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Contents

Preamble

Preface

Introduction

Intentionality Causes Overflowing Joy, and You Have Neither One

Introduction
A life of unparalleled purposeful productivity
What do you want the most, and why do you want it?
You can’t intentionally choose what you do if you don’t know what you want
What do you want? Joy.
Joy is the purpose of life
Intentionality is living according to a chosen purpose
Human inconsistency on full display in inconsistently intentional living
What keeps people from being intentional?
What is the opposite of intentional? Being pathological
Intentionally seeking joy
There are vast differences in quantity and duration of joy experienced between people
Can we quantify the amount of joy it is possible to experience relative to the amount of joy experienced by the average person?
The greatest joy requires full alignment of your actions, beliefs, and desires with what is actually most valuable
Robots find their way by learning as they go; so can you
The complexity of the modern world presents a novel challenge
Modern life demands more sacrifice, but provides less meaning
The power of better choices mapped down to the daily level overcomes human nature’s tendency to choose contrary to joy
The power of greater meaning mapped down to the daily level overcomes the challenges of each day

The Model

The Life Plan: A System for Purposefully Maximizing Joy

The life plan is a compass that shows you how to navigate daily life for maximal joy
The life plan aligns all facets of life to what matters most
The life plan is worthwhile because it gives more than it takes
The big picture is easy; propagating it down to the daily takes finesse
Qualities
Values
Beliefs
Goals
Tasks
How does this extend beyond what is already available?

Purpose

The power of purpose
A transcendent purpose gives you permission to go all out
A transcendent purpose makes it possible to see where intensity benefits and where it harms
You don’t need work/life balance, you need full-tilt purpose!
A focus on purpose yields great progress in things small and large
Progress in a purpose can’t be measured directly
The existential level of importance
Promoting your purpose to the existential level
If its not worth everything, its not worth doing
The benefits of hierarchically arranging your life by purpose
On meaning and vocational work
A strong purpose helps you notice opportunities
Purpose enables clear and confident decisions
Purpose drives stable confidence
Even if your purpose is fixed, its meaning to you will change radically over time
The illusion of lack of purpose: the danger of implicit purpose
Fake freedom from lack of purpose
Eliminating purpose gaps
Greater joy comes from choosing to be responsible for the benefit of others

Qualities

The joy you perceive and obtain in life absolutely depends on the kind of person you are
Who are you now?
Who you are is not determined by how you feel, but how you act
Triangulating who you really are
Why are you how you are?
The life plan provides you a mechanism to decide and become who you want to be
Who do you need to be to achieve your purpose?
Who do you wish to be?
The power of describing character changes as if they’ve already happened
Define principles for each quality
Enumerate rules from each principle
A full example of the process from quality to rules
Dealing with competing principles through specific rules
Defining qualities from rules
Making changes to yourself and to your qualities section
Make it till you make it
Personal change requires work, just like every other kind of change
Coming to the point where you need to break the rules, principles, or even qualities for the right reasons

Values

Your values are a hierarchy of priority
Your values give you a method for recognizing and boosting what is most important
How to prioritize values
Realize that almost all the value you appraise comes from just a few things
Stay true to your values until you have sufficient reason to make a change
Two dimensions of value: how important is it to you, and how important is it, really?
You will learn more accurate and intense value as you live up to your present estimate of value
The value you find in life will come from a few very important things
What is productivity with respect to purpose?
Why hyper-productivity is non-optional in the quest for greater joy
Productivity comes through prioritization
Prioritizing what you want
Being honest about what you want
Prioritizing what you want the most
Prioritizing your impact
Prioritizing your time
Prioritizing your emotions
Prioritizing your money
Sometimes, your purpose requires you to adjust your priorities

Beliefs

What is a belief?
Beliefs are needed to prioritize potential action
Beliefs are crucial for bringing forward future joy
Beliefs describe the way and justify the cost
Where do beliefs come from?
Beliefs and the life plan
Beliefs are critical for calculating long-term benefit and cost
Beliefs predict the future
When to modify your beliefs
You are already living by your beliefs, you just haven’t noticed
Beliefs are not just right and wrong, but better or worse
Should everyone have different beliefs?
What causes strength of belief?
Don’t deny your desires; direct them
You change your desires by changing your beliefs

Goals

What are goals?
Writing goals
Enumerating goals
Use your life plan to choose goals that you believe will yield the greatest joy
Revising goals
Good goals bridge the flow of meaning from purpose to task
Purpose-focus helps you stay consistently motivated between goals
What is an audacious goal?
A transcendent purpose requires audacious goals
Purpose helps you effectively pursue more than one goal at a time
Prioritizing goals
Calculating net benefit
Expected value = (benefit - cost) x probability of success
Goals provide a means to define the worth of your progress independent of the perspective of others
Goals as problems
Pay attention to unsolved problems
Anticipate and mitigate problems before they happen
For greater meaning, focus on what no one else is willing to do
For greater meaning, focus on what only you can do

Tasks

What is a task?
Why goals aren’t enough
Tasks differentiate goals from wishes
Enumerate your tasks
Prioritizing tasks
Joy comes through progress in the highest priority tasks
Transcendent purpose makes daily work meaningful

Execute and Modify Your Life Plan Through Your To Do List

Executing Your Day’s Tasks

Put your daily to do list right in front of you while working
Live the plan
What is most important might not be most important given current conditions
Handling the emotional drag of unexpected opportunities
Use up every drop of your daily resources
Executing the best ideas with the greatest possible resources
Perform according to your purpose, not the expectations of others
The peace of the life plan as you get older or in the event of unexpected loss of capacity
The productivity and emotional benefits of separating execution from planning
Switching from planning mode to execution mode
When to re-enter planning mode
Switching back and forth between modes is difficult and rarely done well
Catch and do in the moment the little things that you will otherwise forget
Batch related tasks to reduce overhead and minimize context switches
Routines reduce the cost of context switches
Learning when to ease up on the rigidity

Incorporating Feedback Into Your Plan

Every action you take is an experiment you can improve from
The life plan is incremental; don’t worry about perfection
Changing the contract
After action review
Reducing friction and drag

Human Relationships

There is only so much you can do by yourself
The key to greater meaning in relationships is better people, not more interactions
All human interactions are not the same
How to focus on 20% interactions
How to find 20% people
How to prioritize 20% people amidst the demands of life
Good people inspire you; bad people degrade you
Friction and drag from other people
Spend most of your time with people better than you
If you want to be better, you have to be different
The multiplicative effect of reliable people
Reduce interruptions that take away from your purpose
Increase interruptions that serve your purpose
Boosting productivity while working with others

Motivational Management

Managing mood for greatest productivity
The challenge of increasing your pace when your mood is good
Tether feel-good activities to productive work
Create an alter ego
Don’t just accomplish your tasks—vanquish them
To kickstart actions you aren’t excited about, get your body into the action
Transfer all negative emotion into traction in the task at hand
Procrastination from poor alignment with purpose
Procrastination from a lack of planning
Procrastination from lack of decomposition
Procrastinate productively
Use time blocks
Use context switches to your advantage
As your resources dwindle each day, backfill all remaining energy with the highest impact tasks for which you have sufficient resources
Choose and arrange your space
Prepare your tools
Beast mode: Developing the ability to continue in a task forever, if that’s what it takes

Purpose Over Pleasure

Positive Emotions Can Only Be Maximized Through Using Reason

We are creatures with rational potential but irrational practice
Most people seek for what feels best right now
Seeking for maximal joy is a rational—not emotional—process
Greater meaning causes greater joy than greater physical pleasure
Joy from within is greater than joy from without
Only a reason-first approach can intentionally maximize value
Only reason can help you maximize long-term joy
How you feel about something right now will only align with how you will feel about it later to the extent you can predict the future
Meaning makes something feel good or bad, and you can change meaning
Acting for the greatest long-term joy will often feel bad short-term until you learn more about cause and effect
Transforming your present joy appraisal into the long-term view
Long-term joy requires a correct understanding of reality
Bringing forward future joy to the present through correct understanding of reality
The long-term optimal path contains far greater joy than the present emotional path
Discipline is acting according to reason, not feelings
How the life plan minimizes regret in spite of unavoidable learning

How You Feel Later Comes From How You Choose to Act Now

Your feelings and choices are separate
You can act contrary to your emotions
Choosing how to react to your emotions
Every human action is a choice, even habits
You have to feel bad for a bit before you feel good for a while
Your present feelings are determined by your past choices
Your future feelings will be determined by your present choices
Improve how you feel by improving how you respond to others
Improve how you feel by investing current feelings for greater future feelings
The value in each moment
Continuing to progress in spite of unproductive feelings
Goals provide concentrated value against unproductive feelings
Tasks provide granular choices against unproductive feelings

Sources of and Solutions to Mental and Emotional Anguish

Mental anguish is a symptom, not a disease
Joy isn’t the same as comfort, and is contrary to the default state of man
Increased awareness and complexity in modern times
Increasingly stronger means are required to contend with the difficulties of increased awareness
Meaning overcomes the challenges of complexity
The life plan is a solution to the misalignment of belief, action, and reality that causes mental anguish
Overwhelm is a signal of the need to plan and prioritize
Planning cures anxiety
Doing what is most important with all our resources brings peace
How character qualities mitigate mental anguish
How values mitigate mental anguish
How beliefs mitigate mental anguish
How goals mitigate mental anguish
How tasks mitigate mental anguish
How the daily to do list mitigates mental anguish
Improve how you feel by embracing objective reality
Conclusion

Qualities

The qualities component describes the kind of person you have to be in order to experience maximal joy.

Showing the world more of what Jesus is like and persuading them to become the same.

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