The life plan is a compass that shows you how to navigate daily life for maximal joy
The needle in a magnetic compass points to magnetic north. Imagine you had a compass that always pointed in the direction of the greatest possible joy. Instead of pointing in the same direction all the time, it would change directions from time to time, indicating in each moment what tasks to work on, what decisions to make, and every other instruction you would need to lead you to the greatest long-term joy. What would you be willing to pay for such a device?
Such a device does exist, but no one can sell it to you. You have to make it yourself. The device is called a life plan, and this book will tell you how to make it. The good news is that the device works; the bad news is that it takes a little bit to describe how to make and use it, and it will only work if you follow the instructions.
The life plan aligns all facets of life to what matters most
Most people live their lives trapped in reactions to daily events, choosing what they do moment to moment based on what others do to them rather than proactively designing and executing an overarching plan of what they want out of life. The life plan provides a way to make everything in your life intentional.
When your life is intentional, it ceases to take the normal form of fragmentation between what we must do and what we want to do. Whether in an outside job or in the home, so many people see their time in these two categories, working because they have to, not because they want to. They drudge away for hours, days, weeks, and months to finance the necessities of life or the next short adventure, only to find themselves back in the slog, no happier than when they started, to repeat the loop forever.
With such an outlook, why would anyone feel meaning in what they do? How could they, when they pursue work as separate from what is meaningful to them?
It is possible to arrange your life in such a way that your every action is integrally aimed at your highest purpose, and as you do so, you will find deep meaning in everything you do.
Work is its own reward when you are laboring for what is most important to you. Gone will be the former split between what you have to do and what you want to do. You’ll only do what intentionally leads to what you want the most, and accordingly, you’ll recognize everything you need to do as being what you want to do, no matter how mundane or difficult it might be.
While this might seem too good to be true, it isn’t. In fact, many of these changes are in such small ways that as you learn about and make them, your life may not be recognizably different to anyone else’s. While you will absolutely make changes to what you do and when you do it as a result of this book, the biggest change will be to why you do what you do. By arranging your life around what is most important to you, you will inject the greatest meaning throughout every aspect of your life.
The life plan is worthwhile because it gives more than it takes
If using a tool requires more work than not using it, no one would or should use it. Creating a life plan saves more time and energy than what is required to learn about and use it.
The big picture is easy; propagating it down to the daily takes finesse
It’s relatively easy to make an irrefutable argument for the fact that extrinsic, long-term, purpose-driven living is the only way to maximize joy. It’s not easy at all to propagate this mode of being through all scopes of life in a way that is as varied as the differences between individuals and as flexible as the ever-expanding revelations of reality requires.
The core of this book describes a framework that provides a scaffold to organize and execute a plan for your life in such a way that you can leverage all the power of a transcendent purpose in every facet of your life without nearly as much hassle as you’d expect in such an overarching endeavor. While it takes a bit to lay it out, you can rest assured that as it’s described, it will make perfect sense. In fact, you might be shocked as to why you hadn’t thought of it yourself.
One reason the model is easy to use and think about is that it is modular. It’s designed so that you can think of any part of it with as much or as little detail as you want to in the particular moment. This helps you remember the vital pieces without having to store every detail in your mind. Each section of the model gives you the ability to partition out a piece of what might otherwise be an overwhelming amount of information, zoom in to higher resolution when necessary, create and edit that portion, then zoom back out to a high level. The model will also give you easy ways of knowing when it is time to do so.
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Qualities
The qualities component describes the kind of person you have to be in order to experience maximal joy.
Values
Values are how we appraise the cost and benefit of everything we might do in the what section in terms of the resilient long-term joy it would bring.
Beliefs
Beliefs influence qualities and values and enumerate goals and tasks. Beliefs are also influenced by the why and what groups as a whole.
Goals
Goals are ways of decomposing your transcendent purpose into measurable, completable aims that will guide your enumeration and prioritization of daily tasks in a way that preserves their connection to your transcendent purpose.
Tasks
Tasks are the actions you take each day to advance your purpose.
How does this extend beyond what is already available?
Many valuable books and other materials have been published that center on themes of productivity, improvement, purpose, organization, goals, happiness, and the like. Tremendous benefits can be reaped by those who read, extract, and apply the lessons provided.
At an extremely high level, existing frameworks all consist of two portions: what and why. While the details vary considerably across frameworks, all seem to correctly highlight the enormous improvements that are available simply by explicitly thinking about, writing a plan for, and executing tasks that detail your answer to these two fundamental questions. From there, most authors have focused considerably on the subject of tasks: how to enumerate them, how to prioritize them, and how to execute them.
Many millions have successfully improved facets of their lives from learning and living these ideas, but have found that they are not broad enough to cover all areas of life, and therefore can’t be used as a universal model for living. Many more millions have struggled to find ways of integrating the material into their lives, not fitting into the mold of those the materials were written for.
Those familiar with prior content will find that the model presented in this book provides new ideas that more readily connect all scales of a person’s life from overarching purpose to daily tasks while synthesizing earlier valuable ideas into a coherent system that is much more integrated, usable, and understandable than how they were originally presented.
Among the new ideas explored here are:
- The importance of one’s character qualities—who you are—to what you do.
- The importance of your overarching purpose to the motivation and prioritization of what you do.
- The vital importance of your beliefs to what you do, why you do it, and how you feel about it.
- How what you value is the key to prioritization for maximal joy.
- The idea that you can only have one overarching purpose, and why.
- That the purpose of everyone’s life is joy, but many differences in implementation will be caused by what each individual values and believes.
- The role emotions play in what we do and why we do it, and what we can do to more effectively steer them towards what we want instead of allowing them to steer us away from what we want.
Another noticeable difference between the ideas in the book and ideas others have proposed is the breadth and depth of applicability. Prior approaches are tuned to specific subsets of life and specific subsets of people. However, the life plan is capable of bringing the benefits of intentionality and joy into every corner of your life, no matter who you are and what you do. The life plan will equally empower high school students, stay-at-home moms, Fortune 500 executives, priests, plumbers, and everyone in between. If you have a pulse, it will change your life.