim Urban. He says[3] it’s like the difference between the cook and the chef. While these terms are often used interchangeably, there is an important nuance. The chef is a trailblazer, the person who invents recipes. He knows the raw ingredients and how to combine them. The cook, who reasons by analogy, uses a recipe. He creates something, perhaps with slight variations, that’s already been created.

    The difference between reasoning by first principles and reasoning by analogy is like the difference between being a chef and being a cook. If the cook lost the recipe, he’d be screwed. The chef, on the other hand, understands the flavor profiles and combinations at such a fundamental level that he doesn’t even use a recipe. He has real knowledge as opposed to know-how.

    Authority

    So much of what we believe is based on some authority figure telling us that something is true. As children, we learn to stop questioning when we’re told “Because I said so.” (More on this later.) As adults, we learn to stop questioning when people say “Because that’s how it works.” The implicit message is “understanding be damned — shut up and stop bothering me.” It’s not intentional or personal. OK, sometimes it’s personal, but most of the time, it’s not.

    If you outright reject dogma, you often become a problem: a student who is always pestering the teacher. A kid who is always asking questions and never allowing you to cook dinner in peace. An employee who is always slowing things down by asking why.

    When you can’t change your mind, though, you die. Sears was once thought indestructible before Wal-Mart took over. Sears failed to see the world change. Adapting to change is an incredibly hard thing to do when it comes into conflict with the very thing that caused so much success. As Upton Sinclair aptly pointed out, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Wal-Mart failed to see the world change and is now under assault from Amazon.

    If we never learn to take something apart, test the assumptions, and reconstruct it, we end up trapped in what other people tell us — trapped in the way things have always been done. When the environment changes, we just continue as if things were the same.

    First-principles reasoning cuts through dogma and removes the blinders. We can see the world as it is and see what is possible.

    When it comes down to it, everything that is not a law of nature is just a shared belief. Money is a shared belief. So is a border. So are bitcoins. The list goes on.

    Some of us are naturally skeptical of what we’re told. Maybe it doesn’t match up to our experiences. Maybe it’s something that used to be true but isn’t true anymore. And maybe we just think very differently about something.

    “To understand is to know what to do.”

    — Wittgenstein

    Techniques for Establishing First Principles

    There are many ways to establish first principles. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

    Socratic Questioning

    Socratic questioning can be used to establish first principles through stringent analysis. This a disciplined questioning process, used to establish truths, reveal underlying assumptions, and separate knowledge from ignorance. The key distinction between Socratic questioning and normal discussions is that the former seeks to draw out first principles in a systematic manner. Socratic questioning generally follows this process:

    1. Clarifying your thinking and explaining the origins of your ideas (Why do I think this? What exactly do I think?)
    2. Challenging assumptions (How do I know this is true? What if I thought the opposite?)
    3. Looking for evidence (How can I back this up? What are the sources?)
    4. Considering alternative perspectives (What might others think? How do I know I am correct?)
    5. Examining consequences and implications (What if I am wrong? What are the consequences if I am?)
    6. Questioning the original questions (Why did I think that? Was I correct? What conclusions can I draw from the reasoning process?)

    This process stops you from relying on your gut and limits strong emotional responses. This process helps you build something that lasts.

    “Because I Said So” or “The Five Whys”

    Children instinctively think in first principles. Just like us, they want to understand what’s happening in the world. To do so, they intuitively break through the fog with a game some parents have come to hate.

    “Why?”

    “Why?”

    “Why?”

    Here’s an example that has played out numerous times at my house:

    “It’s time to brush our teeth and get ready for bed.”

    “Why?”

    “Because we need to take care of our bodies, and that means we need sleep.”

    “Why do we need sleep?”

    “Because we’d die if we never slept.”

    “Why would that make us die?”

    “I don’t know; let’s go look it up.”

    Kids are just trying to understand why adults are saying something or why they want them to do something.

    The first time your kid plays this game, it’s cute, but for most teachers and parents, it eventually becomes annoying. Then the answer becomes what my mom used to tell me: “Because I said so!” (Love you, Mom.)

    Of course, I’m not always that patient with the kids. For example, I get testy when we’re late for school, or we’ve been travelling for 12 hours, or I’m trying to fit too much into the time we have. Still, I try never to say “Because I said so.”

    People hate the “because I said so” response for two reasons, both of which play out in the corporate world as well. The first reason we hate the game is that we feel like it slows us down. We know what we want to accomplish, and that response creates unnecessary drag. The second reason we hate this game is that after one or two questions, we are often lost. We actually don’t know why. Confronted with our own ignorance, we resort to self-defense.

    I remember being in meetings and asking people why we were doing something this way or why they thought something was true. At first, there was a mild tolerance for this approach. After three “whys,” though, you often find yourself on the other end of some version of “we can take this offline.”

    Can you imagine how that would play out with Elon Musk? Richard Feynman? Charlie Munger? Musk would build a billion-dollar business to prove you wrong, Feynman would think you’re an idiot, and Munger would profit based on your inability to think through a problem.

    “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

    — Carl Sagan

    Examples of First Principles in Action

    So we can better understand how first-principles reasoning works, let’s look at four examples.

    Elon Musk and SpaceX

    Perhaps no one embodies first-principles thinking more than Elon Musk. He is one of the most audacious entrepreneurs the world has ever seen. My kids (grades 3 and 2) refer to him as a real-life Tony Stark, thereby conveniently providing a good time for me to remind them that by fourth grade, Musk was reading the Encyclopedia Britannica and not Pokemon.

    What’s most interesting about Musk is not what he thinks but how he thinks:

    I think people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good. But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—“from the first principles” is the phrase that’s used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past.[4]

    His approach to understanding reality is to start with what is true — not with his intuition. The problem is that we don’t know as much as we think we do, so our intuition isn’t very good. We trick ourselves into thinking we know what’s possible and what’s not. The way Musk thinks is much different.

    Musk starts out with something he wants to achieve, like building a rocket. Then he starts with the first principles of the problem. Running through how Musk would think, Larry Page said in an

    interview, “What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it? There’s this level of engineering and physics that you need to make judgments about what’s possible and interesting. Elon is unusual in that he knows that, and he also knows business and organization and leadership and governmental issues.”[5]

    Rockets are absurdly expensive, which is a problem because Musk wants to send people to Mars. And to send people to Mars, you need cheaper rockets. So he asked himself, “What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And … what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”[6]

    Why, then, is it so expensive to get a rocket into space? Musk, a notorious self-learner with degrees in both economics and physics, literally taught himself rocket science. He figured that the only reason getting a rocket into space is so expensive is that people are stuck in a mindset that doesn’t hold up to first principles. With that, Musk decided to create SpaceX and see if he could build rockets himself from the ground up.

    In an interview with Kevin Rose, Musk summarized his approach:

    I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So the normal way we conduct our lives is, we reason by analogy. We are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing… with slight iterations on a theme. And it’s … mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles. First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world, and what that really means is, you … boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “okay, what are we sure is true?” … and then reason up from there. That takes a lot more mental energy.[7]

    Musk then gave an example of how Space X uses first principles to innovate at low prices:

    Somebody could say — and in fact people do — that battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be because that’s the way they have been in the past. … Well, no, that’s pretty dumb… Because if you applied that reasoning to anything new, then you wouldn’t be able to ever get to that new thing…. you can’t say, … “oh, nobody wants a car because horses are great, and we’re used to them and they can eat grass and there’s lots of grass all over the place and … there’s no gasoline that people can buy….”

    He then gives a fascinating example about battery packs:

    … they would say, “historically, it costs $600 per kilowatt-hour. And so it’s not going to be much better than that in the future. … So the first principles would be, … what are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the spot market value of the material constituents? … It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, and some polymers for separation, and a steel can. So break that down on a material basis; if we bought that on a London Metal Exchange, what would each of these things cost? Oh, jeez, it’s … $80 per kilowatt-hour. So, clearly, you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell, and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.

    BuzzFeed

    After studying the psychology of virality, Jonah Peretti founded BuzzFeed in 2006. The site quickly grew to be one of the most popular on the internet, with hundreds of employees and substantial revenue.

    Peretti figured out early on the first principle of a successful website: wide distribution. Rather than publishing articles people should read, BuzzFeed focuses on publishing those that people want to read. This means aiming to garner maximum social shares to put distribution in the hands of readers.

    Peretti recognized the first principles of online popularity and used them to take a new approach to journalism. He also ignored SEO, saying, “Instead of making content robots like, it was more satisfying to make content humans want to share.”[8] Unfortunately for us, we share a lot of cat videos.

    A common aphorism in the field of viral marketing is, “content might be king, but distribution is queen, and she wears the pants” (or “and she has the dragons”; pick your metaphor). BuzzFeed’s distribution-based approach is based on obsessive measurement, using A/B testing and analytics.

    Jon Steinberg, president of BuzzFeed, explains the first principles of virality:

    Keep it short. Ensure [that] the story has a human aspect. Give people the chance to engage. And let them react. People mustn’t feel awkward sharing it. It must feel authentic. Images and lists work. The headline must be persuasive and direct.

    Derek Sivers and CD Baby

    When Sivers founded his company CD Baby, he reduced the concept down to first principles. Sivers asked, What does a successful business need? His answer was happy customers.

    Instead of focusing on garnering investors or having large offices, fancy systems, or huge numbers of staff, Sivers focused on making each of his customers happy. An example of this is his famous order confirmation email, part of which reads:

    Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box money can buy.

    By ignoring unnecessary details that cause many businesses to expend large amounts of money and time, Sivers was able to rapidly grow the company to $4 million in monthly revenue. In Anything You Want, Sivers wrote:

    Having no funding was a huge advantage for me.
    A year after I started CD Baby, the dot-com boom happened. Anyone with a little hot air and a vague plan was given millions of dollars by investors. It was ridiculous. …
    Even years later, the desks were just planks of wood on cinder blocks from the hardware store. I made the office computers myself from parts. My well-funded friends would spend $100,000 to buy something I made myself for $1,000. They did it saying, “We need the very best,” but it didn’t improve anything for their customers. …
    It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.

    To survive as a business, you need to treat your customers well. And yet so few of us master this principle.

    Employing First Principles in Your Daily Life

    Most of us have no problem thinking about what we want to achieve in life, at least when we’re young. We’re full of big dreams, big ideas, and boundless energy. The problem is that we let others tell us what’s possible, not only when it comes to our dreams but also when it comes to how we go after them. And when we let other people tell us what’s possible or what the best way to do something is, we outsource our thinking to someone else.

    The real power of first-principles thinking is moving away from incremental improvement and into possibility. Letting others think for us means that we’re using their analogies, their conventions, and their possibilities. It means we’ve inherited a world that conforms to what they think. This is incremental thinking.

    When we take what already exists and improve on it, we are in the shadow of others. It’s only when we step back, ask ourselves what’s possible, and cut through the flawed analogies that we see what is possible. Analogies are beneficial; they make complex problems easier to communicate and increase understanding. Using them, however, is not without a cost. They limit our beliefs about what’s possible and allow people to argue without ever exposing our (faulty) thinking. Analogies move us to see the problem in the same way that someone else sees the problem.

    The gulf between what people currently see because their thinking is framed by someone else and what is physically possible is filled by the people who use first principles to think through problems.

    First-principles thinking clears the clutter of what we’ve told ourselves and allows us to rebuild from the ground up. Sure, it’s a lot of work, but that’s why so few people are willing to do it. It’s also why the rewards for filling the chasm between possible and incremental improvement tend to be non-linear.

    Let’s take a look at a few of the limiting beliefs that we tell ourselves.

    “I don’t have a good memory.” [10]
    People have far better memories than they think they do. Saying you don’t have a good memory is just a convenient excuse to let you forget. Taking a first-principles approach means asking how much information we can physically store in our minds. The answer is “a lot more than you think.” Now that we know it’s possible to put more into our brains, we can reframe the problem into finding the most optimal way to store information in our brains.

    “There is too much information out there.”
    A lot of professional investors read Farnam Street. When I meet these people and ask how they consume information, they usually fall into one of two categories. The differences between the two apply to all of us. The first type of investor says there is too much information to consume. They spend their days reading every press release, article, and blogger, commenting on a position they hold. They wonder what they are missing. The second type of investor realizes that reading everything is unsustainable and stressful and makes them prone to overvaluing information they’ve spent a great amount of time-consuming. These investors, instead, seek to understand the variables that will affect their investments. While there might be hundreds, there are usually three to five variables that will really move the needle. The investors don’t have to read everything; they just pay attention to these variables.

    “All the good ideas are taken.”
    A common way that people limit what’s possible is to tell themselves that all the good ideas are taken. Yet, people have been saying this for hundreds of years — literally — and companies keep starting and competing with different ideas, variations, and strategies.

    “We need to move first.”
    I’ve heard this in boardrooms for years. The answer isn’t as black and white as this statement. The iPhone wasn’t first, it was better. Microsoft wasn’t the first to sell operating systems; it just had a better business model. There is a lot of evidence showing that first movers in business are more likely to fail than latecomers. Yet this myth about the need to move first continues to exist.

    Sometimes the early bird gets the worm and sometimes the first mouse gets killed. You have to break each situation down into its component parts and see what’s possible. That is the work of first-principles thinking.

    “I can’t do that; it’s never been done before.”
    People like Elon Musk are constantly doing things that have never been done before. This type of thinking is analogous to looking back at history and building, say, floodwalls, based on the worst flood that has happened before. A better bet is to look at what could happen and plan for that.

    “As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

    — Harrington Emerson

    Conclusion

    The thoughts of others imprison us if we’re not thinking for ourselves.

    Reasoning from first principles allows us to step outside of history and conventional wisdom and see what is possible. When you really understand the principles at work, you can decide if the existing methods make sense. Often they don’t.

    Reasoning by first principles is useful when you are (1) doing something for the first time, (2) dealing with complexity, and (3) trying to understand a situation that you’re having problems with. In all of these areas, your thinking gets better when you stop making assumptions and you stop letting others frame the problem for you.

    Analogies can’t replace understanding. While it’s easier on your brain to reason by analogy, you’re more likely to come up with better answers when you reason by first principles. This is what makes it one of the best sources of creative thinking. Thinking in first principles allows you to adapt to a changing environment, deal with reality, and seize opportunities that others can’t see.

    Many people mistakenly believe that creativity is something that only some of us are born with, and either we have it or we don’t. Fortunately, there seems to be ample evidence that this isn’t true.[11] We’re all born rather creative, but during our formative years, it can be beaten out of us by busy parents and teachers. As adults, we rely on convention and what we’re told because that’s easier than breaking things down into first principles and thinking for ourselves. Thinking through first principles is a way of taking off the blinders. Most things suddenly seem more possible.

    “I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can,” says Musk. “They sell themselves short without trying. One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as a sort of semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

    End Notes

    [1] Aristotle, Physics 184a10–21

    [2] Aristotle, Metaphysics 1013a14-15

    [3] https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html

    [4] Elon Musk, quoted by Tim Urban in “The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce,” Wait But Why https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html

    [5] Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (p. 354)

    [6] https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/

    [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-s_3b5fRd8

    [8] David Rowan, “How BuzzFeed mastered social sharing to become a media giant for a new era,” Wired.com. 2 January 2014. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/buzzfeed

    [9] What does Elon Musk mean when he said, “I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy?”

    [10] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-estimate-boosts-the-human-brain-s-memory-capacity-10-fold/

    [11] Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today, George Land

    [12] I am Elon Musk, CEO/CTO of a rocket company, AMA!

    READ NEXTNext Post: My Berkshire Hathaway ReflectionsAfter a decade of attending the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting, these are the thoughts and experiences that stand out the …

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  • The River Cannot go Back

    From clear pure innocence and challenging mountains to…

    It is said that before entering the sea,
    a river trembles with fear.
    She looks back at the path she has traveled,
    from the peaks of the mountains,
    the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
    And in front of her,
    she sees an ocean so vast,
    that to enter
    there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
    But there is no other way.
    The river can not go back.
    Nobody can go back.
    To go back is impossible in existence.
    The river needs to take the risk
    of entering the ocean
    because only then will fear disappear,
    because that’s where the river will know
    it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
    but of becoming the ocean.

    by Kahlil Gibran

  • My Friend Writes…

          I never dreamed that I would have to face the prospect of not living in the United States of America, at least not the one I have known all my life. I have never wished to live anywhere else. This is my home, and I was privileged to be born here.

    But today I woke up and as I had my morning coffee, I realized everything was about to change. No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, something evil has invaded our nation, and our lives will never be the same.

    The hostility of family and friends has confused me. I look at people I have known all my life—so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think I may well have entered the Twilight Zone.

    You can’t justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind!

    • If a man pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.

    • Somehow it’s un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.

    • Russians influencing our elections are bad, but illegals voting in our elections are good.

    • It was cool for Joe Biden to “blackmail” the President of Ukraine, but it’s an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquires about it.

    • Twenty is too young to drink a beer, but sixteen is old enough to vote.

    • People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves.

    • People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees that they never use.

    • Immigrants with the China Virus, tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.

    • Irish doctors and German engineers who want to immigrate to the US must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate gang-bangers who jump the southern fence are welcome.

    • $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care for illegals is not.

    • If you cheat to get into college, you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country, you go to college for free.

    • People who say there is no such thing as gender are demanding a female President.

    • We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a brilliant plan to us.

    • Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.

    • Criminals are caught-and-released to hurt more people, but stopping them is bad because it violates THEIR rights.

    • And pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us “racists”?!

    Nothing makes sense anymore, no values, no morals, no civility and people are dying of a Chinese virus, but it’s racist to refer to it as Chinese, even though it began in China.

    We are clearly living in an upside down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where moral is immoral and immoral is moral, where good is evil and evil is good, where killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.   

  • Fate

    “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”  Carl Jung

    You do not find a happy life. You make it..

    Professor Feynman

  • Perspectives

    Our personal, and All Humanities, Challenge

    All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

    Blaise Pascal

    We’re waking up, becoming more aware, but will our “awakening” be enough, and soon enough?

    The first and overarching Big Problem is to make the Good Person. We must have better human beings or else it is quite possible that we may all be wiped out, and even if not wiped out, certainly live in tension and anxiety as a species… This Good Person can equally be called the self-evolving person, the responsible-for-himself and his-own-evolution person, the fully illuminated or awakened or perspicuous man, the fully human person, the self-actualizing person, etc.”

    Abraham Maslow

    Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a demonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.

    Carl Jung

    For, as all exponents of the Perennial Philosophy have constantly insisted, man’s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God. To be a self is, for them, the original sin, and to die to self, in feeling, will and intellect, is the final and all-inclusive virtue.

    Aldous Huxley

    Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphorical mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life, we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.

    Bob Samples

    Life in the 21st century demands mindfulness—getting to know ourselves better and seeing how we contribute to suffering in our own lives.

    Bill Gates

    One great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase (consciousness / self-transcendence) amid all the clutter, and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top.

    Johathan Haidt

    Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.

    Abraham Maslow

    The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better… and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable.

    Vaclav Havel

    We traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare and neurosis. If we do not quickly awaken to our predicament? Planetary catastrophe.

    Terence Mckenna

    Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment…

    Nikola Tesla

    The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character. The only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

    Will & Ariel Durant

    The problem in the West is people want enlightenment to be fast, to be easy, and, if possible, cheap.

    Matthieu Ricard quoting Dalai Lama

    There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.

    Leo Tolstoy

    There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges—the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.

    Eckhart Tolle

    The mystics, saints, and others make great efforts to wake people up. If they don’t wake up, they’re always going to have these other minor ills like hunger, wars, and violence. The greatest evil is sleeping people, ignorant people… The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that. The only tragedy there is in the world is unwakefulness and unawareness. From them comes fear, and from fear comes everything else.

    Anthony de Mello

    Humanity’s Mind: Wisdom Catching up with Science & Technology

    There are more people on the planet today thinking for themselves than ever before.. Now, for the first time, a huge massive number of people are thinking for themselves.

    Sadhguru

    The public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

    Oscar Wilde

    Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it.

    Henry Ford

    The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. We cannot change it without changing our thinking.

    Albert Einstein

    The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

    Isaac Asimov

    We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

    E. O. Wilson

    We are living in space-age times with people who are living with Stone Age minds.

    Daryl Davis

    The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Palaeolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall… until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago—Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?–rationally.

    E. O. Wilson

    Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign.

    Will & Ariel Durant

    The most urgent problems of our world today are the problems we have made for ourselves. They are human problems whose solutions will require us to change our behavior and our social institutions.

    George Miller

    The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.

    Charlie Munger

    When I think about the world today and the challenges facing mankind, I don’t think the problems are technical. I think they’re human.

    Nichol Bradford

    In order to make peace with technology, we have to make peace with ourselves.

    Tristan Harris

    Responding to a radical crisis that threatens our very survival–this is humanity’s challenge now. The dysfunction of the egoic human mind, recognized already more than 2,500 years ago by the ancient wisdom teachers and now magnified through science and technology, is for the first time threatening the survival of the planet.

    Eckhart Tolle

    Abundance and Leisure Post Workism

    Thus for the first time since his creation man will face his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

    John Maynard Keynes

    Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature results from ease and security, not from a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto, we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this, we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

    Bertrand Russell

    In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally, substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.

    Peter Drucker

    The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.

    E. O. Wilson

    Reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

    Bill Gates

    Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb

    Most of modern life, all our diseases, are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity.

    Naval Ravikant

    Creativity is the last frontier… automation over a long enough period will replace every non-creative job… that’s great news. That means that all of our basic needs cared for, and what remains for us is to be creative, which is really what every human wants.

    Naval Ravikant

    The machines came and took away the power of your muscle. Now machines are coming which will take away the power of your memory (referring to intelligence/intellect)… in the future, the only thing that matters is what kind of human being are you?

    Sadhguru

    Aligning our Human Nature with Universal Nature

    The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

    Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

    You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

    Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut

    Priorities must be Planet-Society-Economy as opposed to Economy-Society-Planet… The reality of the world is that the economy is the wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere.

    Ron Garan, Astronaut

    Driven by greed, ignorant of their connectedness to the whole, humans persist in behavior that, if continued unchecked, can only result in their own destruction.

    Eckart Tolle

    There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview and in identity.

    Frank White

    Your definition of the word ‘home’ would rapidly expand to encompass the planet in its entirety, and for the first time, you might fully understand what it means to be one human family.

    Ron Garan, Astronaut

    Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are finding out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.

    John Muir

    I’ve often heard people say: ‘I wonder what it would feel like to be on board a spaceship,’ and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth.

    Buckminster Fuller

    Earth is not a platform for human life. It’s a living being. We’re not on it, but part of it. Its health is our health.

    Thomas Moore

    In the 1980s, simplicity was seen primarily as downshifting, or pulling back from the rat race of consumer society. Several decades later, there is a growing recognition of simplicity as up shifting—or moving beyond the rat race to the human race.

    Duane Elgin

    The solution to a lot of the world’s problems may be to turn around and take a forward step.

    Yvon Chouinard

    Humanity can still prosper for 150,000 years… but this depends on choosing a voluntary simplicity… growing qualitatively, not quantitatively.

    Matthieu Ricard

    Voluntary simplicity does not mean a return to a more primitive past, but a movement ahead to a more sophisticated, compassionate, and collaborative future

    Duane Elgin

    Individual and Collective Purpose

    The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with nature.

    Joseph Campbell

    As the concerns of survival recede, human beings will naturally evolve into perceiving higher things.

    Sadhguru

    For too long we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up: the dream that if we just improve the socioeconomic situation of people, everything will be okay, people will become happy. As the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

    Viktor Frankl

    The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Only a small proportion of the human population gets to the point of identity, or selfhood, full humanness, self-actualization, etc., even a society like ours, which is relatively one of the most fortunate on the face of the earth. This is our great paradox. We have the impulse toward full development of humanness. Then why is it that it doesn’t happen more often? What blocks it?

    Abraham Maslow

    Maslow defined self-actualization as discovering what you are meant to do and committing to the ardor of pursuing it with excellence. The purpose of free society, I would suggest, is to systematically increase the percentage of people who do exactly that.

    Jim Collins

    Despite the severity of our physical problems, our deepest challenge is to overcome an invisible crisis: a lack of collective consensus and cohesion around a compelling sense of purpose

    Duane Elgin

    The most foundational challenge facing humanity is not devising solutions to the energy crisis or climate crisis; rather, it is bringing visions and narratives of the human journey into our collective awareness that empowers us to look beyond a future of great adversity and to see a future of great opportunity.

    Duane Elgin

    As tribal cultures developed into ancient civilizations, they allotted certain functions to certain people: ruler, priest or priestess, warrior, farmer, merchant, artisan, craftworker, laborer, and so on. A class system developed. Your function, which in most cases you were born into, determined your identity, determined who you were in the eyes of others, as well as in your own eyes. Your function became a role, but they did not recognize it as a role: it was who you were, or thought you were. Only rare beings such as the Buddah or Jesus, saw the ultimate irrelevance of caste or social class, recognized it as an identification with form, and saw that such identification with the conditioned and the temporal obscured the light of the unconditioned and eternal that shines in each human being. In our contemporary world, the social structures are less rigid, less clearly defined than they used to be. Although most people are, of course, still conditioned by their environment, they are no longer automatically assigned a function and, with it an identity. In face, in the modern world, more and more people are confused as to where they fit in, what their purpose is, and even who they are.

    Eckhart Tolle

    Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the surrounding culture. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man’s-land between two worlds. They are no longer run by the ego, yet the arising awareness had not yet become fully integrated into their lives. Inner and outer purpose have not merged.

    Eckhart Tolle

    Then comes the reconciliation of outer and inner purpose: to bring that essence-consciousness-into the world of form and transform the world. The ultimate purpose of that transformation goes far beyond anything the human mind can imagine or comprehend. And yet, on this planet, that transformation is the task allotted to us. That is the reconciliation of outer and inner purpose, the reconciliation of the world and God.

    Eckhart Tolle

    Start with Yourself

    Don’t we all want to change the world? Do our part to make the world a better place, change humanity’s consciousness, mind, work, nature, and meaning?

    Paradoxically, the best and only place really, is to start with yourself.

    Busy remaking the world, man forgot to remake himself.

    Andrei Platonov

    Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

    Rumi

    There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

    Aldous Huxley

    It’s easier to change yourself than to change the world… Live the life you want other people to live.

    Naval

    The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

    Robert M. Pirsig

    If it’s true that “the macrocosm reflects the microcosm,” then you’d see the cumulative and compounding effects of more and more humans taking personal responsibility for their own lives.

    Your own self-realization is the greatest service you can render the world.

    Sri Ramana Maharshi

    To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state. That means now.

    Eckhart Tolle

    The character of a society is the cumulative result of the countless small actions taken day in and day out by millions of persons. Small changes that may seem unimportant in isolation are of transformative significance when adopted by an entire society.

    Duane Elgin

    There is something greater than history. Somewhere, sometime, in the name of humanity, we must challenge a thousand evil precedents, and dare to apply the Golden Rule to nations..

    Will & Ariel Durant

  • In Lieu of One Life Purpose

    Instead of Your Life’s Purpose:

    A meditation on meaning that explores the non-linear ways life progresses beyond a simple conception of a personal mission.

    A common misperception many of us have regarding a meaningful life is that we have a special purpose in life—and that once we find it, all our confusion ends. We’re saved from the happenstance and absurdity of our lives.

    While some people may discover a mission that does this, most of us will not—at least not in a way that makes for a good “Hero’s Journey” story.

    Our infatuation with stories portraying “the hero’s journey” select for meaning stories that scratch a certain human itch. They project a narrative simplicity backwards onto lives full of false leads, crises, and dead ends. They gloss over long periods of despair, the noise of randomness, the elements of chance, and personal and moral failings to tell the story of someone special who carried out a special mission. We have been told these stories all our lives, so we have deeply internalized them. “If only I could find my purpose!” And there’s actually truth to this. It’s me. It’s the story of my life.

    There is an alternate truth to my life as well. It’s premised on the idea that life is full of randomness punctuated by sudden moments—crises and opportunities—with vast potential for meaning making, when our skills and virtues shine.

    Rather than struggle to discover a purpose or vocation, we become people who can recognize and exploit opportunities to create meaning as they arise—resourceful and audacious people who live adventurous lives.

    This approach means not waiting to find your story arc, but recognizing that there are stories that pop up which you can opt into if you recognize them and have the right skills and virtues. It is about being prepared for the call to adventure, and cultivating the ability to recognize it, rather than believing we can direct our lives from the perspective of some knowable, ultimate mission (purpose).

    Where does meaning come from?

    Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe, there’s people always dying trying to keep them alive.”

    Bright Eyes

    The meaning I’m talking about is the kind that relieves a certain despair—the despair that comes from knowing that we must suffer and die and wondering if anything can be worthwhile in the face of these facts.

    Some sources of meaning seem to be:

    • participation in something larger that will survive ourselves—a nation, a family, a faith
    • creativity and flow states—bringing something genuinely novel into the world. When all our talents, including our deeply held and latent ones are used, this is more meaningful than when we are schlepping along.
    • love—when our sense of wellbeing has loci outside of ourselves—friends, family, and lovers
    • pro-social utility, or good works—creating a surplus of security and resources that others can use to survive and pursue their own sense of meaning
    • an internal sense of coherence, wholeness, and dignity

    Some people may find their sense of meaning is satisfied entirely from one of the above sources. Most of us, however, develop a portfolio of meaning—we have multiple sources of it in our lives, and cannot in fact derive it from only one source any more than we can be healthy on a diet of bread and water.

    What is the linear approach?

    The linear approach imagines that the meaning of our lives can be reduced to a mission, like the kind that fixes saints, heroes and social reformers in the historical imagination. “Created a vaccine.” “Expelled an occupier.” “Founded a religious order.” Of course, these accomplishments may admit multiple achievements or adventures—but are usually reduced to one overarching narrative.

    This imagines that if we found a sufficiently noble cause to devote our lives to—one to which our talents were suited and appropriate—we would be free to the suffering that is caused by the knowledge of death (and the possibility that it might strike at any time).

    Of course, there are people who have been personally fulfilled from devoting their life to a cause. For many, though, it does not work—our noble causes run into moral complexities on the ground, or are mirages based on a distorted vision of the world. They may leave us open to manipulation by careerist sociopaths, who know that we will chase any projected image that offers a shred of meaning, like a cat chasing a laser dot.

    What is the non-linear approach?

    The non-linear approach is different—rather than trying to discover a particular arc path and follow it to its conclusion, it recognizes that there will be many moments and opportunities to create meaning that arise in our life. The idea is not that we will take part in one story that can be easily wrapped up by our biographers—but that there are many adventures and quests that we can pursue. Rather than the attitude of the saint who is given a mission by God, it takes the attitude of the swashbuckling adventurer who goes out to seek his fortune.

    Instead of imagining yourself as the hero of a Hollywood movie, imagine yourself as a hearty ancestor that you might brag about when drunk: the one who rode bareback, founded a town, fought a grizzly bear, raised 10 kids, saved her son’s life by drinking the governor under the table, and went to the frontier to stay one step ahead of the hangman and her gambling debtors.

    This approach to the problem of meaning recognizes that, rather than trying to discern a mission, it is better to become a certain person—a person who can act on and recognize opportunities to make meaning when they are seen.

    Opportunism and Power Laws

    One advantage of the non-linear approach is that it does not demand that we devote every spare moment of our time to fulfilling some pre-ordained goal. It is more adaptive to the realities of power laws—of moments of high payoff or high risk—than of the day-to-day grind of accrual. If our lives are rich in opportunities for meaning, rather than defined by a singular narrative arc, we can act decisively at particularly important moments rather than imagining that every moment is equally meaningful. There are profound asymmetries and power laws at play in the pursuit of meaning—a split second decision might be the most important one you make; years of lounging around in cafes and on beaches might pay off more than years of hard work—if it results in one excellent idea.

    Trying to treat all of our time as equally meaningful and fungible because you can devote it to The Cause leads to absurdities. Consider this example of someone debating whether he should tell someone their car trunk is open:

    I hold open doors for little old ladies. I can’t actually remember the last time this happened literally (though I’m sure it has, in the last year or so). But within the last month, say, I was out on a walk and discovered a station wagon parked in a driveway with its trunk completely open, giving full access to the car’s interior. I looked in to see if there were packages being taken out, but this was not so. I looked around to see if anyone was doing anything with the car. And finally, I went up to the house and knocked, then rang the bell. And yes, the trunk had been accidentally left open.

    Under other circumstances, this would be a simple act of altruism, which might signify genuine concern for another’s welfare, or fear of guild for inaction, or a desire to signal trustworthiness to oneself or others, or finding altruism pleasurable. I think that these are all perfectly legitimate motives, by the way; I might give bonus points for the first, but I wouldn’t deduct any penalty points for the others. Just so long as people get helped.

    But in my case, since I already work in the nonprofit sector, the further question arises whether I could have better employed the same sixty seconds in a more specialized way, to bring greater benefit to others. That is: can I really defend this as the best use of my time, given the other things I claim to believe?

    Time is not fungible—a moment of opportunity, or a chance to respond appropriately to a crisis, might not occur again. Our creative powers do not flow smoothly and evenly like water from the tap to the drain, but chaotically like a babbling brook going from the mountains to the ocean—with different shoals, rapids, pools, and speeds along the way. Believing that our efforts must flow from smooth, even and continuous effort rather than coming in uneven bursts leads to unnecessary guilt and anxiety about “wasted” time.

    The need to regulate our time into a continuous flow is the result of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It is something we do to serve economies of scale in which we are interchangeable parts. But meaning, creative power and fortune arrive on their own schedules, and imagining that you can or should devote every waking moment to something is absurd.

    When there is only one possible source of meaning in our life, we adapt ourselves for efficiency: our goal might be to win souls for Jesus, or stop Skynet. We make ourselves machine-like. When the world is full of possibilities for meaning, we adapt ourselves for resiliency, flexibility and maneuverability. Resiliency, because we must survive long enough to take advantage of these latent sources of meaning, and flexibility, and maneuverability in order to act quickly and appropriately when they come up. Instead of looking for a cause to devote your life to, you might try to become someone who is useful and level-headed in a crisis, who is well connected and makes friends easily, or who regularly has good ideas.

    Interests and Projects

    Giving up on a life’s purpose does not mean there are not areas which are more fruitful to pursue than others. When you are interested in something, this suggests a fertile area. If nothing else, interests represent low-hanging fruits of reward-to-effort payoff: when you are pursuing an interest, rather than an obligation, you can use the energy you would otherwise need to browbeat yourself into actually doing things. Therefore it seems so easy to read about whatever your personal obsession is – astrology, kabbalah, entomology – rather than whatever the marketplace or superego tells you should pursue – tax law, Bible study, a programming language (these are examples only many people have interests or disinterests in these subjects!) Like the God of the Old Testament, we will love whom we will love, and we will be fascinated by that which fascinates us.

    If we have an interest, there is a challenge to make it meaningful – with some things, this will be easier than others, because our culture that tells us how to do has given a script to us so. More obscure interests represent more of a challenge – but also easy opportunities. A quick glance at the internet will reveal artists who are using new media to create works of brilliance in unexpected places. There are Twitter threads made by anonymous writers which contain more insight than most published academic papers, and memes which capture the human condition better than most works found in art galleries. Your heroes become what they were by breaking genuinely new ground – doing things that those before them thought were unthinkable. To be like them, you must surf the void at the frontiers of meaning – and discover meaning where no one else thought it would be, transforming harsh barrens into lush gardens.

    The linear approach of finding a mission and dedicating one’s life to it – is typically best for those who have an overpowering, obsessive interest in something. If you are like this, chances are this article is not for you, and you are not grasping at meaning but hoping to read more about the Thing which so consumes your thoughts. If this is the case, your vocation has already chosen you.

    Selfishness, Love, and Integrity

    Because several loci of meaning – pro-social utility, love, and self transcendence – involve escapes from our localized self interest, we can feel guilt or a dearth of meaning when we act selfishly, when we cannot love as often or as deeply as we should, or when our interests do not lead down paths which generate surpluses and resources for others.

    Sometimes it is, in fact, necessary to put others first – you may have to take time out from your career or hobby to care for a child or an ailing parent, or to help your community or nation deal with some crisis. You may realize that you are spending too much time in the workshop and not enough time with your children. But taken too far, this thinking can also produce crippled, resentful individuals who give back only a fraction of what they would have if they were flourishing. Your children need food, clothes and education, and they need your love and guidance – but they also need to see you happy and engaged with life.

    Most of us have probably met some version of the pinched and crabby moralist – one who dedicated his or her life to some cause and did not get the spiritual payoff they thought they would, and are now resentful and controlling. There was a time when this was me. Thankfully, that period is part of my past.

    Instead of selflessness, strive for integrity. When you create, it should be things you think are good – that honestly portray your inner and outer world as best you are able. When you are honestly pursuing your own values and vision – and not subordinating them – you are more likely to generate meaning than if you are navigating a maze of compromises with some goal in mind. Especially if these compromises are dictated to you by a nagging superego that torments you with an image of moral heroism which you can never live up to.

    This requires faith and willingness to trust your values and intuitions rather than the well-worn stories dictated to you by culture. Recognize that the heroes whose lives inspired you did what they did, mostly by going out into the unknown and doing what others thought was impossible. This is not, incidentally, a guarantee that if you do so you will succeed – for the world to be a meaningful one, there must be uncertainty and risk.

    Meta-ethics and Meaning

    This approach to meaning – becoming a certain kind of person who can act appropriately in response to opportunities for meaning making – lends itself well to a particular school of meta-ethics, which is virtue ethics. Deontology, (a study of duty and obligations) represents the ethics of duty: the floor beneath which we must not sink, if we are to co-operate with others to pursue the goods of survival and flourishing. Consequentialism is the ethics of power and emergency, when there are clearly defined stakes which must be traded off against one another. In its utilitarian version, if flounders, precisely because a definition of “the good” requires more legibility than is typically available: of both our own values and the results of our actions in a real-world environment.

    The non-linear approach to meaning is about becoming the person who will, given a chance, act effectively to realize their values in this world, even if those values are not articulable except as a felt sense of meaning. It requires us to become developed along multiple axes of development: capable of risking it all in a dangerous, uncertain and beautiful world full of hazard and opportunity.

  • Learning How to Think

    Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Exercising this kind of choice will put you miles ahead in life.

  • Luck

    “Being pleasant and having a respectful attitude is a simple way to become luckier.

    Opportunities come through people, and people are more likely to bring opportunities to people they like. 

    It’s hard to win if your attitude adds friction to every interpersonal experience.”

  • Metabolism

    Health

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aACFi0ZIO8w

  • Learning

    This is a good way to becoming the best you can be. What that is is up to you.