Sources of and Solutions to Mental and Emotional Anguish

Mental anguish is a symptom, not a disease

In our modern world, a host of conditions are referred to under the umbrella of “mental health.” This naming is a significant case of intentional misdirection. How you describe something changes how you address it. Calling someone’s feelings their “mental health” is more than just unnecessarily complicated. It’s an overt and successful attempt at absolving individuals from any personal responsibility over how they think, feel, and act. Saying someone has “mental health problems” does nothing to address the cause of their undesirable feelings nor the consequences of having them.

Mental anguish is a symptom, not a disease. Anxiety, depression, stress, and other bad feelings are not the manifestation of something you have. Rather, they are merely the manifestation of something you don't have, namely the ability to regulate your emotions through the choices you make.

Mental anguish is a sign that you are missing something—the solution to a puzzle within that you have not yet solved. It is a signal calling you to action: go and find and fix the choices that are leading you to feel this way.

The simplistic explanation that your feelings are a result of deficient chemical process in your brain oversimplifies the complex processes driving your body and grossly overstates the results of research into them. In fact, it may shock you to learn that there has been no peer reviewed evidence of brain chemistry causing mental anguish. Though obviously a multi-factor problem, the incidence of modern mental anguish is a crisis of internal perspective more than anything else.

The phrase “mental health” might be new, but the problems it labels are not. Human happiness is not a new goal, nor the abundance of the alternative a new condition. We need not treat this as a new puzzle nor an ongoing mystery; it’s a problem for which a sufficient solution has always been available and—until very recently—widely employed.

The principle problem is not that modern people have undergone a sudden genetic shift that renders them inadequate to face challenges that most people managed quite well since the dawn of time. While life is more complex in many ways than it was in prior generations, humans since the dawn of time have faced significantly harder situations than we do. Because people in the past successfully managed their emotions, you can rest assured that the problem is not one of genetics, and that the power to change your feelings is much stronger than any biological imperative.¹

The significant difference between this and prior generations is not genetic, but cultural. Since WWII, multiple generations have been led to believe that how they feel is a purely physical phenomenon over which they have no control. You see the intentional minimization of the role of choice in every description of this problem. Suicide, addiction, and obesity—all personal choices—are described as things that happen to you. “He was a victim of suicide,” “she got addicted,” “she was afflicted with obesity.”

Poor choices should not be referred to or treated as illnesses or genetic flaws. Character flaws should not be described as anything but optional. Your choices are yours to make, your character is yours to shape, and you are free to learn and live to manage your emotions or not. Regardless, how you choose to respond to your feelings is your responsibility alone, and referring to feelings in any way that abdicates responsibility for them is dishonest and harmful to yourself and others.

Joy isn’t the same as comfort, and is contrary to the default state of man

One of the problems with calling bad feelings “mental illness” is that it strongly suggests that they come from some abnormal situation. As diagnoses continue to balloon, so does the evidence that joy is not the default human experience. And why would it be? This life presents an unending source of ever-increasing challenges. It’s not a mystery when someone feels bad. The mystery is why anyone would ever feel good!

When most people say happiness, they often mean comfort. Comfort is the absence of suffering. Comfort can’t endure forever. Challenges will always appear. No matter against what opposition you achieve comfort, something more will eventually overwhelm your comfort. Only an ever-increasing source of meaning can endure an ever-increasing source of challenges.

Joy is not the absence of suffering, but the adequacy of meaning. Happiness is not the absence of suffering, but the possession of meaning that makes the inescapable suffering worthwhile. While mitigation of unnecessary suffering is absolutely a portion of obtaining greater joy, it is of itself insufficient to yield enduring joy.

To attain the greatest joy, you need to overcome suffering with meaning. The search for happiness is the search of ever-increasing meaning, not the search for cessation of suffering. Joy requires deliberate effort and accurate aim. Joy requires intentional living. It requires actively searching for and living according to incrementally greater truth.

Increased awareness and complexity in modern times

The historic demands of life were always sufficient to require deliberate effort and accurate aim, and while a contingent of people always failed to lock into and achieve lasting happiness, these were always a small minority that tended not to be the ones who successfully reproduced and raised the next generation.

Modern life provides even greater challenges compared to historic periods due to the complexity fueled by cheap energy and the innovations it fostered, along with unprecedented wealth and health that has removed most of the consequences for poor attitudes and choices.

While modern wealth far exceeds anything known by prior generations, but wealth is no substitute for meaning. Growing wealth has brought with it growing entropy that has overtaken the adoption rate and strength of the beliefs that worked before but have declined steadily since WWII. Because joy comes from meaningful progress in a worthwhile goal, should it be a surprise that increasing numbers of people are devoid of it, given the increasing cohort of those completely overcome by the challenges of life?

A principle component of what is different today is the sheer amount of information instantly available for nearly no cost. Ambient awareness is much greater today than in the past. Thanks to a flood of information, people today are much more aware of the serious challenges of reality compared to those who came before, but have far fewer and weaker tools than prior generations. Modern life is a combination of greater-than-historic awareness and near total abandonment of practices that proved sufficient to cope with historic awareness.

The more awareness you acquire, the stronger your tools must be for contending with complexity. You have to become better at critical thinking, yet people today are markedly worse than prior generations. You have to become faster at adapting to change, yet people today are still following paths that have not led to success since before the financial crisis of 2008. You have to be more willing to sacrifice for the future, yet people today are arguably worse at this than any prior people. You have to be robust to quickly notice and recover from bad decisions inevitable in higher complexity, but today’s youth are more ideological and fragile than any surviving society has ever been.

Increasingly stronger means are required to contend with the difficulties of increased awareness

Today’s world employs a flood of chemical and physical approaches to contend with the challenges of increased awareness. Most respond to these challenges not by seeking their solutions, but by muting the signals they produce, saturating their brains and schedules with things that help them ignore them.

None of these external approaches actually address the underlying problem. Instead of fixing the problem, they merely make it possible to care less about it. The honest sufferer has to admit that no amount of pills, liquids, or hedonistic living will actually take away the anxiety, sorrow, and suffering they experience.

Children, for the most part, are joyful beings. Unhappiness in its many forms tends to correlate with the transition into adulthood and the increased awareness it brings. Though it will not attain its full potential without exercise, to a certain extent, the mind will grow on its own, just as the body will. Unfortunately, one’s ability to cope with awareness does not grow automatically. Furthermore, the greater the intelligence of the individual, the more drastic will be the increase in their awareness, and the less sufficient their childhood tools will be for contending with adult life.

Meaning overcomes the challenges of complexity

The primary cure for the challenges facing people today is the same it’s ever been: meaning. Though much more of it is needed than ever before, meaning has always been the motivator for finding and living principles that overcome the challenges of life.

Purpose produces peace when sought with the same intensity as the feelings that preclude the peace. The ongoing struggles of people who suffer from mental anguish primarily come from a lack of sufficient meaning to justify their suffering. It is not accidental that the most productive and creative people in history have been notoriously plagued by mental anguish. Those with unusual drive are attempting to find meaning to justify the greater awareness they have of the suffering that exists in life.

To find the cure to what mentally ails you, start with finding an intensity of purpose sufficient for your suffering. What would be worth the negative feelings you experience?

The very act of thinking about your situation in terms that transcend your present feeling moves you out of the fight-or-flight mechanism into which we automatically move when we experience something that sufficiently exceeds what we are accustomed to.

Instead of intentionally thinking in transcendent terms, too many people become imprisoned by persistent emotional reactions. They can remain in the unthinking emotional state for a moment, a prolonged period, and even for the rest of their lives.

How many people do you know who refer to long past trauma as the explanation for why they act in certain ways? In order to break the bonds of mental anguish, you must seek an intensity of meaning that justifies what you have suffered. Shockingly, as you do so, you will find that you move past the suffering, and into joy of equal and opposite intensity.

The life plan is a solution to the misalignment of belief, action, and reality that causes mental anguish

So much mental anguish comes from an insufficient understanding of reality, the absence of a viable plan for maximizing meaning given reality, and failure to effectively execute such a plan.

The life plan is a holistic solution to mental anguish, because it is a practical approach to aligning oneself to the greatest possible purpose, orienting the individual to the greatest meaning and maximally propagating that meaning into every facet of life.

By consciously identifying and addressing shortcomings in one’s character qualities, values, beliefs, goals, and tasks, one can effectively mitigate mental anguish. Beliefs that cover more of reality with greater accuracy will generate goals and tasks that are better prioritized to produce much greater joy.

Overwhelm is a signal of the need to plan and prioritize

The emotions that come from thinking about everything you need to or could do can easily overwhelm you. You can control negative feelings by leaving the emotional state and intentionally listing and ranking what you need to do.

Problems have a way of jumping out at you. You don’t have to look very hard to find them. Once a problem has been identified, the usefulness of paying more attention to it is limited to what it takes to add it to the list of problems to include in your next training session, where you will make a plan of how to solve those with the highest priority. Unfortunately, almost all our brain interactions with problems is in worrying about them instead of thinking about what can be done about them, or evaluating which is most important. Once a problem is recorded, focus only on what you have intentionally determined is most important until and unless you have constructive new ideas about it.

Mental anguish comes as we incorrectly assign the feelings that come when we aren't doing what we can about the things we can change to the things we can't change. Focusing your attention on future events outside of what you will do today will create a feedback loop of anxiety that will prevent you from doing what you actually need to do today, causing less joy and more suffering in your life than what could have been had you not self-sabotaged.

There is no point fixating on what lies outside of your power. As you do all that lies within your power to obtain what you seek, you will find that you have no attention to spare on what does not. Those who do all they can will find surprising peace that endures independent of what others do or don’t do.

People treat overwhelm as if it can’t be predicted or avoided before it comes, nor adequately overcome once it arrives. The truth is that overwhelm isn’t a problem, but rather the symptom of a problem. Stop thinking of overwhelm as an opponent that is stronger than you, and start thinking of it as a signal that you need to do something differently than you do.

The natural reaction of overwhelm is to do less, but this response isn’t just in the wrong direction. It’s in the wrong dimension. Overwhelm isn’t a question of working harder, but an indication of a need to work smarter. Overwhelm indicates that you haven’t sufficiently planned and prioritized your to do list. If you feel overwhelmed, you have not yet sufficiently differentiated the priorities of the tasks you could accomplish with your limited resources.

Overwhelm comes not just because you have too much to worry about, but also because you are often worrying about the wrong things. Limitation of resources will require you to pick which problems to be most concerned about. Interestingly, when you focus all you have to give on what matters the most, your concern about both the things you are focused on and the things that are not as important evaporates.

When you live life unintentionally, you have no way of comparing the relative priority of different initiatives, but the life plan gives you everything you need to compare and order competing demands on your time. The more confident you are of your values and the fact that you are honestly doing all you can to complete the most important tasks you can, the less mental anguish you will experience.

With every task completed from these lists, you are going to not just find that you have less anxiety, you are also going to feel like you have more resources than you did before to tackle the next task. You will gain greater resources to complete more, and you will also develop more implicit confidence in yourself and your life plan.

Planning cures anxiety

The modern world uniformly considers anxiety a problem. What if, instead, anxiety is merely a signal? Often, negative feelings come because you aren’t sure that your path is what is best, you aren’t sure it will lead to what you really want, and you don’t know what you need to do next. In the life plan framework, anxiety is not an existential problem—it’s just a signal that you need to have another planning session.

Whenever you find yourself dealing with anxiety, write down everything you could possibly do to address what is making you anxious. You will be surprised at how much anxiety will vanish just by writing down what is on your mind. The more organization you use while you write, and the more you put into practice what you learn, the more effectively you will mitigate your anxiety. The planning process discussed previously in this book gives you a constrained, intentional, and effective way to construct a written plan for how to solve each

problem and prioritize it in the context of all other items on your list, vastly reducing your stress about it. A planning session with your life plan will help reassure you that you are on the path to better things,

mitigating negative feelings and often replacing them with positive ones. When you repeat this exercise across multiple sources of anxiety, you will use your purpose, your qualities, and especially your values to identify the source of anxiety that is most important to you. Reusing the analogy of paying down credit card debt, you will focus all your discretionary resources on the chief source of the worst anxiety until it is reduced to the point where it is replaced by something else.

As you do this, you’re going to notice significant changes. One of the most pernicious things about anxiety is that it acts like emotional overhead, stealing away your emotional resources from the productive things you would otherwise use them for. As you knock out chunks of your anxiety, you will recover that emotional energy, and you will feel yourself snowballing into greater momentum and capacity to accomplish more and more than you could before in less and less time —and not just on your anxiety lists. Freedom from emotional overhead will carry through every single moment of every single day, no matter what you spend it on.

Doing what is most important with all our resources brings peace

While negative feelings are almost universally assumed to be a bad thing, it is important to realize that at least sometimes, they come as we begin to realize just how important so many things in life are. For example, a person who begins to understand the true urgency of every moment will necessarily see every moment as extremely important. This is not a mental deficit, but a boon of honesty, requiring an additional increment of intensity in what you do and why you do it.

Whether through lack of diligence in ascertaining priority, lack of discipline in focusing on what is most important, or lack of awareness of the possibility and importance of doing so, whenever we feel bad, there is usually something more we can do.

Negative feelings are frequently interpreted as a signal that we have too much to do, or that what we have to do is too difficult, but the truth is that negative feelings often actually come as a result of our failure to do all we can.

The best way to accept how things are is to try to change them with all your might. If you don’t yet feel peace about a situation, it indicates you don’t yet believe you’ve done all you can about it. Until you feel at peace about something, you should keep asking what more you can do about it, and doing the most important of the things you enumerate. Even if you fail in your attempt, you will feel peace about the situation until and unless you gain greater capacity at a later date to try again. Instead, most people feign attempts at what they want while reserving the needed intensity, securing for themselves the ability to hold on to what they would have proven beyond their reach if they went all out. They don’t seem to understand that in doing so, they both rob themselves of what they say they want—as they aren’t doing what it takes to get it—and what they actually want—as they aren’t pursuing it at all while distracted with the half-hearted attempts at something else.

It’s not enough to have a plan, you really have to live it with your full being. You can't have enduring peace while you are failing to live up to what you believe is best.

How character qualities mitigate mental anguish

The tendency of modern people is to blame others for your situation. While the choices of others absolutely affect your situation, much of what is done by others lies outside of your control.

There is absolutely no benefit in focusing on things you can’t change. It causes extra suffering and limits joy. It is far easier and more beneficial to be realistic about what you can change and focus your efforts on that.

Be responsible for your life and what you use it for. Don’t blame other people for things that are your fault. Don’t suffer needlessly for things you can prevent. If you wish to improve, the place to start is by asking what you personally could do differently to obtain a better outcome.

The best way to develop a better life is to become a better person. Joy comes through who and how we are, not what happens to us. Those who seek a better life in spite of who they are will never find it, because a better life can only come through becoming a better person. Those who seek to feel better without becoming better use experiences and insincere posturing to distract themselves from who they are, but vicarious virtue and proxy prosperity will never yield what is sought in them.

Unfortunately, few people want to feel better by becoming better. They do not want to be good, which requires change. Instead, they want to feel good, which is all about avoiding evidence that they aren’t actually good. Almost all people will do almost anything to avoid greater awareness—whether it is of better outcomes than they already have, or better visibility of imperfections they possess, as yet known or not.

No one would publicly admit that they hate improvement. Instead, they manifest this attitude through their feelings and actions. People tend to hate having their choices, actions, beliefs, and words questioned. They say they want to be better, but hate when others point out something better than what they think, do, or feel. They want more and better than what most people have, but they also don’t want to fight conventional wisdom. At some point, each person has to decide which they want more, because whenever what you want is mutually exclusive, you’ll either have to choose one of the options above the other, or have none.

To feel good about yourself, you first have to be willing to feel bad about yourself. The best character will yield the greatest joy long-term, but will require you to do things that make you feel bad in the shortterm. The need to feel good now will keep you from developing and maintaining the best character qualities, because being a good person requires you to do difficult things. Most people feel worse when their shortcomings are exposed, but this need only be the case as long as you have not yet discovered that it is best to be best.

Much of the pain that comes from correction is due to an unfounded attachment to who you are in preference to who you could be. You can instantly minimize this pain by choosing to associate yourself with the improvement you seek rather than the qualities you seek to leave behind.

Whatever cost is associated with improvement is always worthwhile when prioritized against other potential improvements. As long as you are making the greatest possible progress, the challenge of change is more than worth the cost.

Change requires pain, but staying the same in the face of a needed change causes much greater pain. The pain of a necessary change unmade will endure and fester and grow until you choose to experience the pain of change. Why delay?

How values mitigate mental anguish

What you choose to value can provide resilience against challenges. Becoming a better person includes developing a more accurate understanding of what benefits the most. If you want to feel better, act so as to obtain and retain outcomes that are more valuable to you. When you identify, seek, and obtain greater outcomes, you have a more abundant stockpile from which to draw in times of need.

Beware the temptation to measure life’s abundance solely in the things you possess. These are the least valuable and least resilient of all possible outcomes. Who you become and what you’ve sacrificed for others are much stronger and long-lasting bulwarks against the challenges of life.

Your values can reduce the strain of seemingly negative outcomes when put into the context of what is more important. For example, when something turns out worse than you expected, you can consider how unimportant it is in the scope of all things that matter more.

Values provide you with a source of measurable gratitude for what you have but would otherwise underappreciate. The richest man is he who knows the true value of the simple things most take for granted.

How beliefs mitigate mental anguish

How and when our emotions manifest is highly coupled to our beliefs. Our beliefs strongly influence how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. Everything we perceive in life is interpreted through a model of meaning, and that meaning—not the event itself—is what determines how it makes us feel.

“It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance. It is not external events themselves that cause us distress, but the way in which we think about them, our interpretation of their significance. It is our attitudes and reactions that give us trouble.” - Epictetus

One’s beliefs are their model of the laws of cause and effect. When you have greater understanding of cause and effect and choose to better align with what you already know, you will find that the majority of the anguish in your life will evaporate.

Consider how many negative feelings come from inadequacy in our understanding of cause and effect:

• When we do not know what actions are necessary to produce the outcomes we desire.
• When the actions we take fail to produce the outcomes we desire.
• When new information about the causes of outcomes we seek reveals they cost far more, or that the benefits of those outcomes are far less than we anticipated.

Not having what you want can trigger a host of negative feelings. There are three possibilities as to why you do not have what you want:

1. You are in the process of getting it.
2. You aren’t willing to do what it takes.
3. You don’t know how to get it.

Your beliefs can empower you to suffer short-term negative effects when you predict that your present actions will lead to greater longterm benefit. The degree to which you live up to your beliefs will generate confidence to give you patience while you are in the process of getting what you want. The more substantial your ability to overcome past challenges, the more confidence you will have that you will continue to do so, no matter how difficult things may seem in the moment.

Holding to the desire for an outcome whose price you are not willing to pay can cause great mental anguish. In the event your beliefs reveal costs for what you want that exceed what you are willing to pay, you can encounter peace conscientiously coming to this realization and moving on to what you prefer instead.

If you do not know how to get what you want, you can mitigate negative feelings by dedicating your energy to searching for the path that yields what you seek. While not all beliefs are conscious or consistently applied consciously, all beliefs can become consistently conscious through intention, attention, and honesty. To the degree that one discovers their beliefs, one can change them. Better estimates of the laws of cause and effect can provide you with means to achieve what you seek.

How goals mitigate mental anguish

So much of our mood comes from whether we perceive ourselves making measurable progress towards worthwhile goals. The obviousness of the following statement does not diminish its power: The best way to feel as if you are making progress on a goal is to actually make progress on the goal.

The worse you feel, the harder and more intelligently you should pursue your goal. Most people do the exact opposite. If the next step toward your goals is too large for your present resources, you won’t make it. Chop the next step down to match your resources, or pivot to another goal whose next step is within reach of your reduced resources.

How tasks mitigate mental anguish

Whenever we have open tasks on our mind and in our life, they carry mental and emotional overhead. You’ll be surprised how many open loops you’ve created over time. While your conscious mind has grown accustomed to them, your subconscious mind has not. Closing these open loops can drastically reduce mental anguish.

Some open loops have become invisible to us. Pretend a stranger is about to come into your environment, or better yet, the person you know with the highest standards. What would they notice? Now fix it.

Closing forgotten open loops will not only reduce the invisible overhead that makes everything you do more difficult, the sense of progress will impart momentum to anything you do next.

How the daily to do list mitigates mental anguish

We can think about the future and the past but we can only act today. The only way you can change the future is through what you decide to do today. You should focus on today, even when thinking about the past or planning for the future.

No matter how you feel about the past, there is never anything you can do to change it, except as far as you change what you are willing to do today. You can and should identify past mistakes because it means you have learned from them, are less likely to make them again, and have greater wisdom to help others avoid the same. Realizing something you’ve done wrong in the past gives you the opportunity to do what you would not have otherwise done now.

There are always things about the future that you can’t do anything about. However, there are also always some things about the future you can do something about. You should focus on today, even when thinking about the future. It is good to consider the future in terms of what you need to do today to effect desired outcomes. Focusing on future events outside of what you will do today won’t help you.

When we incorrectly focus on what we can’t change instead of doing what we can, we generate unnecessary mental and emotional turmoil as we dread or delight in what might never happen. You will experience greater relief as you correctly parse out the things you can change from the things you can't change. When you list out these things, on paper if need be, and isolate the specific actions you can take to work on the things you can change, the likelihood that positive anticipations will actually occur, and that negative anticipations will abate.

Improve how you feel by embracing objective reality

At its root, what is mental or emotional pain? It is nothing more or less than the revelation of a difference between our expectations and reality. Most people avoid what would fix this difference at all costs. They will cut off their closest friends, dive into the deepest delusion, and cause themselves great harm to avoid it. This is highly irrational, and the worst possible behavior in the context of obtaining happiness. Avoidance of a more accurate perception of reality may more effectively prevent you from obtaining greater happiness than anything else.

Most normal people go through their whole lives pinching their eyes shut, trying to ignore what they know is out of accord in their lives. They think that by ignoring what they know is not as they wish it was, they can enjoy what they do like about their lives and avoid what they do not. This, however, never works.

As you progress, you encounter greater peace because you no longer suffer from avoidable consequences, and the unavoidable ones don’t bother you as much because you better understand why they have to happen.

We have to grapple with reality as it really is in order to make it more like how we would like it to be. It is good and essential to imagine the world how we would like it to be; this is how we determine our goals. However, we have to interact with the world as it really is. Our daily actions should be based on reducing the distance between how the world is and how we would like it to be; they cannot be effective if our starting point is not how the world actually is.

Reality does not care how we feel about its rules. They just exist, whether we like it or not. Those who most fully embrace reality and operate most effectively within the rules it provides will encounter what they seek more often and more enduringly than those who do not. The elements of reality that we wish were not true are the richest source of new truth. Clinging to our vain imagination in the face of revealed reality causes cognitive dissonance and psychological pain. Recognizing these holes as opportunities to learn is essential. These are moments to reflect and ask what our understanding lacks on these points. This is how we progress.

A person who does not believe in objective reality will encounter unnecessary suffering in all aspects of life because they refuse to contend with the greater portion of what is all around them. They will stumble through miserable lives without accomplishing nearly as much as they could have, constantly being unpleasantly surprised by many outcomes they should have seen coming and could have prepared for. Not surprisingly, those who believe in an unconstrained reality have much higher incidence of anxiety, depression, and suicide than those who believe in a constrained reality.

In today’s world, most people believe that reality only exists in their minds. They believe that with enough scientific advancement and social control, we can create an environment free from constraints and consequences.² Belief in an unconstrained reality is accelerating with shocking rapidity in the world, creating unbridled hatred and animosity against those who recognize and live according to the non-negotiables of reality. With every wave of consequences for bucking what is obvious, delusional people project their own fault onto those playing the game better than them, making everything even worse than it already is.

Embrace objective reality to maximize your joy on purpose. Do all you can to learn the rules of reality, and devise and live a strategy to maximize the joy you experience and retain while you are here. The life plan will help you do this more directly than anything else presently available.

Conclusion

This book asserts that the purpose of life is to maximize the longterm joy you experience. In it, you have read of a framework called the life plan that gives you a scaffold to intentionally design and execute personal character qualities, values, beliefs, goals, and tasks that maximally advance your purpose while helping you understand and feel the maximal amount of joy in all you do each and every day.

You’ve been adequately informed about the importance of recognizing the unending possibilities of what you could do in any given moment, and taught how to effectively manage an unlimited list of things you intend to do.

Many barriers to the implementation of your life plan have been discussed, most important among them how you perceive, interpret, and act on emotions. You’ve learned about the separate states of emotion-and reason-driven action, the essential act of recognizing when you slip into an emotional state, and intentionally acting in a rational state. You’ve also been shown the importance of maximizing the quality of the people with whom you interact and the quality of those interactions.

You’ve been given a formidable armory of practical tactics to build and maintain exceptional productivity in all facets of your life and feel more meaning than you ever have. The choice before you is how fully you will use them. May you encounter all the joy you are willing to.

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