Joy on Purpose

Preface

History is the long tumultuous chronicle of our collective attempts to answer the question: What is the good life? While libraries have been written on this subject, and many useful answers are available, there has yet to occur a mass outbreak of joy. Are you aware of any group of people living out their highest potential from the grandest ideal to their daily tasks? Are you aware of even one such person?

In place of fulfilled people, modern society consists of people violently thrashing between what they feel they must, but don’t want to do, and the distraction and entertainment they stuff into what time and money remains. Yet these synthetic substitutes fail to provide the meaning deeply yearned for and desperately needed in the modern world.

Joy comes from meaning, and a lack of joy comes from a lack of meaning. Deep meaning is possible for all people, as well as the overflowing joy it provides, but neither comes unintentionally.

The ambitious aim of this book is to enable you to articulate and live the most joyous life possible through learning and living the life plan. The life plan is a novel system for maximizing long-term joy through intentional living. It is a practical, easy-to-use, and easy-tounderstand means of injecting greater meaning into every corner of your life through designing, prioritizing, and living each day to best advance your purpose while aligning with ideal character qualities and values.

As you implement your own life plan, you will feel, do, and be better than you are now. You'll trace the interplay of articulating your purpose and living out your daily task list. You'll build out your repertoire of tactics to combat the obstacles of emotions, meaninglessness, and lack of clarity that plague the modern human.

You will drastically increase the quality and quantity of what you do each day while consistently strengthening your mental well-being.

While reading this book will not immediately give you overflowing joy, it will provide you with the inspiration and the tools to begin your path. As you practice the principles provided, you will find deeper and more continuous meaning in everything you do each day. You will have far less stress, anxiety, and uncertainty, even while becoming more ambitious and intense in your endeavors. You will find yourself with more of what you say you want in life, and you will have stronger reasons for knowing you are on the path to what still remains. You will find the path to joy on purpose, and sufficient reasons to walk in it.

Introduction

Whatever the definition of human life may be, it is clear that life does not require intentional thought. Remaining alive, however, usually does, and living well most certainly does. Remaining alive can be extremely difficult at times, not just because of the necessity of securing the water, food, and shelter required to do so, but because of the difficulty of doing these things in such a way as to make the effort necessary seem worthwhile.

The difficulty of remaining alive is increased by the lack of clarity in how to do so in a way that is worthwhile. Life is hard, but it doesn’t need to be confusing. The unavoidable component of the difficulty of life is not in finding its purpose. A clear understanding of purpose enables the intentional pursuit of it essential to generating the meaning that provides internal joy and external well-being in life.

The majority of the internal distress and external challenges faced by people today can be conquered through understanding and living according to one’s purpose in life. This book will help you make sense of life, as well as why and how to live it well.

The two central questions that separate living from living well are.

Why? How?

If you can answer both with personal conviction and your answers align with reality, you’ll have a great life. If you can't answer them or if your answers don’t align with truth, your life may continue, but not in ways that you are likely to enjoy.

To answer these seemingly simple questions with any degree of truth and inner belief, you need to have a lot of deeper answers. While depth is almost always conflated with complication, they are not the same. Like a well-organized storage area, the right structure can make order easy.

Making sense of life isn’t just a matter of getting the big picture right, though that is necessary. You also need to find a way to connect the big picture to the moments that fill each day.

At all times, a life of maximal purpose requires the answer to these two questions.

What should I do right now, and why?

This question, repeated constantly, must be considered within the context of greater scopes.

What should I do today, and why? What should I do this week, and why? What should I do this month, and why? What should I do this year, and why? What should I do with my life, and why?

At first glance, these questions might seem overwhelming, but remember: the right structure makes order easy.

This book will help you design a unified answer to the big and little questions of what your life is all about. You’ll discover a way to maximize the purpose you find in all things, at all times.

By the end of this book you'll be able to answer what you should do and why from the scope of the briefest moment of each day up to the grandest vision of what you believe your life to be about. You will architect the answer to these questions yourself, but the structure provided to you will make it straightforward and spare you from the overwhelm you might otherwise expect.

Intentionality Causes Overflowing Joy, and You Have Neither One

In order to convince you to keep reading, I need to tell you up front how the ideas presented in this book will change your life for the better. The good news is that because these ideas will more directly cause greater improvement in your life than anything else of which I am aware, that’s really easy to do. The bad news is that they are so beneficial that I don’t think you’ll believe me. As you continue to read, you’ll see ample evidence of just how powerful these ideas are, how immediately they can be put into practice, and how quickly they will transform your life for the better. For now, let’s begin with a story.

Throughout my life, I have outperformed those around me in most ways. I’ve had an unusual number of jobs and other activities, and the resounding consensus from my peers and supervisors has always been than I am the most productive person they’ve ever met, though the form of expression has varied, from “I don’t understand how you finished this already” to “how do you get so much done” to “knock it off—you are making us all look bad.”

That said, you might assume I’ve had some sort of challenge-free life or that I am particularly gifted. Though the space to prove it would take a biography, I promise you that both of these couldn’t be farther from the truth. As a child, I routinely felt as if I had to work much harder, longer, and smarter at things to perform at the same level as my peers. The lack of stability from moving eighteen times before I was eighteen years old meant that I was always catching up on something— and often many things—in some aspect of my life. The beauty of an early disadvantage is that if responded to with tenacity, it can motivate the establishment of a pattern of exerting extreme force into what one sets out to do in spite of great obstacles, acting like a giant flywheel, building momentum with each activity that carries into the next throughout one’s life. Somehow in the chaos of my childhood, the tenacity of tearfully learning how to write, tell time, learn basic math, and grow in fitness that seemed to come so easily to other kids transitioned into greater and greater momentum to continue applying outsized effort even after I caught up.

Time and again, I found myself promoted—to gifted and talented classes in school, to supervisory positions at work, to higher ranks in the military, and so on.

Consider the following examples in the domain of employment. I began working for my grandfather’s construction business picking up trash at eight years old for a brief stint over the summer. By the time I was 15, I was made supervisor of a man in his sixties on a construction crew. During the school year, I was working as a cart attendant at a grocery store, and quickly promoted to a shelf-stocker. Then I took a job as a restaurant cook, where I was training new hires within the first week as a restaurant cook. At 17, I was hired for an internship at an insurance company. Within two weeks, I finished the work my predecessor had accumulated over a year as an intern, and had to find another job because they had run out of more work to give me. I found a job at a computer store where my assignment was to clear an overflowing stockroom full of broken computers that needed to be walked through the long process to gain authorization for return to the the vendor. I had the room completely cleared in a matter of weeks, much to the shock of the owners, who promoted me to fixing computers because they had nothing else for me to do in my prior position.

This pattern continued through my undergraduate years and into the first jobs following. My assignment in my first programming job was to single-handedly build a piece of software that would not only replace but improve upon an established product built by a large company. In six months, my completed project was in production earning the hospital millions in new revenue per year. Within two job changes in three years, I found myself leading a small software company, where I had been promoted over the engineer that had hired me after successfully replacing the failed code produced by two engineers over two years in just two months after starting.

I returned to university where I completed MS and Ph.D. degrees in computer science within six years, graduating with more peerreviewed publications than anyone in our large, competitive graduate program all while having four children in diapers, fully remodeling a derelict starter home, writing two books, and serving as a company commander in the National Guard. At 30, I became the youngest hire on the computer science faculty I joined, in spite of delays in my timeline caused by several years of full-time work in industry, two years of missionary work in Chile, and ten years in the National Guard. I was promoted to Assistant Professor one year early, earning competitive rewards for research and receiving excellent reviews for teaching. I was awarded tenure, having outperformed my previously tenured peers in grants awarded and papers published in spite of founding and running a tech company, building a hobby farm, and writing another six books during that time, in addition to being a husband and father to five small children.

This is not a complete story, but it should help you believe that I know a thing or two about productivity. I have only been able to do what I have because I live the system I am going to show you in this book. It works, and my life is abundant proof of it.

The story of what I accomplished does not describe the challenges I worked against, which were much greater than I can take the space to describe. How did I do so much in so little time? How did I overcome what would overwhelm most people with stress, anxiety, and depression? How did I deal with the uncertainty and the sheer amount to do? Where did I find the motivation to continue through so many long projects? And why did I consider it all worth the cost? In this book, you’ll find the answers to all of these questions, but first we need to stop talking about me, and start talking about you.

One day, while walking along, you find an old Arabian lamp. It’s scuffed and dented, but you figure you don’t have much to lose by rubbing it, so you give it a shot. Out comes a shabby genie who explains that while he can grant wishes, that as the discount version of the legend we all know, he can only give you one. What would you ask for?

After you tell the discount genie your wish, he gets into the fine print. He explains that he doesn’t have the kind of budget those deluxe genies have. They can afford to give everyone whatever they ask for, but only if they limit their requests to what they really want. It turns out that different things are worth differing amounts to different people, and very few people really want what they say they want. In order for him to grant your wish, you have to convince him that you want what you are asking for enough to justify its cost. Do you think you could convince him?

In reality, outcomes of tremendous value are available in life, and all of them have a certain price. While the budget genie is not real, the opportunity to have what you are willing to pay for is.

You can have anything you are willing to pay the price for. Part of that price is finding out what it takes to obtain it; the other is doing just that.

When you explicitly define what you want and how you expect to receive it, your achievements will reach further toward your potential than ever before. You will more consistently do what is needed on a daily basis to bring about the outcomes you say you desire.

In order to obtain what you want in life, you’ll have to learn how to do so and and be willing to do what is necessary to get it. Part of what is necessary will be to prioritize what you want among competing options, because your resources are limited and the things of greatest worth tend to demand a great many of them. You can’t prioritize what is of greatest worth if you do not yet know what you want.

In Lewis Caroll’s book, Alice asks the Cheshire Cat for directions and gets a philosophical exchange that is more than the directions she was looking for.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

While the Alice in Wonderland books were written a very long time ago, the same principle of guiding purpose applies in the countless examples of modern autonomous robots that surround us. A robot cannot decide where to go unless its programming tells it what is most important. It will have a certain set of possible actions defined, and it will be told to use them in order to maximize some outcome, usually subject to certain constraints. For example, an autonomous car might be told to go from point A to point B in the minimal time while obeying traffic laws and not colliding with any other objects or people. If the robot did not have its purpose, potential actions, and constraints defined, it would not be able to navigate in any but random moves, causing random outcomes instead of arriving at the intended destination.

Most people live life full of situations they don’t particularly want that they obtained through walking long enough in directions they didn’t particularly think through. Most people never arrive at their intended destination, and many encounter infractions and collisions along the way that they would have rather avoided. The reason is simple: humans don’t tend to approach life intentionally.

If we were sitting face-to-face, we could go through the following exercise: I would ask you what you want more than anything else. You would answer. I would ask you why you want that. You would answer. I would ask you why again. You would answer. If we continued this exercise for long enough (it usually only takes three or so rounds), we would arrive at what you really want, and it would almost surely be different than what you said you wanted at first. It wouldn’t be the sports car or pony or even the college degree for your child that you said you wanted at first—it would be joy. Joy is what you really want, and you only say you want everything else because you believe those other things will give you more joy than anything else.

The things people say they want when first asked are surrogate sources of joy. They are useful intermediaries that serve as waypoints on the path to greater joy, but they are not joy itself. While they are essential to guiding you closer to what you seek, their utility is limited, and you will never reach what you seek until you understand those limits.

Seeking joy through a surrogate goal can never lead you to levels of joy greater than what that surrogate goal can provide. In order to overcome this limitation, surrogate goals must be considered in conjunction with other known alternatives, as well as the understanding that something presently unknown will always lead to still greater joy than the best thing you presently know. Intermediate sources of joy will always reach a point where they fail to justify the existence of evermore suffering in life.

The purpose of life is to gain joy. At its root, everything we do is to maximize joy. It is inescapable. Joy is the sensation of value. Value is, by definition, what we want. We seek what we want, which is what we value. Thus, we seek to maximize joy. All human choice is to that end.

That the purpose of life is to gain joy isn’t a new idea, even if it was never explained very well. Anciently, Aristotle said: “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

With sufficient joy, anything in life can be worthwhile. Without sufficient joy, nothing in life is worthwhile. Joy is the greatest potential benefit, and with enough of it, any cost can be worthwhile. In fact, fundamentally, all benefit is either joy or something expected to lead to it, and we value it in accordance with how much joy we expect to receive through it.

To fulfill your purpose in life, you need to maximize the joy you encounter. You will never do this unless you intentionally seek to do so.

Intentionality is a way of living so as to maximally pursue a chosen purpose, subject to explicitly defined options and constraints. Intentional people have a why for every what, a what for every why, and all are explicitly prioritized towards a transcendental goal.

Unfortunately, instead of thinking conscientiously about what they really want, why they really want it, and how to get it, most people live their lives as if what they receive has nothing to do with what they feel, think, or do.

Most people lumber through life only partially aware of any degree of detail and almost no intention. It is no surprise, then, that after years of a lot less joy than could be had, they suddenly find themselves in a situation they never wanted. This is as true on the micro scale as it is on the macro scale. Countless people are daily confronted with shocking, painful situations they never expected, where they are astonished by the sudden loss of some or all of what they thought was real, good, and enduring.

Drifting along through life is not a strategy for success. In order to live life well, you must live life intentionally. If you want to drive a sailboat to a predetermined destination, you have to learn all about how that ship works: you need to understand the rudder, the sails, the food stores, and everything else on the ship that connects to its ability to drive you to your destination. So it goes with your self awareness. You have to understand why you do what you do.

Perhaps the most important aspect of intentional living is self discovery. If you want to obtain the greatest outcomes, the only way to do so is to learn how to intentionally search for and obtain them.

Intentionality is the secret to my success: I accomplished such a litany of achievements in such a brief time against great opposition because I chose a purpose that was worth it, and I aligned my entire life to it. That purpose was joy. In this book, I am going to show you how to do the same. If you follow the system I show you, you will be amazed at how effective it is and how bountifully your efforts are rewarded.

We live in a world full of the necessity and fruits of general intentionality. The sophisticated products we use daily could never be designed, manufactured, or even distributed without intentionality, and even the stories engraved in our cultural memory—from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to The Matrix— prominently feature its necessity and the consequences of being without it.

How is it that so few people live intentionally with any intensity or consistency?

Being intentional is not merely a question of understanding the reasons or making the decision to be intentional, though these are adequate barriers and will be amply addressed in this book. Intentionality not only requires you to know your purpose, it also requires a way to map that purpose to and through every domain and moment of life. The extent to which you can understand and apply your purpose in every facet of life is the extent to which you achieve intentionality in life.

The primary obstacle to intentionality is the lack of a pragmatic framework that effectively maps your purpose through your life, across all aspects of life, and in scopes of time: from how you operate internally, to how you interact with the world from the big to the little, and from each moment to the full span of your remaining time on earth.

Without such a framework, it is highly unlikely that you will.

Find and adopt a purpose that you feel is important enough to subordinate everything else in your life to. Understand and leverage character improvement for increasing resilience and developing deeper meaning as you pursue your purpose. Discover how to unlock unimaginable productivity by organizing your life into audacious, coordinated goals that advance your purpose. Free yourself from the prisons of depression, anxiety, and procrastination through subduing emotions to reasoned, intentionally optimized living. Fluidly and intelligently adapt to the constant learning opportunities and fluctuations provided by reality.

A sufficient framework for intentionality will provide these and many other benefits that will so extensively improve your life that you will have to experience them to believe it.

The word pathological was coined to describe poor human choices with the same nomenclature as disease. If a pathogen is in your body, your body can fight it using various internal systems designed for that purpose.

In modern times, pathological conditions are treated as if they were untreatable diseases. Excusatory language attempts to absolve individuals from any personal responsibility over how they think, feel, and act, but no amount of excusatory language will absolve them of the guilt they feel over poor choices they make, nor spare them from the real world consequences of doing so.

Pathological thoughts, actions, and feelings are not conditions beyond the control of the individual. Instead, a pathological state is one in which a person ceases to be intentional. They become passively emotional instead of proactively rational.

When people fail to live intentionally, they allow emotions, other people, and situations dictate to them what is important. This causes their prime purpose to unconsciously and constantly change, becoming an equally unconscious source to wasted energy, poor outcomes, and a host of undesirable feelings along the way. The cure to all of these problems is to intentionally seek greater joy.

Joy is a feeling, but the label doesn’t stipulate its source, duration, resilience, or intensity. The source of joy is incremental progress towards worthwhile goals. The amount of joy you encounter in life will be determined by how effectively you pursue the greatest possible improvement, and what you gauge as improvement will depend on many things, including how you see yourself, others, and the world. While the purpose of all people is to obtain greater joy, the details of how they will achieve this are as varied from one person to another as their fingerprints.

Factors that will increase the amount of joy you experience include how effectively you find and pursue what is best, how thoroughly you define and become the ideal person, and how consistently you do all you can toward these ends.

Breaking an overarching purpose down effectively into daily actions is no easy task. This is exactly why the framework described in this book is needed, and the purpose it serves. The purpose of a life plan is so that you make decisions differently on a daily basis. It is a tool that will help you act more effectively in large and small ways to more effectively accomplish your desires.

Though the details between people will differ, all will find that greater joy is found as you intentionally seek it. In this path, you will find more meaning daily as you consistently act in ways that orient you toward the greatest improvement.

Humans incline towards the same fundamental desires. If we all share joy as our fundamental desire, why is it that we differ so much in our specific desires, and even more in what we believe and in how we act?

The difference in how different individuals approach the search for joy—or if they do at all—generates significant differences in the amounts of joy they encounter. While we may share the same fundamental desire, we do not share the same external circumstances or internal qualities. We differ in our beliefs and how thoroughly we edit and live them, our experiences and their interpretations, and the direction and intensity of our efforts.

Joy can come from different sources, and the source you choose to recognize is part of the reason for the wildly different ranges of intensity of joy experienced between and within people. Joy can come through bodily sensation or mental meaning, and they are not equal. Joy that comes from bodily sensation occupies a range of intensities, but is drastically limited compared to the upper bounds of joy that comes from meaning. Joy through meaning comes from the alignment of your actions and your chosen purpose.

The intensity of joy you experience will also depend on the value of the meaning you’ve chosen and the degree to which you have sacrificed to that meaning.

The value of the meaning you’ve chosen is a composite of the actual value of the meaning and the value you perceive. You will experience the lesser of the two, meaning you can’t enduringly experience greater value than something actually has, and you can’t experience greater value than the limits of your perception of its actual value.

Your ability to maximize joy will depend on your discovery and choice of what has the greatest value. This is why it is so vital to understand as much of reality as accurately as possible. You have to comprehend what was, what is, and what will be. Only then can you fully view the range of options before you and the value of each.

It’s important to realize that the options of greatest value will carry the greatest price. The price of things of great value act as a gate controlling who has access to them: those who do not understand the value of great things will never pay the price required to obtain them.

Most people are terribly unhappy. There is plenty of data and anecdotal evidence to support this. It should be plain that the average person is miserable. They are lonely, overweight, broke, stressed, sick, depressed, anxious, and apathetic.

How much joy is it possible to have, and how many people encounter more than average? Perhaps it seems that it is impossible to say, since joy is not as externally measurable as something like wealth.

The key is to understand that joy is one of many Pareto-distributed attributes.

The measurement of the range and count of a property across a population is called a distribution. While uncountable properties exist across reality, they tend to recur according to only a few patterns. By naming and recognizing these patterns, we are able to instantly ascertain a great deal of information about what would otherwise be a poorly understood situation. Distributions can be graphed using a curve that increases or falls based on the count of people with increasing amounts of whatever is being measured as you go from left to right.

The Pareto distribution has most of the area under the curve over by the low end of whatever is being measured, and the curve drops speedily to near zero shortly thereafter. Most people have heard of this distribution, whether by name or property, but everyone has seen it in action. Sometimes it is described as the 80/20 rule, and examples are found in many cases in nature and human behavior. For example, most earthquakes are of low magnitude, most traffic occurs on very few of the total set of roads, a small set of the salespeople make most of the sales, 80% of car accidents are caused by 20% of people, 80% of time spent watching movies comes from 20% of movies, and most famously, 80% of wealth is held by 20% of people.

Research will show that every outcome determined by human choice based on perceived value results in a Pareto distribution of results. With this in mind, though we can’t directly measure the distribution of human joy, we can accurately predict it. It will follow the same distribution as human wealth. This isn’t to say that those who are poor in money will be poor in joy and vice versa, but that we should expect that the magnitudes and spread of joy among humans will be similar to how money is distributed among people.

What does the wealth distribution look like in magnitude and spread? In 2020, Elon Musk was 1.5 million times more wealthy than the average middle class American and 378 million times wealthier than most Americans, who are poorer than that.

If joy is Pareto distributed, it can provide us a clue as to how much joy it is possible to have. If joy is Pareto distributed, 80% of the joy is experienced by 20% of the people, while most people have hardly any joy at all.

The proposed extremity of the limits of joy may seem exaggerative, but it is no harder to believe than the extremities of wealth. If wealth and joy are distributed according to the same pattern, it is possible to be many thousands of times more joyous than the average person and that the “most joyous” person may be millions of times more joyous than the average person! It is not unreasonable to suppose that the most joyous person is as joyous as the summed joy of many other people, just as Musk had as much money in 2020 as the sum of 378 million average Americans. Just think about that.

Lasting happiness comes from your understanding of what has the greatest value, how it is obtained, and the degree to which your actions reconcile to it. It comes from your ideas about how life works, how well those ideas align with reality, and how well your actions and desires reconcile with those ideas.

Your ideas about how life works are your beliefs. Beliefs differ between people and even in the same person over time and circumstance.

Not all beliefs can produce the same degree of happiness. Not all beliefs are equally correct. Not all beliefs describe equal amounts of reality. Not all beliefs produce the same depth of meaning.

What you value, what you believe, and what you do will dictate how fully you are able to improve in life. Each of these three aspects of your choices will affect the others, and any friction between them caused by conflicts will impede your ability to improve, and therefore your joy. Joy flows at its greatest when what you believe, what you desire, and what you do are aligned.

Before joy can flow, action must be oriented towards its source. Joy comes from value. Maximal joy requires you to identify, find the path to, and do what is necessary to obtain what has the greatest value.

Before your joy can be full, your actions must be fully aligned with your desire and beliefs, and your desire and beliefs must be oriented to what is actually most valuable. How will you find it?

There are seemingly good reasons not to bother with living intentionally, all revolving around uncertainty. Admittedly, no one knows everything there is to know about every potentiality in life. In every choice we face lies the possibility that there was something significant we missed or that a better choice existed, even when we do all we can to analyze the choice before making it. Any serious advocate for intentionality must make a case as to why doing the best you know equates to doing the best there is. The best argument relies on belief in a just, all-knowing God who will orient you to the best eventual outcomes here and hereafter, through incremental increases in understanding, as you do the best you know. However, a sufficient argument can be made simply by appealing to how robots handle this problem.

Robot pathfinding algorithms create interesting patterns that grow like slow-motion forks of lightning, with the robot fluttering between potential paths while incrementally investigating the very next segment of the most attractive path so far. If the additional information provided by the present exploration causes the present path to become less attractive compared to an alternative fork, the robot will go and continue exploring the other path.

There is an optimal path that maximizes your purpose, and the way you will find it is through incrementally adapting your strategy as you learn and grow.

Unintentional living has never produced the abundant life, but living passively today is much more likely to lead to a harder life than in times past.

The modern world is more complex than anything humans have ever seen. Human history until now has consisted of tasks that were.

Immediate. Much of historic human action provided instant feedback. In the present day, it is not unheard of to need to wait years before the efficacy of choices becomes evident. Obvious. Many historic tasks featured predictable pairings of cause and effect, with readily-recognizable markers of progress and early indications of successful solutions. The modern world is full of problems that are sufficiently arcane that large numbers of people attempt each available option, many of which lead to catastrophic results. Meanwhile, many poor choices have strong short-term positive incentives, and many poor choices come with little accountability. Focused. Historic life featured very few streams of largely consistent information. A normal environment today consists of constant interruptions from multiple streams of everchanging information.

Short. Daily life used to entail mostly short-term tasks, many of which would be completely finished inside of a day. It is possible to go days in the modern world without feeling like you’ve finished anything of import. Simple. For almost all of human history, each choice was based on limited information and limited options. Today, choices with unending information streams and situations with seemingly unending options are becoming more and more numerous. Clearly completable. Historic tasks featured defined finish lines: you were done when you completed the hunt, sowed the fields, or completed the harvest. Today’s tasks are often ended by a time limit, not a noticeable state of completion. Physical and mechanical. Many labors in the past were physical or mechanical, leveraging pre-existing pieces or processes, but many of today’s problems are primarily mental, requiring outsized creative discovery, contemplation of fuzzy ideas, and evaluation of many components that do not yet exist.

Modern times feature an explosion of the incidence and extremity of stress, anxiety, fear, and insecurity. Some have argued that these conditions demonstrate that our default ways of thinking and feeling are much better suited to the historic ways than the present ways. Whatever the cause, the cure is finding ways to effectively arrange an intentional path through the increasingly numerous and unclear options for action.

Ironically, the complexity of modern living demands greater inputs while providing lesser meaning than historic life. Less than a hundred years ago, establishing a content middle-class family was a much more attainable goal for many more people in far less time and effort than required today. People felt more meaning in life, and it cost them less to find and maintain. Today, the cost of living—in the most holistic sense of the phrase, including the financial cost and the emotional, mental costs—is so much higher than before, and yet it seems that there is much less meaning available in most of the options before us.

Meaning has always been the motivator for hard things. The pairing works well enough when the rewards are sufficient to match the costs. Some problems have always required sustained sacrifice under uncertainty, but they provided rewards deemed worth it.

Today, many modern problems expand beyond yourself and across others, and the time scales and resources required are exponentially more than in the past. For example, most tech startups today require at least two million dollars and five years just to know whether a minimal viable product is possible or not, and those quantities continue to rise geometrically. Imagine pouring your heart, soul, and life savings into an idea for five years without having any signal to indicate probable success.

Inescapable uncertainty against increased duration and degree of sacrifice has always been a hallmark of some endeavors, like starting new exploratory businesses, but it is spreading to more areas in modern life—areas that do not provide the same kind of rewards as high risk endeavors.

We are naturally incapable of productively managing modern complexity. People are just as inadequate at complex productivity as they ever were, but today’s highly complex world makes those inadequacies more apparent. More and more historically normal situations now require the same level of uncertainty and sacrifice as only a few elite endeavors used to, from normal jobs to normal family relationships. Many of the best outcomes today require long periods without the intermittent micro-rewards that so many people required to remain motivated historically. The demands of the modern world overcome the many weak spots in a person’s natural ability to be rationally intentional and effective.

You need new levels of motivation and meaning to justify the unprecedented challenges that you will face today. To have the confidence to engage in what were historically normal activities in life, and to have any chance at success, you have to have excruciatingly rare resilience and exceptional productivity. You need the wisdom to know what is worth the full investment increasingly required for success in more and more aspects of what used to be normal life. You need the discipline to continue on a task that will take much longer than comparable challenges used to.

The framework described in this book arms you with each of these vital abilities. It maximizes meaning against modern challenges through purpose-driven productivity.

Most people are capable of weighing the respective value of options in the big picture. Where they struggle is in translating these valuations into the daily scope of life. It’s as if we have different equipment to make big picture decisions than we do the daily ones. For example, one might clearly prefer the welfare of their child to their own, but they might make regular choices day by day that contradict that ordering.

By default, our daily actions will tend to focus on the most obvious short-term benefit. What requires a longer or more intense sacrifice will always be out of bounds to those who never develop a way to sufficiently prioritize what yields greater long-term benefit. Often it’s because it typically isn’t the most obvious, fastest, or most pleasurable thing we could be doing.

By default, humans attempt to maximize present pleasure and this is the opposite of what maximizes joy. The path to maximized joy requires the adoption of thoughts, feelings, and actions that tend to be quite different than what people will choose by default.

The daily choices that maximize joy run contrary to human nature.

By nature, people prefer short-term benefit. Joy is maximized by choosing what provides the greatest benefit over the longest time, and this tends to be opposite to what provides the greatest immediate pleasure. By nature, people prefer what is easy. Joy is maximized by choosing what is best, which will always carry a high cost. By nature, people prefer what looks good right now. Joy is maximized by choosing what has the most enduring value, and this tends to be anything but obvious. Long-term value can only be learned through wisdom and experience, neither of which are common or easy to obtain. By nature, people prefer choices that reduce their awareness of needs. Joy is maximized by increasing value, and this typically increases the sense of needs by creating new, previously ignorable problems rather than assisting in hiding those already known. By nature, people attempt to minimize suffering. Joy is maximized by finding greater meaning, even if it requires dramatic increases in suffering.

By nature, people seek to get as much as they can for their own benefit. Joy is maximized by giving as much as you can for the benefit of others.

In choosing to counter human nature, you may feel you are engaging in some pious sacrifice. The truth is, you are just rationally seeking what is obviously best for you. You aren’t giving up anything. In fact, you are maximizing everything of worth. As amazing as it may sound, in all of these things, optimizing the latter in the short-term always maximizes the former in the long-term.

It’s easy to get excited about big, valuable things, but exciting dreams take time to accomplish. The longer or harder the road, the more difficult it is to propagate the excitement for the whole down to the present task at hand along the way.

As you implement a life plan, the meaning you find will cause you to grow stronger and stronger in overcoming any obstacles between you and the outcomes you say you desire that appear along the way.

Each day is the only window we have to work towards or away from joy. Our ability to encounter greater joy in life is completely coupled to our ability to effectively map the big picture down to our daily tasks. In our modern world of ever-increasing complexity, doing so is harder than ever.

Joy comes from meaningful progress on worthwhile goals. Very few goals can be accomplished in a single day. Joy is not obtained by seeking it directly, but by effectively breaking it down into subordinate qualities and goals, eventually culminating in prioritized daily tasks. What is needed is a practical, effective, and easy way to map our overarching purpose through goals down to the tasks we accomplish each day. This mapping is exactly what is provided by the system presented in this book.

The Life Plan: A System for Purposefully Maximizing 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.

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.

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.

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

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 influence qualities and values and enumerate goals and tasks. Beliefs are also influenced by the why and what groups as a whole.

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 are the actions you take each day to advance your purpose.

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.

Purpose

Imagine a life where every moment of every day was filled with the highest purpose. What would it be like to feel like each day brought opportunities to contribute to something bigger than you?

Imagine if you had much more energy than you presently do. What if you had a seemingly unlimited daily reserve of energy to impart to every important task?

Imagine how much you would accomplish if you put your full effort into everything you did. What would it be like to have a compelling reason to give your strongest and smartest effort to everything you set your mind and hands to?

Imagine being freed from the anxiety of not knowing how to best spend your time. What would it be like to perceive a clear path through life’s many options, and to have strong confidence with every step?

Imagine transcending the effect of uncertainty and the decisions of others on how you feel about yourself. What would it be like to have the power to choose who you are and how you feel, instead of having others decide it for you?

All of these outcomes and more belong exclusively to those who have identified what they want and oriented their lives toward obtaining it. Those with a clear purpose and plan in life will have a fundamentally superior experience compared to those who do not. They will achieve more, and better, and feel much greater joy while doing so, according to their own definitions of “more”, “better”, and “joy”. They will do so in spite of the disappointments, surprises, and sorrows along the way.

It’s rare enough to find a person who is willing to explicitly define what they want out of life. Most people prefer remaining in the vacuous comfort of not really knowing what they want in life, which protects them from the pain of failing to have it.

Of those with the courage to define what they want from life, most are looking for the shortest possible path to what they want, asking, “What is the minimum I need to do?” The problem with this approach is that great outcomes require great sacrifices—sacrifices whose costs almost always exceed the limits of what someone who does not yet have them imagines possible.

We have a perennial ability to underestimate the cost of outcomes. By the time you find out the true cost of what you seek, it is usually too late to pay it. An uncommon kind of person doesn’t wait for the bill. They proactively ask, “What more can I do?” This person is always doing all they can to achieve what they want. Sooner or later, they will reach a point where anything more they can do is no longer worth the effort it would take, except in one special situation: that of a transcendent purpose.

There are two characteristics that make a purpose transcendent.

It is recognized as more valuable than anything else. Any effort applied to it will result in worthwhile advancement of it.

These two properties make it so very few purposes qualify as transcendent, but those that do always have sufficient justification for doing everything you can to advance them. Nothing short of these properties justify unbounded effort.

Most comments about balance in life come from people who have the opposite of the credentials in life that you’d expect from someone with an opinion worth hearing on the topic. Balance is not an inherent quality in life, but rather one that can only be defined and weighed with respect to what is of greatest value to the individual. Plenty of high achievers feel greater balance in their lives than those who criticize them for what they perceive to be the lack thereof.

Without a defined transcendent purpose, all discussion of balance is no better than feeling one’s way through the dark. The difference between necessary sacrifice and overzealousness can only be assessed once a purpose is defined. How can one say what is worthwhile independent of knowing the value of the expected outcome?

A transcendent purpose is worth anything else. Without a defined purpose, necessary efforts could easily be withheld in the name of balance in spite of how many worthwhile paths would be precluded by such an approach. Anything that ultimately detracts from your transcendent purpose is overzealous, but anything that fails to advance your transcendent purpose is insufficient.

While all of these statements accurately suggest that, for most, the life plan will result in some increase in activity, don’t mistake this for an increase in pressure or overwhelm, as you’ll feel less of both as you implement your life plan.

The only way to alleviate anxiety towards being better than you are is to have compelling reasons to believe that you are already the best you can be or doing the best that you can. You can’t feel peace in doing less than your best, and you won’t be successful in persuading yourself that you are doing your best without compelling evidence. The life plan is your evidence.

Rather than seeing every moment as a high-pressure decision to make, your prioritization of all things according to purpose will make the pace you set and the breaks you take intentional and for the greatest benefit. You will definitely get much more done by living a life plan than not, but living a life plan does not mean you will be a robot who never has downtime or never hesitates before beginning a new task.

If you ask a successful person what they do for fun, the odds are high that they will look at you funny. Successful people tend to say that they would do what they do even if they had enough money that they never had to work again. How do successful people find a way to enjoy what they have to do when normal people make a distinction between what they have to do (work) and what they want to do (play)? By choosing paths where what they have to do is clearly necessary for what they want; they choose their work based on their purpose, and they understand how it directly contributes to it.

In recent years, more and more people are seeking what they call work/life balance. Instead of seeing work as something you do to finance what you want to do, your purpose can help you see it as something you get to do, like everything else you choose, to advance your purpose.

In truth, there is no such thing as balance, just priority. For example, for many, the priority of family exceeds the priority of work for money. For these, there is a point at which the needs of work must sublimate to the needs of family. There is no need to artificially juggle the two; the one is subordinate to the other. So it is with all contending pieces in one’s life.

Your purpose, in conjunction with your values and beliefs, is the key to defining the priority of everything in your life. Much more will be said about this in the “Values” chapter.

In Atomic Habits, author James Clear makes a convincing argument for the compounding effects of small, consistent changes. As the book title suggests, small habits need not be related to one another. Whatever benefits are possible from disconnected, individual changes, imagine the extra dimension of compounding that occurs when they are oriented coherently towards the same purpose. Furthermore, consider the additional motivation you can find in starting and continuing small changes when they serve your overarching purpose. Imagine how much overwhelming motivation flows into a small task when it has a visible impact on your supremely important purpose!

While small changes do indeed have an enormous aggregate impact, there are also some few choices we make in life that can easily dwarf them. To prove this point, enumerate a few hallmarks of success in your own life or in the lives of those you know. Consider how they happened. It is much more likely that they came about from one or just a few big decisions or actions than that they came from small sustained changes.

In a way, your habits will raise the floor of your experience compared to the average person, but the ceiling of your experience will much more likely be determined by how you react and respond to those rare opportunities that capture the vast majority of meaning and accomplishment in life. When it comes to the big actions, tiny motivation simply won’t suffice.

It’s more accurate to understand that small habits and big decisions are partners rather than independent phenomena. Often, the decision to begin what will be sustained into a habit is itself a big change. For instance, starting a new career, getting married, joining the military, having a child, enrolling in college, or writing a book all require dramatic initial action, even though continuing them requires a much smaller but sustained effort over time. In both the initiation and the sustainment, you are much more likely to begin and continue activities that are based on a central purpose than those which are not.

It’s easy to frame progress as finishing tasks, but this perspective is limited in the motivation and sustained productivity it can yield. When you instead frame your work as the art of advancing your purpose, you are freed from the drawbacks of being task-focused. You will find yourself reducing procrastination, increasing productivity, and enjoying work a lot more than before. It’s more difficult to procrastinate against a purpose than it is a task. After all, while the task may be something you need to get done, you chose your purpose, and it is what you say you want. It’s easier to hold back on a task than it is your purpose, for the same reason—your purpose is exactly what you want. When you see how whatever you are working on in the moment is the present instantiation of your purpose, you can learn to enjoy it.

Unlike a goal, a purpose is so transcendent that it cannot be measured or accomplished directly. Your progress on a purpose can only be measured by proxy, since you can finish subordinate elements of the life plan like goals and tasks, but never your purpose itself. You measure progress in your purpose through.

Assessing the character qualities you have attained. Measuring what you value, and by how much. Considering the goals you have set and accomplished. Thinking about the tasks you have set out to complete, their prioritization, and the rate at which you complete them.

Seeing work as the advancement of your purpose creates a positive feedback loop; your reallocation of the time and energy from convincing yourself to begin or continue in important tasks to actually moving them forward will dramatically boost your throughput and the satisfaction you feel in that progress.

Something that is existential carries the highest weight of importance. An easy way to describe something existential is as part of the phrase: “If I don’t, I’m going to die.” Interestingly, all people have felt like this about many things at many times, even if they didn’t put it into these words. Food, water, sleep, and sex are all frequent fillins to the sentence, but some people have elevated other things to this level of importance, for good and bad. Many parents have made the well-being of their children existential priorities, and successful business people have placed their business at this level; for some, escaping pain, worry, or sadness can take ultimate priority; drug addicts treat their high with this level of importance, among many other examples.

It turns out that no matter what you put into this slot, only one thing can go there. This is one way of identifying your prime priority.

Successful people learn how to choose what they get existential about. They master how to lock in one target. They proactively plan plausible paths to obtain their existential goals, and they lock onto them like a snapping turtle until they yield.

Making your life’s purpose mere self-preservation is going to direct you away from the greatest meaning and motivation in life. To encounter the power available in a life plan, you have to come to see your purpose as more important to you than life itself. If you aren’t willing to die for your purpose, then maintaining your life is your true transcendent purpose, and that’s pretty lame.

Self-preservation doesn’t just limit your accomplishment; it ensures your failure. A willingness to die for something more important than life is required to find sufficient meaning to live. The purpose of maintaining your life runs counter to everything of value great enough to contend with the ever-present malevolence of this life. You will not invest full intensity into something less than a life-or-death matter. If you want to unleash your latent potential, you’ll have to find a cause that you can promote to a primal priority.

The power of a supreme priority is so visceral that it is a common theme in myth and stories. Think of just how many stories you know of where the protagonist’s entire world balances on just one fulcrum. It’s such a ubiquitous scenario that you’ve probably never noticed how frequently their existential focus falls on something rather arbitrary, all things considered.

As an example, the protagonist in Rocky IV experiences the death of his friend during a boxing match. Instead of seeing this as an unfortunate but not altogether unpredictable accident, Rocky risks everything to fight the man himself. His wife tells him how silly this is, as he is risking his life, his family, and all the wealth he won in prior bouts, telling him that she not only thinks he will lose, but that he will die trying. Rocky responds by saying.

You may have found the movie campy, but more than one highly successful person has cited its intersection with the deep currents of reality as having been critical to their mindset.

Your purpose needs to be the most important thing in your life, which means it must be more important to you than life itself. You need to stare it down and say and truly believe that you are going to give it everything you’ve got, even if it kills you.

A popular phrase says that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. This is true, but fails to recognize the existence of competing demands for your limited resources. To do something well requires feeding it the resources it requires, which necessitates depriving something else of those resources.

The truth is that if something isn’t worth giving everything for, it’s not worth giving anything for. The only proper place anything worth less than everything has is if it serves as a prerequisite to what is worth everything.

The widespread failure of people to see this truth is not due to it being false, but because they don’t understand the difference between a purpose and a goal or task. A goal or task is never worth giving everything for, but your purpose must be, or you are guaranteed to eventually fail—not just at your purpose, but at life.

Your purpose must be existential. Your life does not have inherent meaning. It has the meaning you assign it through your adopted purpose. If you want your life to be worthwhile, you need to adopt an existential purpose. What isn’t worth dying for isn’t worth living for.

When you reorganize your life with a single focal point—your purpose—you might fear that you will need to clear out a great many present activities that you value.

In reality, if you properly understand joy, you will find that everything you deem valuable continues to have a place at the table when you make it your explicit purpose. You’ll keep everything good, you just make it easier and better.

Many changes will consist only of why you do what you do, not what you do. Even those that touch on what you do or when or how you do it will likely not be terribly obvious from the outside, like rewiring a house, even if the internal differences are immense. You’ll be amazed at the magnitude of change in how you feel and what you accomplish!

The benefits of prioritizing your life according to your purpose stem from the properties of hierarchical arrangement. Reality is hierarchical. It is naturally organized into a network with levels of detail. For example, the workstation at which I am typing this can be treated as one entity at the highest level of detail—a set of monitors, a laptop, a desk, and notes—and a whole bunch of atoms on another. It turns out that we could keep going in either direction: the workstation itself is just a subcomponent in the room, which is a subcomponent in the house, and so on.

The life plan organizes your life as a hierarchy of several categories under a single purpose, each with layers of detail within them. Much like a chest of drawers, you only have to unpack the contents of each category when needed. In each category and on each level, you are prioritizing by your purpose, giving you the benefits of organizing in high detail across your life without the burden of doing so all at once.

Sublimating your life to your purpose yields increased focus. Focus isn’t just a question of saying yes to one thing and no to everything else. Life is more complicated than this, and you’ll need a way to easily see what doesn’t fit, and where to place the rest. When you prioritize the maximal fulfillment of your purpose, you will find the importance of everything in your life clarify to the point where it is obvious and easy to choose between options for your time, emotions, and other resources.

Sublimating to your purpose will increase the accuracy and consistency of your prioritization, vastly increasing your impact. Hierarchical arrangement of your life arranges everything into just a few pieces, which are much easier to organize and prioritize than treating them all independently. Following the 80/20 rule, prioritizing the highest impact tasks and goals can easily yield ten times greater progress than otherwise. Just imagine getting ten times more done simply by making better choices about what to do next!

You might make the mistake of thinking that living a life plan means you need a very specific career that directly matches your described purpose. This is highly unlikely.

Work—whether in or out of the home—is no different than anything else in your life plan. Whatever you do should be the fullest potential contribution to your overarching purpose. What you do is not the driving factor— why you do it is.

Many today—particularly young people—seem to think that a job worked only for the money it pays is some tragedy of unattained opportunity. The prime benefit of work outside the home is almost always what you get paid to do it. Though it is possible to find intrinsic meaning in what you do for a living, it is much more likely that the value of the money you earn is greater to you than the value of what you do, otherwise you would volunteer.

Having a life plan will help you feel the same way about whatever you do for money as you do what you do for purpose, because the one will directly feed the other in ways you have perceived and actively think about.

Working for money does not in any way preclude finding great meaning in your work. Very few transcendent purposes can be pursued without temporal means.

Few people find their purpose in their job, but most need the money their job provides in order to fund their purpose. If you find your job meaningless, it isn’t because you need a job with greater meaning, but because you have failed to honestly perceive the value of the money it provides.

When you recognize the value of money in terms of your transcendent purpose and know exactly what higher value outcomes it makes possible, it’s much easier to find deep meaning in work—even if the main benefit it provides is a paycheck.

A surprising share of what makes an abundant life comes from the ability to recognize and take advantage of unforeseen opportunities. A strong purpose will help you do this more than anything else. You will find that the incidental gains accrued by taking advantage of unexpected incidental opportunities will often outweigh those intentionally sought, and sometimes by a shocking ratio. Opportunities are like toddlers.

Many are accidents. You can’t predict them, but you need a way to respond to them if they happen. Most are not paid attention to, and in ignoring them, guarantee great regret later. The greatest treasures come from those who value them in the moment. They usually don’t play nicely with others. You need a way to prioritize which is most important, because you can probably only really pursue one at a time. They are particularly impatient. If you don’t handle them when they appear, they usually will scurry away. They can suddenly stink very badly. It’s vital to know when to discontinue what once looked like a great idea.

Opportunities can be far more subtle than their benefits. You are much more likely to notice something you are looking for, especially if it is subtle.

A strong purpose will increase your ability to notice otherwise hidden opportunities. Your well-defined life plan provides a scaffold of what to look for and reasons to look for it. Without a life plan, you’ll be stuck in an up-close view of life, unable to see and take advantage of unforeseen opportunities outside the scope of the present task at hand.

With a life plan, you’ll be cognizant of the overarching purpose that matters the most to you, as well as many goals and even more tasks that will contribute to it. This web of priorities creates a net on which many unexpected opportunities might catch to your advantage. Having an idea of what you are after is a prerequisite to noticing and taking advantage of incremental opportunities along the way.

Your purpose will help you justify the reallocation of resources necessary to take advantage of life-changing opportunities that you might otherwise pass over as impossible. Your life plan vitally assists you in deciding what is important, heightening the likelihood that you will notice and leverage unexpected opportunities.

Always take advantage of incidental opportunities that take much less present effort now than they would in the future. For example, if you happen across items for sale at the store that you weren’t planning on buying, but that you use, buy as many as you will use before they expire. Pull a weed as you walk by on your way to the objective that brought you that way. And always—always—write down ideas worth having that come to you unbidden.

When you have a purpose, you have a framework that makes every decision clearer than it would otherwise be. Your purpose gives you criteria to measure against every decision before you. It also acts as an organization system to look for, gather, and evaluate evidence. In all things, you are able to evaluate the costs and benefits against your chosen purpose: either a clear best choice emerges, or you will have done the due diligence necessary to prove to yourself that the decision isn’t terribly important to you.

When you are doing the best you know in service of your purpose, you can generate feelings of confidence, peace, and satisfaction that endure much more strongly than feelings that come from arbitrary environmental conditions. Every time you act in preference to your purpose, you generate more supporting evidence for your capacity, selfworth, and eventual success. As you continue to learn about the life plan, you will begin to realize how you can make every moment of your life into supporting evidence for your confidence through intentionally choosing to act to advance your purpose.

Increased confidence in your life plan will generate a positive feedback loop. The more you live according to your plan, the more confidence you will have to continue aiming towards a better life. You’ll come to recognize the life plan as a tool to continuously improve your life. You will set out to become a person with even better qualities, even more accurate values, even more audacious goals, and even more high impact tasks. The more improvement you encounter, the more courage you will have to fully invest any energy you’ve been withholding.

Joy is one word, but don’t let that fool you into thinking its a simple thing. You will find that your understanding of what joy means will deepen over time, as will your comprehension of how much is possible, how long it can endure, and how intense it can be.

Your understanding of your purpose is a naturally iterative process. With every additional example of the many experiences reserved for those who live intentionally, you will find that every piece of your life plan pulses into greater and greater richness. The meaning your life plan helps you encounter will deepen as you experience more and more of the intensity in life that remains permanently hidden from most people.

You may feel like the idea of acting with an overarching purpose is something new or different compared to life as you presently live it, but this is an illusion. Humans are inherently purpose-driven creatures, and when we are unaware of a motivating purpose, the issue isn’t the absence of purpose, but the absence of awareness of it. Think of human purpose like a slot that must be filled at all times. If you don’t fill it intentionally and consciously, it will still be filled—it just won’t be filled with what is best, you won’t use it up to its potential, and it will likely rotate out to something else just as arbitrarily and unnoticed as it came.

When a person does not have a consciously-chosen purpose, they will typically default to baser aims that have some relationship to avoiding pain and maximizing present pleasure. These will always end in lesser long-term consequences than intentionally selecting and pursuing a valuable purpose.

All sentient beings have something more important to them than anything else. It is whatever they are presently doing. Most people never make their priorities explicit, and are constantly and subconsciously jostling what is most important. The problem isn’t that they don’t have something of highest priority—it’s that they choose what is most important by reacting to what is around them rather than proactively selecting it ahead of time.

Unintentionally choosing a purpose will not result in anything near the same success as pursuing one intentionally. One does not tend to land darts as near the bullseye when blindfolded and spinning as they do when aiming, no matter how bad they are at the game.

A person who allows their purpose to be passively-selected will never stay with a purpose long enough to make significant progress in it. They will flitter between multiple, usually-conflicting purposes one after another, leading to even more disastrous results than any single baser purpose might yield alone. The constant change in purpose makes it difficult to identify the patterns that might otherwise help the individual to identify the source of the problems they find themselves constantly plagued with, which stem from the lack of a consistent and worthwhile purpose.

While adopting a purpose seems like a big commitment, realize you are already doing it, just not intentionally or well. The difference in the life plan is intentionally choosing what the most important thing is, and keeping it consistent.

This is precisely the opportunity before you: to make intentional what you have consistently taken for granted your whole life, and in doing so, to unleash the power uniquely available to those who do.

Until now, your attention has fluttered haphazardly from one thing to the next with only the slightest coordination and intention. The best things in life carry the greatest price, and almost none are available to those who incidentally meander through life. From now on, you will know how to organize your attention toward what you want the most, unlocking the attainments that require full and deliberate intention.

You may hesitate to adopt a transcendent purpose because you realize that as soon as you do, you will begin feeling guilty any time you deviate from it. The fake freedom that failure to live intentionally offers is not worth its cost. While you will feel guilty in the event you deviate from a purpose you’ve chosen, failing to choose one will absolutely result in worse outcomes still.

Guilt for underperformance is a small price to pay for the vastly improved outcomes that can only come through intentional effort. And remember, you have full control to make any changes to your life plan you feel are necessary. That kind of flexibility is empowering, but it comes at a price.

So often in modern life, people burn precious time and other resources in situations that they know do not directly contribute to what they feel important. Whether you are in a dead-end job, a dead-end relationship, a dead-end hobby, a dead-end church, or anything else, align your whole life to your purpose. Immediately swap out dead ends for something that contributes directly to your purpose, or at least spend that time looking for what does.

Even if a group of people share the adoption of joy as their purpose, there will be tremendous variations between how they define joy. One dimension of this difference is how much they view joy to be a function of what they are able to do for others versus what they do for themselves.

It’s easy to see joy as a uniquely selfish pursuit. Surely, there are ways that joy can be pursued and obtained that place self before others. However, if your motivation is limited to your own progression, you will hit an absolute limit in your improvement, and therefore a limit in your joy.

The fact is that the path of self-improvement for the sake of self quickly hits diminishing returns, where the increased sacrifices necessary to continue improving can’t deliver sufficient benefit to self to make them worthwhile. Since joy comes from improvement, the diminishing returns of improvement for self create an unsurpassable asymptote in your path to greater joy.

The greatest joy is only available in improvement for the sake of others, and the quantities are not even close to comparable. While the joy you can find through improvement for self-benefit is very limited, the joy available to you through improvement for others is unlimited. The cause of other people can absorb any sacrifice you give for it, up to and including all things.

The joy you feel in self-improvement for your own sake is obviously limited to yourself. When you become willing to rejoice in the joy of others, the domain of what you can receive through your sacrifice extends through all people, in a chain as infinite as the relationships between all people, through all time.

How much joy you experience will be determined by how much responsibility you willingly take upon yourself. The more you assume responsibility for the benefit of others, the more reasons you will have to become the best person you can possibly be, the more meaning you will find in your life, and the more joy you will experience as you grow into your full potential.

Qualities

Your character qualities are a list of one-word adjectives that describe the kind of person you are. There is a set of qualities you must possess and live by in order to be the happiest person you can be. The purpose of this section of your life plan is to specify this set of qualities.

Since the greatest joy comes from the greatest improvement, your list of qualities should answer the question: “What is the best kind of person I could be?”

Every improvement requires a starting point. You can’t navigate using a map unless you know your starting point. The most effective progress toward attaining your potential will require an accurate idea of who you presently are.

List out your present qualities in your life plan document. For each quality, use only one word, and look up and write out a definition written in your own words.

Your qualities are not demonstrated by how you feel; they are demonstrated by what you do. Your character is what you do right now, for the reasons you do it right now. Acting in accordance with a trait means you have the trait, and acting against the trait means you do not have it.

Any residuals from the past tend to be limited to how much easier it is to continue in a pattern than it is to do something different. The past character decisions that do carry into your present reputation are, more often than not, the mistakes and not the victories.

For most people, the fact that you are what you do works against them, as the positive qualities they demonstrate on average are regularly vanquished by momentary negative deviations. But this principle can be used to your advantage. The fact that you can destroy your character in one decision means that you can also turn over a new leaf at any moment, no matter where you find yourself.

You can change who you are moment by moment through how you begin to act right now. No matter where you are, you can improve into something better.

All character changes, no matter how great, are determined from momentary decisions. What you do, how you do it, and why you do it defines who you are. All of this information is encoded, refined, and executed from the life plan.

Each person has several selves: the person they believe they are, the person they project to others, how they are seen by those that like them, and how they are seen by those who do not. The real you is a composite of all of these things.

What are your qualities according to you? It’s not uncommon to make the mistake of presuming that how you see yourself is how you really are, but you have some faults that you will struggle to see and some that you will refuse to admit. How you see yourself will tend to more closely match how you desire to be rather than how you really are.

Differences between how you see yourself and how others see you can be powerful indications of areas where you can improve how you think, feel, and act to become more of the person you desire to be.

What are your qualities according to someone you trust? Others whom you trust provide valuable external feedback on how you behave that can surpass the limitations of your blindspots and honesty. Because you trust them, you should earnestly consider their perspective.

What are your qualities according to someone who dislikes you? Those who dislike you may have a negative bias in how they see you, but their absence of any positive bias means that they can also sometimes be the most honest source of external feedback. Usually, the more that what other people think about you bothers you, the more likely it is that there is a grain of truth in at least some of their negative opinion of you.

For most people, who you are will be a composite of many inputs, only some of which are clear, coalescing into who you are in an arc so subtle it might be imperceptible over time.

Everyone has a unique backstory. For each quality you currently possess, you might trace its genesis back to something internal, such as a choice you made, or something external, such as something that someone else did or didn’t do. Some qualities might seem to have been with you from as early an age as you can imagine.

Most people will not be much different over time, and when they are, they tend to be worse—not better. This is not an inevitable outcome.

Some have not worked on their character because they don’t know it is possible, others because they didn’t know it was necessary, and others because they don’t know how. You can change how you are. You can become the kind of person you want to be. The life plan will show you how while helping you find the reasons why to do so.

No matter your past, and no matter who you are today, there are still many improvements that remain possible. Your life story has not finished being written until you stop living. You can change who you are. You do so with each daily choice you make.

In a nutshell, your life plan is you on paper. It is the mapping between who you are and who you will become. Your life plan will specify the details of how to be the best person you can be in such clarity that it will simplify the whole process down to what you do moment by moment, one day at a time.

The life plan gives you a convenient and effective way to improve your character. Your life plan provides enough detail that you can continuously ask yourself what the person described in your life plan would do, and know the answer.

Humans have an incredible ability to adopt the character of another. We have an astonishing capacity to turn experiences into narratives. From very few exposures to a person, we can begin to accurately predict what they would do in unseen situations. If you go through life asking yourself what this person would do in your place, you will fill in many of the gaps that written tasks cannot fully describe. As you do what that person would do, you will actually become like that person.

In the other parts of your life plan—your goals and tasks—you will describe what the ideal person does. In the qualities, you describe how the ideal person is. Your qualities are determined from your why—your purpose. They are implemented by your what—your goals and tasks.

Your life plan is where you design your character and map it down to the daily level. While your character stretches across the whole life plan, your qualities section is the core, as it specifically describes the kind of person you would like to be. Your qualities describe the avatar of the most joyous person you can imagine. Your qualities should answer the question: “how would I have to be to have the most joy I can imagine is possible?”

The goals and tasks you write will implement how you act as that person, as enumerated through your beliefs section and prioritized through your values section. The tasks you complete each day are where you implement your character. As you execute your life plan on a daily basis, you will be the person you desire to be.

You should think of your purpose as a challenge that you must grow to overcome. Many hero movies have a training montage, because one critical aspect of a good story is a challenge that the hero must grow to become able to overcome.

Your life plan should be a healthy mix of things you are doing already and new or expanded qualities that stretch you. If your qualities don’t require growth, you aren’t aiming high enough.

You will use these qualities throughout the rest of the life plan to implement those qualities in the goals you set and the tasks you accomplish daily to align with them.

Do you love the kind of person you are? Are there things about yourself that you aren’t proud of? Are there ways in which you wish you were a better person?

Plenty of people can identify ways of being that they value, but do not embody. Few people make a plausible plan to grow toward the ideal they can imagine.

How would you change your character qualities if you could be however you wished? How would you change your personality? How would you change how you interact with others? How would you change how you viewed yourself and others, and situations in life?

What qualities would you use to describe the ideal person? If you could carve your own character from a block of marble, what qualities would you choose?

You will answer these questions by listing character qualities in your life plan.

Improvement is hard work, so you want to leverage every advantage that your body and mind give you, and they give you quite a few. Most people take the path of least resistance, where your natural.

Quality 1.

Quality 2.

Purpose Quality g.

Qualities Principle q.1.

Values Principle q.2.

Beliefs» Principle q.p.

Rule q.p.r.

As you carry yourself through each day, try to keep the definitions of your qualities in mind. Whenever you face a situation, ask yourself what the ideal person you have described would do.

Qualities are just single word descriptors. Single words can be unfamiliar, arcane, or ambiguous, and each of these attributes will add obstacles that make it harder for you to act like the person you describe in your life plan. The more details you have, the easier it will be to understand and apply how and why the person described in your life plan would act in every situation. In order to provide greater detail, you will enumerate a list of principles for each desired quality in your life plan.

Principles are generalized descriptions of behavior. Rules are derived from principles and describe specific behavior in specific situations. Principles are less specific, and give general guidance across a broad range of situations.

A good resource to help you enumerate principles is to look up the quality in the dictionary. Dictionary definitions tend to be formal and precise. Rewrite the definition in your own words, aiming for a single sentence. If you can think of several different aspects of the quality, or if it’s too tricky to fit your own definition into a single clear sentence, split your definition into separate sentences.

Each sentence you form should be worked over until it is short and plain. To finish the process of decomposing your quality into principles, rewrite each sentence as if it were a description about yourself.

Here are some examples of possible principles for the quality “I am honest”.

I do not lie. I tell the truth. I live according to the truth. I seek to know more about the truth.

You’ll notice that these principles do not describe specific situations, but provide general guidance.

As you write your principles, make sure you are writing as if you already possess them. Do not describe the principle as something you will be, but something you are. Don’t write about what you are trying to do or will do: “I’m trying to quit smoking,” but say: “I don’t smoke.”

From day to day, remember your principles and use them as a way of indicating what you should do in situations where your rules do not specifically apply.

Rules are descriptions of how to act in specific situations so as to implement the principle and quality described in your life plan. Rules are the solutions for the problem of how to act in certain situations worked out ahead of time.

To make rules, simple describe each principle in higher detail. The more specifically you plan out an action, the more likely you will do it, and the more likely you will be successful.

Make a bullet list of significant situations where the quality in question would be demonstrated. In each bullet, describe the ideal behavior in concise detail. Write each bullet in terms of behavior that would demonstrate having the quality, whether that means what you will do or what you will not do.

As an example, you might enumerate the following rules for the principle “I tell the truth”.

I will not say something I do not agree with in order to please others. When someone asks me what I think about something, I will tell them what I really think. When someone says something that I believe is false, I will ask them why they believe what they do, compare why I believe what I do, and share my own belief and reasons if I continue to regard them as more correct. Etc.

You’ll want to keep your rules short and snappy. You will call these rules to mind throughout your day to guide your behavior to align with the qualities you seek. Make them as specific and short as you can: “When someone cuts me off in traffic, I smile and wave.”

Consult your rules often throughout each day. When one applies, do what the rule says. When you face situations where you don’t have a rule, immediately write yourself a note to revisit this during your next planning session to think more about it and perhaps create a new or better rule.

Suppose you want to be generous. If you look up generous in the Oxford dictionary, you’ll see “showing a readiness to give more of something, as money or time, than is strictly necessary or expected.” You can enumerate the principles for “I am generous” as.

I give more than is needed or expected. I look for ways to help others. Etc.

Next, you’ll want to enumerate some rules. Think through your average day. Suppose that when you get up and use the bathroom, sometimes you leave the seat up. Rule 1: “I put the seat down.” Suppose that when you get to the office, there are usually donuts, but they never buy enough for everyone, and if you get there too late, they are gone. Rule 2: “I don’t take the last donut.” You can imagine the rest.

There are many potential character qualities that are difficult, if not impossible, to carry at the same time. It is difficult and may even be impossible to be both assertive and cautious, or just and merciful, or patient and productive.

Any strict mutual exclusivity between character traits can be resolved through extreme specificity in how opposing character traits should interact. For example, you could be assertive when you have sufficiently strong reasons and cautious whenever you don’t.

These specifications are often not just when two positive qualities compete with one another, but also when you have a single quality that would be good to have in some cases and bad in others. For example, empathy is regarded as a universally positive quality by many, but it can easily become a vice when it is used in situations where doing so leads to greater harm through triggering even worse second order consequences. Your rule could be, “I will help relieve present suffering except where doing so would increase future suffering.”

Defining principles and rules from qualities is not always the best order. Sometimes, it is better to think about how an ideal person would act in specific situations, extrapolate this to a set of principles, and then distill a quality from those.

For example, if you’re a parent and you don’t like how you sometimes yell when your child ignores you, you might write: “When my child ignores me, I calmly walk over to them and have a chat about it.” What is the principle here? “I do not react to situations I do not like by yelling.” What is the quality? “I am patient.”

Once you have climbed from rule to principle to quality, you can work back down enumerating additional principles and rules to fully flesh out the quality.

Most people will find it much easier to enumerate potential improvements than to implement them. Instead of seeing your list of character changes as something you need to do all at once, prioritize them according to their impact on your purpose, and begin by focusing on the first one. If you keep thinking about and working on the highest priority quality, you will soon find that you have improved enough in that area that another quality has become the highest priority.

Every time you make a change to your qualities, you will read the change once per day and try to think about it throughout the day until you find yourself living it without thinking. If you slip up on one, make a point to add it back to the daily review list until you firm it up.

Your list of qualities becomes your recipe for how you will act. Throughout each day, face every situation as if you are playing the part of the person you have written down.

Some would contend that this approach sounds an awful lot like the adage “fake it till you make it.” Character is built through decisions over time. Here’s a more accurate but less fun phrase: “Make it till you make it.”

Who you are is what you do and why you do it. There is no magic switch that happens after you’ve lived according to some quality for an arbitrary amount of time. If you act in the moment as one with the quality would, you have that quality—at least for that moment. It is easy to have a certain quality in just one moment, and realizing this is the key to making sweeping improvement in your life. The hard part is keeping it. Any attribute you can practice for a moment is thereafter yours to lose.

The necessity of continuing to live true to the qualities you have temporarily demonstrated might seem stressful, but it is yet another one of those things that seem hard only because we don’t realize that everyone—including you—is already doing it. You are already who you are, and you are only that way because you consistently live true to your present qualities. What is discussed here isn’t the suggestion to adopt the consistent practice of certain qualities, but rather to choose better qualities to practice.

An important point missed by those who say “fake it till you make it” is that. It’s a false and you are never finished making it detrimental belief to assume that any quality will ever be automatic and enduring. Just one lapse in many qualities, such as honesty or trustworthiness, instantly robs you of those qualities for a long time, no matter how long they were true before. You are never done making it.

Most people don’t improve their qualities very much, and some not at all, but it isn’t because character improvement is any harder than any other change—it’s just less often pursued.

It’s not uncommon for people to care about what they look like. Many people watch what they eat and work out to get or stay in shape, spend money on nice clothing, or spend considerable time on grooming, but comparatively few make any comparable investment into their character.

Character improvement lies opposite of human nature. A little improvement requires a lot of intentional effort, and a lot of improvement requires a lot more of the same.

Do you place as much time and effort on the quality of your character as you do on your physical appearance? If not, why not?

Rules are always created for a higher purpose. Sometimes, keeping that higher purpose requires breaking the rules.

Rules are specific descriptions of behavior in a specific situation. The problem is that situations differ one from another, and sometimes the behavior more true to the principle will actually require you to break the rule. This might seem hard to believe for anyone who hasn’t had extensive experience in highly regimented situations, such as the military.

There’s a time and place where the spirit of the law requires you to violate the letter of the law. While it is true that the major applicability of rules is why they are attractive in the first place, anyone who is serious about living a certain character quality is going to run up against a situation like this sooner or later. While the occasional need to break the rules can be abused to justify poor choices, it is absolutely necessary to learn to apply them with prudence, honesty, and wisdom if you really want to fully embody a character quality.

Conflict can appear at the principle and quality levels, too. For example, you may encounter situations where you find a conflict between being just and merciful, patient and proactive, calm and assertive, etc.

One of the strengths of the hierarchy of character, quality, principle, rule is that the parent category gives overriding guidance to the subordinate one. When you find yourself questioning whether a rule, principle, or quality should be broken, do what aligns best with your purpose and the remaining categories.

Values

In the context of your life plan, your values are the way you will describe the order of priority between competing aspects of life.

Value is a measure of preference among a set of things. Just as a dictionary must define a word by using other words, the degree to which you value something can only be defined in terms of the value of other things. Until and unless you explicitly define the ranking of your preferences, it is extremely unlikely that you consistently act toward what will bring you the greatest joy.

Modern life floods you with demands on your time and other resources in ways that extend far beyond what our ancestors faced. Buried amidst the flood of ever-more-complex tasks, limitless information, and constant contacts from others are potential actions that are vitally important: life-changing information to learn, crucial connections to make with people, and critical decisions to make.

It’s easy to expend your resources on what is quick or easy, and most do, but few have developed effective ways to find and act most meaningfully.

What is most important is not always clear. What seems minor might be very important. In fact, this mix up occurs so often that an inability to notice or unwillingness to do those seemingly little things can frequently be the very reason we fail to attain what we hope for in life.

It’s typical to think of many things as equally important, but importance varies quite a bit between the options for action in a given moment. One’s ability to find the needle of what is useful in the haystack of what is not is essential to modern success. Filtering out what is useful requires a method for sorting through the options quickly and accurately. You need a measure of importance. Your prioritized values give you both a way of measuring importance and a method for organizing your response for the greatest impact.

Values are the key to overcoming the tendency to conflate what is easy and fast with what is meaningful. By referring to your prioritized ranking, you can recognize and boost the importance of any seemingly small idea or action that connects to a value near the top of your list.

You’ll begin the process of enumerating your values by brainstorming what is important to you. What brings you joy?

Imagine you are your own employee. Imagine a meeting where you are telling your employee what matters and why. What is important? What is more important? What matters most? Try to keep these entries as brief as possible. If you are still stuck, perhaps begin with things you know have low value, and then ask what is more important than them.

Potential entries on your value list might include the well-being of a family member, time spent with a pet or in pursuit of a hobby, or experiencing a feeling.

As you list entries, you’ll want to order them in terms of relative importance. In some cases, you will be able to place each item relative to the others rather quickly, but in others, you will have to compare an entry to the other entries one by one to find its exact place.

The difficulty of your values section isn’t so much in how complete it is or isn’t, as the holes will make themselves apparent over time, but in explicitly setting each thing as more or less important than everything else. It’s probably something you haven’t thought about before.

At the highest level, sort everything according to your purpose: How central is what you are describing to your purpose? How much joy do you or would you experience in the thing described? Order everything in your list from greatest joy to least joy. With each item, you’ll want to ensure that what you have so far is what you would want if you could only have as many entries as you do.

As you work, you might notice several adjacent values might actually be describable under a more generic label. Condense these if you find them. Each person is different, but potential examples of groupings would be several specific aspects of work, several hobbies, or some collection of specific feelings.

It is difficult to act so as to honor the value of many things at once. It produces stress and fragmentation of effort.

Listing and ranking what you value might seem like it is too involved and will lead to too long a list of values. Actually, one of the greatest benefits of this exercise is to realize the falsehood of the assumption that many things matter to you.

The first part of this realization occurs when you reach the point in your values list that you can no longer confidently rank additional items. There is no point continuing to list anything past this point, as you don’t care enough about any of those things for them to be useful in directing your choices. You may be shocked as to how quickly you reach this point.

The second part of this realization is to realize that, according to the 80/20 rule, it is likely that the first 20% of the items on your list capture 80% of the total value you find in your whole list. Furthermore, if you truncate your list to the first ten items, the first two provide 80% of the value of that set of ten.

Your surprisingly short list of values encapsulate everything you care about enough to specify where it is relative to something else, providing you with a clear ordering and a shocking amount of clarity in how to best allocate your resources to maximize what you most value.

As you live according to the values you have listed, you will discover ways to improve your value prioritization. You will add and remove values, and you will shift their prioritization.

As with all parts of your life plan, you alone will choose what you write in this section, and you have full sovereignty to choose what to change and when. Make changes when you have sufficient reason to, but live true to what you have written until then.

Maintaining your written value prioritization under all circumstances will require discipline. You will find that some circumstances make it more difficult to live according to your values than others. Many examples abound, but they can be summarized as a battle between the prioritization you generated in the objective calm of when you wrote your life plan and the subjective environment where you feel a pull to act contrary to what you’ve written. These situations are a question of the tension between rationality and emotion—a topic that will be discussed at length later on because of how often it comes up as you implement various pieces of the life plan.

Just writing out a life plan will give you a rational foothold in areas of your life that you previously paid much less attention to. Thinking about your life plan in these moments will help you remember why you chose the way you did, but even if you can’t reproduce the logic, you can trust that you knew what you were doing when you did, and this will give you strength. The more thoroughly and repeatedly you review and renew your prioritization when you are calm and hopeful, such as first thing in the morning, the more easily you will retain a rational mindset in times you would usually devolve to an emotional mindset.

How valuable you find something is subjective. Your appraisal of how much joy something provides is an estimate. You probably accept the possibility that you might be incorrect in how much joy you expect from something before experiencing it, but how could this be true for something you already know from experience?

The joy we associate with present or past experiences is subject to retroactive revision. You’ve no doubt experienced this, though perhaps not conscientiously—and certainly without a label—when you were surprised to learn details about a present or past experience that significantly reduced the value of that experience. An example of retroactive revision is how a spouse reinterprets their marriage after finding out that they’ve unknowingly been cheated on for years.

As you proceed through life, you will learn more and more about the actual value of people, things, and situations. As a result, how important different aspects of life will shift, and the more you learn, the more your valuation will approach more closely to objective value.

The purpose of life is to gain maximal joy, and one part of that puzzle is to discover and obtain what has the greatest potential to provide that joy. Why is that a puzzle? Why isn’t what provides the greatest joy obvious?

Joy comes from value, and our default valuation of things is exceedingly incorrect. If we saw the true value of things, we would have immense joy in things that most consider of very little worth. Moments scattered through each day would fill us with overflowing bliss. Instead, we place massive concern and value on things of no importance.

We improve in the accuracy of our appraisal of value through encountering and correcting deviations from our expectations of worth. As we invest in the cost of what we believe to be worthwhile, we learn what it is actually worth, and how the net benefit relates to other alternatives.

As your appraisal of value becomes more accurate, you will notice a pattern: nothing is both highly valuable and low cost. Value is a function of cost. However, they are not interchangeable, because plenty of low value things also carry a high cost. What we seek are those things that have the highest net benefit—the highest benefit after accounting for the cost.

What has the greatest value also carries the greatest price. The greatest joy comes from the greatest cost for the most meaningful end.

Those who encounter the greatest joy in life do not seek to minimize cost—whether that cost be pain, suffering, endurance, or anything else. Rather, they seek to maximize meaning. As you learn to do the same, you will increasingly prioritize pursuits that carry great costs, but which are still the most worthwhile.

One thing you will discover as your appraisal of value becomes more accurate is that value is Pareto distributed. As a consequence, the value you find in life comes from disproportionately few things.

You’ve probably already seen this pattern, even if you have not recognized it until now. Try to answer the question: “What decisions have I made or actions have I taken that are most responsible for what I presently value in life?” You may be surprised at how much of the value you’ve experienced came from just a few items.

For another important surprise, for each of the main sources of value in your life so far, how many did you recognize were so valuable beforehand or even at the time? The lesson learned: The value of high impact things usually only becomes apparent through time, after the fact.

Because so much value is concentrated in so few things, and because those things tend not to be obvious ahead of time, it is astronomically important to find ways to intentionally seek out highvalue activities, decisions, and outcomes.

While each of the sections of the life plan play a role in maximizing joy, the values section has a special role by providing the necessary ranking to prioritize how resources are used for the greatest joy.

Productivity is the measure of efficacy of a productive effort. In the paradigm of the life plan, productivity is a measure of how much joy can be experienced within the finite limits of life.

Human productivity is Pareto distributed: 80% of what matters is contained in 20% of available options, and this pattern repeats in all subsegments: A single task can be more important than all the others combined.

It is highly unlikely that anyone not paying careful attention to prioritization is even remotely approaching how productive they could be. The most valuable activities carry the highest cost, and what is most difficult is the most likely to be avoided. Most people spend most of their time on the most trivial activities.

Because productivity, like wealth, is Pareto distributed, almost all productivity is concentrated in just a small percentage of people, no matter how big or small the sample of people measured. While there are overlaps between wealth and productivity, there are also differences. Not all productivity produces wealth, and not all wealthy people are productive. While you know of some of the wealthiest people in the world, you probably have no idea who the most productive people are. What this means is that while you know how wealthy extremely wealthy people are, it’s unlikely you have any clue just how productive a human can be.

Normal people see hyper-productive people as miraculous oddities or examples of overzealousness. Both perspectives are wrong in serious ways. To see the hyper-productive as miraculous oddities dismisses the fact that it is a choice, and it is something that anyone can do if they learn how and choose to pay the price. To see the hyperproductive as overzealous is to miss the point that normal life can ever bring more than the normal condition, which is obviously inadequate.

Unlike wealth, which is at least a little dependent on outside circumstances, productivity can be taught and its exercise is purely a matter of choice. This is precisely what this book and the life plan do.

A joyful life carries a higher cost than a normal one. Normal people are miserable. They ignore opportunities for improvement, assuming that the future will be at least as good as the present without adopting the improvements that would make it so. Unsurprisingly, their lives cascade into greater overwhelm as challenges unexpected by them predictably occur. Surprises require surplus. If you want to be better than normal, you will have to do more and better than normal people do.

The pursuit of a joyful life requires more time, energy, and rational selection than normal people have. An excellent life requires more than just enough for yourself—more time, more skills, more wisdom, more money, more space, and more stability. And not just for you. The greatest joy comes from helping others, so what you’ll need is more than what you alone need. If you want to save a drowning person, you’ll need to be able to swim well, not just tread water, as it is much more difficult to swim for two than it is to swim for one. Happiness requires surplus, and surplus requires hyper-productivity.

It is convenient to pretend that hyper-productive people have a magical stockpile of surplus time, energy, talent, or will. They don’t. They use the same exact resources normal people have; they just use them in ways that generate much better outcomes.

Hyper-productive people do not base their decisions to improve on whether they need to, but rather whether they ought to. They do the best they can, not the worst they can get away with. They weigh whether the benefit outweighs the cost, and do what is worthwhile.

The life plan framework gives you a way to move towards hyperproductivity by combining faster execution, more effective selection of tasks, and better decision making to compound productivity gains to a point where you will not believe how much you are getting done. The dramatic gains in productivity will be even more shocking when you realize how little you needed to change to obtain them.

Productivity is achieved through what you do, why you do it, and how you do it—all internal choices that you make yourself, and all of which are addressed in the life plan.

The life plan gives you a means of prioritization in every scope of your life by giving you a mechanism for ranking the importance of different demands on your limited resources. By assessing the impact of different options on your purpose, goals, or tasks, in reference to other choices, you can systematically choose what is best. Each of these choices is a question of prioritization.

Great confidence comes through living this way; at any time you will know that your present state of choices best reflects what you truly believe will most directly lead to what is of greatest value to you. You will be free from the worry that you aren’t pursuing the best course, because you will always have a detailed case for why you are. When you know you are doing the best things, you are free from the anxiety caused by not being able to do all things.

The life plan is intended to transform your life into what you value the most through who you are, what you do, and what you have.

Often our desires contain mutually exclusive things, but almost no one realizes when the many things they desire compete with one another. Making your priorities explicit helps you see when the pursuit of one thing you want detracts from the pursuit of another, because as you spend the extra time and thought elucidating how to obtain what you want the most, you will also see previously hidden conflicts in what it will take to get what you want almost as much.

A great deal of resources are wasted on low value pursuits because people make the mistake of comparing the value of what they choose to doing nothing. The reality is that the cost of every moment is the highest value action that could occupy it. Most choices fail to measure up when compared against the potential action of greatest worth. Every decision in life is a tradeoff, and far more often than you realize, there tends to be something within the set of possible choices of much greater worth than any other option.

The best way to improve your choices is to spend more time thinking about them before you make them, ideally when you are far away from the situation in which you’ll need to make them. The more time you put into making and rehearsing detailed prioritizations of what you value, the more likely you will be to follow those prioritizations in the moment of choice.

It isn’t unusual for someone to actually want something other than what they say they want. As you live your life plan, you are going to face this situation every time you have to choose between acting as the person described in the plan or acting in some other way. When you find yourself swept up in circumstance, remember that you’ve already thought this through. However you might feel in the moment should be subordinated to what you already planned, until and unless you have information that differs from your understanding when you made your plan. Even then, odds are you should still follow your plan until you’ve had a clear headed moment to revisit your plan.

Unfortunately, the most common outcome for people who find themselves wanting to deviate from what they understand to be best is for them to pretend to have a rational basis for what is really an arbitrary emotional position by complicating the situation, ignoring facts, or otherwise bending the truth. With enough of a smokescreen, they can persuade themselves that what they know isn’t best is still worth doing.

There are two solutions for such challenges. The first is to become more honest about what you want and why you want it. The choice to be truthful is one each person must make for themselves. The second is to increase the strength of your reasons for wanting what is better.

When you want to change what you want, find something that matters more to you than what you are tempted to choose instead. Find something that you consider more important than what you want to pivot away from. Hold to those reasons in times of temptation.

Desire is a limited resource. Any desire you orient toward one thing cannot be shared with another. There can only be one thing you want the most at any one time—even if you are inconsistent in what it is, whether you intend it or not, whether you are aware of what it is or not, and whether you like it or not.

It is possible to desire multiple things at once, but any amount of allocated desire cannot be shared with another objective at the same time. Too often, the reason you have not received something you desire is that you don’t desire it enough to do what it takes to obtain it, because that desire is already allocated elsewhere.

One of the greatest detractions from obtaining what you want in life is holding mutually exclusive aims that ensure you will never make significant progress in any one of them. Even when values are not mutually exclusive, they still compete in the sense that you can only do one thing at a time, and therefore everything has to be more or less important than everything else. It is uncomfortable to think about competing options for our concern this way, but realize that there is no other way to act: every choice is an exchange. Even when you don’t realize it, every choice is the preference of something above everything else.

The word sacrifice has been corrupted to mean something you go without. In reality, it means to increase the priority of something you do not yet have such that it replaces something you do. For example, to sacrifice something for your children means to value providing that thing to your children over whatever it will replace.

Needing to choose one option necessarily means not choosing another, but you should not feel as if these revelations of conflict are an experience of loss. Remember, the value of something must be denominated in the things we view as less valuable than it. The more value you sacrifice for something, the more value it will have to you.

Whatever you don’t have is always a result of either not knowing its cost or not having paid it. You will obtain everything that you desire above its cost, provided you possess an accurate enough belief to describe how to obtain it. Even when you want something more than anything else, you still might not want it enough to meet or exceed its cost.

You are unlikely to achieve anything worthwhile without devoting your full attention to it for at least a span of time. The greatest outcomes in life do not tolerate competition. They require your full attention. Anything that requires everything prevents the contemporary pursuit of anything else. The greatest pursuits cannot succeed while you are only partially committed, or while you simultaneously seek lateral alternatives that sap your limited resources away from the main pursuit.

To make something your highest priority means it is what you want no matter the cost. If there are constraints, such as certain things you would not do or timeframes you would not endure to obtain it, you can’t say it is your top desire. Rather, the constraints are.

This point about constraints may seem subtle to some, but it is very important. Most people are riddled with constraints, most of which they’ve never thought of explicitly. The addition of each constraint on a desire decreases the probability that a complying solution exists. One of the benefits of the life plan is that it helps you be more explicit about the constraints you set, making it more possible to obtain what you say you want the most, as well as revealing when you actually want something else more.

The wrong kind of sacrifice happens when you sacrifice higher priorities for lower priorities. This kind of sacrifice breaks authenticity, and it causes a host of outsized problems within and around you that can be hard to trace to their source. Don’t violate more important priorities to obtain lesser priorities.

Peak productivity requires that you intentionally direct your attention to the most important things at the most effective times. The less intentionally your highest impact efforts are planned and promoted, the more likely you are to focus on what is least important.

Not all action is equally effective. What you are doing, how you are doing it, and why you are doing it matters so much more than just whether you are doing something or not. If you want to achieve peak productivity, you will have to learn to optimize what you do, how you do it, and why you do it.

Productivity is not a question of activity, but impact. Counting hours is much easier and much more consistent than counting actual production, but reality is not directly effected by the amount of time that you commit to a task. Busyness is not progress. Those who conflate productivity with activity are assured to have a dramatically lesser impact than they otherwise could because they will prioritize additional time and effort as its own benefit instead of measuring the outcomes that actually matter. Satisfaction comes from impact—not activity, and not number of activities. Always focus on what has the highest impact. Focus on outputs, not activity.

Even hard work is no guarantee that you are advancing your purpose as much as you would some other way, if at all. Examples abound where less time on task under the right circumstances can yield dramatically better outcomes than more time would. Effort is only progress when it advances your purpose, and does so more than any other possible action.

Prioritization is the key to knowing what to say no to. Focus is a question of saying no to everything other than what is most important. You have to learn to say no to the things that matter the least in order to have the time to do what matters more.

Productivity requires that you orient your actions most directly towards your purpose. You will be most productive as you navigate the opportunities and obstacles in the landscape of your life as you would using a compass to head due north in the most efficient way given terrain features on a map.

Like other resources, time provides a measure of our priorities. How do you spend your time?

Peak productivity requires efficient use of your time for the highest impact. Perhaps the most common perceived barrier to more of what you want is time. All good things take time, but there are so many demands on our time that there never seems to be enough. There will always be more to do than you can do. There is always enough time to do what matters most, but with none to spare.

Intentional living will increase how much time you have. By pivoting your use of time to more productive ends, you will enjoy significant increases instant and long-term meaning in your life. It’s well worth the minor cost of paying attention to how much time you spend on your activities.

You are probably only aware of a fraction of the wealth of time, activity, energy, and emotion you presently waste each day because, apart from what you know you waste, there is so much you expend on something other than what is most important to you.

Most people consume the bulk of their attention on things that do not matter to them and do not generate progress on what does. Odds are that you waste hours per day, everyday, on things that do not matter at all to you. It’s quite likely you don’t realize how much time you are spending on things you would be embarrassed about. You might want to keep a log of your time spent over a few days, or at least check your phone activity record or your web browser history. As an experiment, write out how you spent your day yesterday, and identify the most important 80% of the impact of the day. You will find that those moments occupied only around 20% of your day. Just think how much extra time you would have if you replaced how you spent most of your day on tasks that produce greater meaning.

Most people consume the bulk of their attention worrying in ways that do not actually change their situation. So much time is wasted in worrying instead of acting that it is no exaggeration that adopting more effective ways of thinking, feeling, and acting could leave you with as much as two or more times the time and energy you presently feel limited to. Imagine if you could double the time and energy you have!

You can’t even scratch the surface of your true potential while you are burning countless hours on activities that do not contribute to advancing your purpose. Every minute you waste on meaningless activities will obviously reduce the amount of meaning you feel in your life.

The tools provided in this book will help you look at how you presently spend your time with new eyes. As you apply the lessons in this book, you are going to find that great sums of time are available to recover that are presently being used in ways that are far less efficient than they could be, or used on things that don’t matter nearly as much as they currently seem to. As unbelievable as it may sound, you may find yourself feeling as if you have found an entire extra day’s worth of time each and every day by applying the lessons in this book. Imagine what you could do with another day each and every day.

What is most desirable in itself is almost always limited to the short-term and almost always least important long-term. Consider, for example, how desirable it is to stay in a hot shower on a cold morning. How long will you remember the pleasure of spending an extra ten minutes in that shower? The whole purpose is for the other things you will complete in that day—things that contribute meaning that will last weeks, months, and even years.

What is most important is almost always least inherently desirable and most difficult. Its value must be promoted through identifying its connection with goals, values, and transcendent purpose in order to boost the motivation to complete it. Without this intentional promotion through linkage to what is more important but less obvious, you will default to short-term, pleasure-centric activities.

How whole-heartedly do you attack the things that matter most in the long-term? How boldly do you charge into what has the highest long-term actual value, and not just the most obvious short-term value? If you don’t feel like you are flowing when you are working on what you understand to be most important, you are suffering from a misalignment between your mind and your heart. Spending time and thought to analyze what you are doing and why you are doing it will help bring what you do and what you want into better alignment. Much more will be said about emotions in a later part of this book.

Like other resources, money provides a measure of our priorities. How do you spend your money? Do you spend money based on what is important to you, or do you spend money based on having it? On paper, make a quick sketch of a pie chart showing how you spend your money. If you need to, do the research to see how you spent your money over the last month and the last year. Credit card and bank statements are quick and easy resources to verify your spending.

Do your purchases show that you are looking ahead and planning for recurring and potential needs, building an increasing store of savings and investments, or does your spending tell a less intentional story?

Do you have a way to prioritize funds and protect the expenses that most closely serve your purpose? Tools might include a budget, automatic transfers to named accounts, automatic bill pay, and so on.

Most people spend reactively. When you fail to look ahead and anticipate costs, you will spend a lot more money than someone who does, even if you spend it on all the same needs. It’s very difficult to take advantage of discounts, sales, and multiple bids in an emergency. The savings available goes far beyond obvious things like getting multiple bids on a roof repair: most things, from cars to clothing to food to cosmetics can be purchased at a discount by taking advantage of opportunities like sales, clearance, or unexpected rare events.

When you spend intentionally, you don’t just adopt the spending habits of others. You spend according to what matters most to you. You think outside the box, evaluating atypical options that free up funds from what matters less to reallocate to what matters more. For example, you move if there are less expensive living situations that satisfy what is important to you. Consider the long list of considerations! Different geographical locations have tremendous differences in cost. If you aren’t in a less expensive area, is it because it provides something more important to you than the money you would save? If you live in a more expensive domicile than alternatives, is it because you intentionally decided that what it provided was worth it to you? What other options exist? When is the last time you looked? If you have a house and a mortgage, your insurance situation can easily save you thousands per year. When was the last time you shopped around to see if you can get a better deal on your homeowner’s insurance? Do you really need the coverage you have? Would a higher deductible or even reducing to the minimal coverage required by the mortgage make sense in your situation? If your home is paid off, would it make more sense to forgo insurance and simply save/invest the money you would otherwise burn on ever-increasing premiums with no return?

Think about your healthcare situation. How essential are the doctors visits you make? How essential are the prescription drugs you take? Are there alternatives that provide greater net benefit? What health coverage, if any, do you have? What alternatives exist? Is there an option that better fits your needs and costs less?

Think about recurring monthly services and fees. What monthly services do you pay for, and are they worthwhile? For example, consider cell phone costs. Most people are on cell phone plans with companies that sell the same service on the same network under a discounted brand. Newly released cell phones offer a much higher price than older but still newly manufactured cell phones, and plans are typically loaded with expensive options like insurance and streaming services that provide questionable value for most people. Do you really need additional lines for your children? Does that provide value beyond the cost in additional money and the considerable damage research has convincingly shown it causes to their well-being?

Think about your transportation situation. Do you have a very old car that costs more to maintain than a newer car would cost? Do you have a very new car that costs more than a slightly used car would cost? Do you know the cost per mile of your car over its lifetime, and did you pick it based on that, the sticker price, or something less important? Do you have more than one vehicle, and if so, have you calculated what it costs you to operate, maintain, and insure it, and is it worth it to you? Are you confident that what you are paying for insurance is the best deal you can get? When was the last time you got multiple quotes for car insurance?

Think about your charitable giving. Who do you give money to, and why? How much of the money goes to the cause you are attempting to support? What value does it provide? Are there better opportunities that would yield greater value?

Many more examples abound. Dissect your whole financial life and rebuild it according to what you value and why you value it.

Prerequisite situations will adopt the priority of what follows them. You will find that there are cases where you will need to transfer the priority of one thing to another related thing. For example, if you urgently need to take your car to the mechanic, but need to shower before going out, taking a shower takes upon itself a higher priority than it normally would.

Commonly, work with others generates many such prerequisite situations. If another person is waiting for your work in order to continue with something very important, your work will adopt the importance of the value it has to them.

Another source of value transmittal is in the value a thing enables. Consider the meaning a father finds in paying the mortgage because of what it enables for his family versus the importance he places on the house itself.

Finally, consider boosting your consideration of the priority of anything that provides long-term efficiencies, whether that be something that grows resources, increases resilience, or reduces friction. For example, if you need to organize your garage, maybe building a set of shelves is more important than it might seem, since the aggregate emotional friction of seeing the mess each time you pass by it is greater than the trouble to build the shelves. Always prioritize for long-term benefit.

Beliefs

Your beliefs are how you model reality. Reality consists of objective rules of cause and effect. A belief is an estimate of how some piece of reality works—an explicit but putative mapping between cause and effect. Each belief is a prediction of the outcomes that will result from certain actions.

Beliefs are the key to knowing how to obtain what you want in life. They are recipes for how to obtain specific outcomes. The more of reality you have mapped through beliefs, and the more accurate those beliefs are, the closer you will be to knowing how to obtain what you want most in life.

Beliefs are also crucial for determining what you want in life. The more you understand what is possible and what it costs, the more informed your appraisals of value will be. To the extent they are complete and correct, your beliefs can be used to prioritize potential action and bring anticipated joy forward to the present.

Every decision you make is actually an exchange. You are exchanging what you could be doing for what you choose to do instead. To the extent you choose and carry out those actions that most effectively lead to what you correctly believe is most important, you will maximize the joy you experience in life.

One way to view productivity is as the practice of acting so as to maximize what you believe to be of greatest value. In order to do this, you need to know what options exist and then prioritize what generates that which you believe to be of greatest value, and your beliefs are what reveal to you what those actions are.

In order to prioritize your actions, you have to understand their cost and their benefit. If you don’t know how much time, energy, and other resources an action will require, you can’t prioritize it against other potential actions. Beliefs are how you will correctly calculate the net benefit of each potential action, which is required in order to prioritize them and select the most effective alternative.

Correct and complete beliefs are essential for correctly perceiving and believing the long-term effects of a potential action. Impact is Pareto distributed: among any set of potential actions, a few will tend to result in outcomes better than the rest combined. Among any set of choices there tends to be at least one option dramatically better than the others. The most valuable choice among a set of possibilities will almost never seem to be the most valuable choice when evaluated in normal ways by a normal person. To the extent you can properly anticipate the importance of each option for potential action and you choose what has the greatest importance, you will accomplish orders of magnitude more than anyone who does not, without any need for any additional resources over what you presently have. If that doesn’t sound like an impossible magic trick, you have not yet grasped the positive effects such an outcome would have.

Joy can be categorized by the time in which it is experienced, relative to its source. Joy comes from the receipt of an outcome, on anticipation of the outcome, and on the path to the outcome. Each kind of joy has differences in how intense, enduring, and motivating it is. Joy that comes after you obtain an outcome is often what is sought by those who set and work toward goals. Goals are important motivators, but as many have correctly pointed out, exclusively focusing on completing them will lead to an uneven experience of motivation, where your drive for progress usually dips considerably as the work wears on, and especially once it is completed. While it is better to focus on the joy experienced due to the anticipation of an outcome, this will also end with the outcome, and can quickly vanish during the journey as you face obstacles that exceed what you expected in the path towards what you had hoped for. This raises the question: how do we experience joy that occurs during the path to the expected outcome?

Joy that occurs during the path to expected outcomes holds the prospect of equalizing the experience over time, maintaining the same level of value during the pursuit of a worthwhile outcome as you had when you first started, and holding onto it even after attaining it. This might seem like joy alchemy, but it’s completely possible if you have a strong enough link between the eventual goal and the daily effort needed to progress toward it. That link is precisely what your beliefs provide.

Your beliefs tie together the cause and effect in a way that your confidence in them can allow you to pull forward at least some of the joy you will feel as you complete your goals into the time during which you are working toward them.

Accurate beliefs will mitigate both main causes of diminished joy during the pursuit of hoped for outcomes. Normal excitement at the start of a path comes mostly because of unrealistically easy expectations, and the pleasure of accomplishments fades as the revealed cost grows relative to the expected benefit, but accurately described relationships of cause and effect provide a constant expectation before, during, and after attainment of outcomes.

The more confident you are in your beliefs, and the more consistently you live up to them, the more fully you will distribute your joy across the entire journey.

Reality is open to all and unbiased in the laws of cause and effect that comprise it. If you do not have what you want, it can only be because you have not found the path or not yet paid the price to obtain it.

If you do not know the path, you have not yet found the belief that describes the cause of what you seek. Don’t be quick to assume that you know the way to what you want. Some valuable things require a long list of complicated steps to obtain them. Realize that the more steps there are in a set of directions from one place to another, the less likely you are to find the way at random. The safest way to find the way to what you want is to find someone who already has it, and ask them. If you can’t find anyone who has obtained what you seek, its all the more reason to exercise humility in your confidence that you know what you’re doing.

If you have not yet walked the path to completion, you have not yet learned the value of the outcome of the path. Do not underestimate the importance of understanding the benefit of what you seek. How accurately your belief appraises the value of what you seek will determine what you are willing to do to get it; if you aren’t willing to do what it takes, you will not obtain what you seek. The better the outcome, the more it will cost and the less likely you are to encounter or obtain it without explicit planning and tenacious execution.

Beliefs can come from a variety of sources. They can be selfcomposed through observation, inherited from parents, adopted from others, or emerge from subliminal biases.

Most beliefs are adopted subconsciously. When you adopt a belief without consciously choosing it, it’s highly unlikely you’ll live it fully, because you won’t possess the reasons to believe that confidence requires. Without living it fully, you will neither obtain the missing confidence nor learn the limits of the belief, and you may well stagnate in the same questionable belief for the rest of your life.

Beliefs should not be adopted for frivolous reasons, but because they describe plausible paths to obtain what you desire. Intentionally search for the beliefs you need to obtain what you desire, and choose the options that are most believable.

Odds are that no matter what you want in life, you are not the first one to want it or try to get it. A great gift is provided to you by the examples of both those who have already found what you desire and those whose attempts have failed. You can have the same results of anyone whose actions you are willing to replicate under the same conditions. If you place yourself in the same environment and do what those who were successful have done, you will obtain what they have. And if you can’t find an example of one who has what you want, at least avoid repeating the approach of those who do not have what you want.

Your beliefs will help you write and update every section of your life plan to maximize your joy: they will help you specify needed qualities, list and rank the relevant values, suggest necessary goals to achieve, and enumerate required tasks.

Your beliefs also serve as a sort of interface between the why and what sections of your life plan through the links provided in the cause and effect mappings they describe.

Finally, your beliefs provide the mechanism through which the lessons you learn through living the contents of your life plan can be propagated up and down between successive sections of the plan.

In essence, beliefs help you figure out what you want, develop a plan to obtain it, and update your course as you integrate necessary changes.

Most good choices are particularly weighted toward long-term net benefit, and the more correctly you can perceive those effects and value them over the time horizon required, the more often you will make good choices and the better they will be.

Most people focus on short-term outcomes rather than long-term outcomes. Do the opposite. Begin paying close attention to long-term outcomes in your own life. Make the most of those around you whose past decisions are currently demonstrating their long-term consequences. Follow the examples of those who enjoy what you want to obtain, and eschew the examples of those who are suffering what you want to avoid.

As you weigh your choices, ignore the time horizon. Simply sum up all of the good and all of the bad. This will absolutely change your arithmetic. For example, consider how something that provides a little utility forever is better than anything whose benefit is time-limited, provided comparable cost.

Important decisions always seem to have long-term consequences for good or ill. Learn to see them and pay attention!

You can use your beliefs to obtain a better future. When you use your beliefs to extrapolate the present into the future, you can consider whether what you are headed for is what you want, as well as enumerate alternative options to obtain something better. This process is not terribly different than using what you see ahead to adjust the steering wheel while you drive. Think to yourself: “What will happen if I keep doing what I am doing in the long-term? Is that outcome what I want more than any alternative?” If you do not desire what you expect to happen, think to yourself: “What do I need to change in order to make my future closer to what I want than what I presently expect?”

Lean fully into what you predict will happen. No matter how correct and complete your beliefs are, they will do you no good unless you actually live them. As you live your beliefs, you will receive what they correctly predict while generating early warnings of their limitations.

You should frequently ask yourself if what you are doing is producing the effects you expected, in the same way an orienteer compares where they think they are on the map to the terrain they see around them. If there is a difference between what is happening and what you expected to happen, locate the error in your beliefs and fix it.

Having your beliefs written out will significantly increase your ability to compare your expectations to reality and know where to adjust. If you are aware of your beliefs, you’ll be able to perceive and translate any surprises, regrets, and unfulfilled desires you experience into the necessary changes you need to make.

Begin noticing deviations from or holes in your model, and fix them. If you are surprised by the results of certain actions by yourself or others, take note and fix your model to fit everything you’ve ever observed. If you don’t know how to fulfill what you desire, search for the beliefs that tell you.

When deviations from your beliefs arise that are too great to address with modifications, you should abandon the belief in question. It is dishonest to persist in a belief when the predicted outcomes do not occur. Humans have power to deceive themselves about what they believe and any evidence that controverts those beliefs, but having your beliefs written will at least make it more difficult to do so. Do not excuse yourself for holding to clearly false beliefs in the case where you don’t have anything else with which to replace those beliefs. It is better to be knowingly ignorant than it is to be knowingly dishonest. When you are knowingly ignorant, at least you will be looking for and willing to accept something better.

It seems overwhelming to think about modeling the vastness of reality and navigating your model, constantly updating it as you learn more. But if you think so, it’s only because you haven’t realized that you are already doing it, and have been since birth!

You are constantly making decisions based on predictions from your model—just not consciously. Most of the cause and effect pairings you follow in life are not conscious. You don’t think about them, and because you don’t think about them, you don’t search for or accept more accurate versions.

Your entire life is comprised of the habits you’ve learned through trial and error. If you get hungry, you will go eat because you predict that doing so will make your hunger go away. You will go to work tomorrow because you predict that doing so will result in a paycheck. Why do you expect these things? Because at some point you learned to associate the cause and effect pair.

Your urges, cravings, and so on are actually predictions. The problem is that many—if not most—of your predictions are wrong, or at least less accurate than they could be, because you have yet to develop or apply an explicit apparatus for measuring and improving them.

Learn to pay more attention to your habits and other subconscious actions. Write out what you do and why you do it. For each one, think about whether the expected effect actually occurs, and whether or not more effective causes exist for the desired effect.

You will find that in many cases, the quality of a belief is not just a question of right or wrong, but better and worse. Just as we have a multitude of options for action, we have a multitude of options for beliefs. And just as with actions, the best may yet be unknown to us. Always have a mind open enough to believe that something better might exist, and always have eyes open enough to be looking for the same. When you find a better belief than what you hold, realize that you may struggle to adopt a belief emotionally even when it is obviously rationally superior.

Our beliefs can differ in coverage and accuracy. An accurate set of beliefs is like a treasure map toward joy. The existence of a map does not indicate its accuracy or completeness. Like a treasure map, our beliefs can fail to describe the full picture, sometimes with disastrous consequences. When our beliefs fail to include the description of parts of reality, this is an indication that they are incomplete. Similarly, some of our beliefs can be slightly mistaken or even completely wrong. When our beliefs predict something different than what occurs, this is an indication that our beliefs are incorrect.

Since reality is composed of objective rules of cause and effect that are the same for everyone, the perfectly complete and correct set of beliefs would be the same for everyone. However, there are obviously significant differences in how closely any individual’s beliefs approach that ideal.

Even though the ideal map may be the same for all people, the ideal path differs according to each individual’s unique present place on or off of it. Those further ahead will have different ideal beliefs than those further behind, and those a little off to one side will have different ideal beliefs than those off to the other side.

We each have a different compass that indicates the way to traverse towards maximal individual joy because we all have different values. Your path to the greatest joy will be subject to what you want out of life, not just in terms of the specific experiences in which you find joy —and how much joy you find in them—but in the price you are willing to pay to obtain them. Too often, people fail to obtain what they say they want not because they don’t know how to obtain it, but because they aren’t willing to pay the price required. If you don’t want to pay what something costs, you don’t really want it! You’ll be much happier choosing the next best thing whose price you are willing to pay.

Confidence in the accuracy or importance of beliefs can be based on strong reason, flimsy fancy, and everything in between. Contemporary people seem to have no particular connection between the strength of their beliefs and sufficient evidence for them. It is not difficult to find a person who has far too little confidence in beliefs for which they have strong evidence nor a person who has far too much confidence in beliefs for which they have insufficient evidence. In fact, you may be an example of both.

If you have too much confidence in your beliefs, you will harm your ability to notice and accept better beliefs. It is dishonest to have strong feelings about weak beliefs. If your observations or your ability to interpret them are highly limited on a given topic, it is dishonest for you to hold strong beliefs about that topic.

Strength of belief, when accurate, comes through living what you believe and finding that the outcomes you expect follow from the causes you predicted they would, in exactly the way you expected. To the extent this occurs across more cases, you should increase the strength of your belief.

In times when it is easy for you to live according to your beliefs, the degree of confidence that you have in them is less important. It is when opposition arises that your confidence matters the most.

Enduring confidence comes through the accumulation of positive outcomes from conscientiously chosen beliefs lived fully. The more evidence you have that your actions align with what you value the most, the more confidence you will have.

You cannot grow in confidence without actually living your beliefs, because you will not gain any evidence for them without putting them into practice. You come to greater confidence through more intentionally identifying and choosing your beliefs, through living them more fully, and through accumulating experiential evidence—evidence both that they are correct in their mapping of cause and effect, and that they yield better outcomes than any alternative beliefs or actions.

Many people are smart enough to know that while living your beliefs can increase your confidence in them, it can also produce counter evidence against them. This is one reason why so few people actually live their beliefs, even if they loudly profess them and tenaciously fight to defend them. It is easy to avoid living what you claim to believe out of fear of the possibility of contradicting them, but you need to understand that there is no benefit to holding potentially false beliefs that is not dwarfed by recognizing them as false. It is better to know you know nothing than it is to think that what you believe is true when you are capable of knowing it is not.

The common difference between what most really believe and what they say they believe stems from a lack of honesty. The reason so many struggle to align the two is because they try to exercise honesty unevenly, and this works about as well as trying to be healthier only when you get sick. You grow more honest through being honest all the time, just as you grow healthier by being healthy all the time.

Be honest about what you desire and how much you desire it. Do not ignore how you feel. Do not ignore what you desire. You need to recognize and acknowledge desires in order to find a sufficient source for what you seek and to have a willingness to pay the adequate price to obtain it.

You have to deeply care about your life in order to be willing to invest what it takes to make it worth living. If you ignore your desires, you’ll never be willing to do what it takes to fulfill them. Pretending to want what you don’t actually want will result in failing to obtain anything better than what you already have. You won’t try very hard to obtain what you don’t really want, and few things worth having are easy to get.

Instead of suppressing your feelings and desires, direct them toward what has the greatest worth using your capacity for reason. Better choices come from better thinking, and elevating your mind from the default animalistic emotional baseline into intentional thinking requires explicit effort. It can be done, but it takes practice and dedication. The results are well worth it.

Our beliefs are our estimate of how to obtain what we consider has value. Value is how much you desire something. Value and beliefs are interactive in important ways.

Everything has objective value, but we can only interact with it according to our subjective perception of its value. Our subjective estimate of a thing’s cost and benefit comes from our beliefs. This is crucial to understand: our desire for something comes solely from our beliefs about it, and the value we can find in anything will be limited to the value with which our beliefs appraise it.

Many have struggled with attempts to change their desires, whether in an attempt to more fully desire what they consider good or to diminish their desire for what they consider to be bad. Those who have not succeeded in their aims have failed because they did not understand that their desire for something comes solely from their beliefs about it.

You will not encounter much success in attempts to directly modify your desires. The lever of control for your desires is not on the desire itself, but on the practical beliefs that determine it. You change your desires by changing your beliefs.

To achieve desire-shifting changes in belief, you’ll have to find convincing reasons to want something else more than what you presently want instead. With the wrong beliefs, even the very best actions will require a great deal of additional willpower or motivation. With the right beliefs, many good actions become almost automatic.

Your desires comprise a relative ranking of effects from the catalogue of your beliefs.

At all times, you have the choice to decide whether to.

Heed or reject the thoughts, actions, and feelings suggested by your beliefs. Recognize evidence suggesting your beliefs, or your prioritization thereof, are lacking. Search for beliefs that are better supported or which bring about better outcomes. Treat the causes according to how you prioritize the anticipated effects.

It is your decisions with respect to your beliefs—and always your decisions only—that dictate what you do, what you think, and how you feel.

While what you do, think, and feel is always your choice, that choice can be made much easier or much harder through you obtaining more information about cause and effect—through expanding and increasing the accuracy of your beliefs.

Goals

Goals are measurable, specific outcomes that serve as markers of your progress in your purpose. Goals provide daily direction, a measure of progress, and a source of motivation.

Your purpose will absorb any effort you invest into it, so decomposing your purpose into goals is essential to providing you with a sense of progress in your purpose. Goals provide a measurable surrogate for progress in your purpose, which itself can never be finished. As you accomplish goals, you provide evidence that your purpose, qualities, and values are being lived up to.

Goals transform what you want from a short-lived and ill-defined wish to a prioritized plan whose daily execution assures that you will accomplish exactly what you set out to do. Goals provide greater detail than higher layers of the life plan, moving further into the realm of daily action. Goals answer the question of what you will accomplish with the tasks you spend your time on, while tasks answer the question of how you will accomplish your goals.

Goals are an essential source of motivation beyond tasks alone, providing reasons to increase intensity, persevere against opposition, and endure delays in order to achieve them.

To write a goal, describe the conditions under which the goal will be considered achieved. A goal consists of measurable and specific criteria that describe the finished state of the goal.

A good goal answers the question: “What is the best outcome worth accomplishing?” In the life plan, each of your goals should help convincingly persuade you that you are advancing your purpose to the greatest possible degree.

Often, goals will include constraints that set boundaries on how the goal will be accomplished. Perhaps the most common constraint is a deadline, which some people find helps them accomplish more in less time. Other constraints could indicate what resources you must or can’t use in accomplishing the goal.

Goals are generated through intentional reflection. There are many specific techniques that can help you brainstorm goals.

You can enumerate goals by asking: “What measurable accomplishments would indicate that I am making the best possible progress in my purpose?”

You can generate goals by asking what outcomes you desire. For each, ask why you want it. Through identifying why you want what you want, you can revisit what you want asking whether it is actually the best fulfillment of why you want it. If something else would better meet your motive, make that your what instead.

Specifying time frames might help spur ideas for goals. How do you want the world to be a better place as a result of what you do today? This week? This month? This year? You can envision the big picture by considering the whole scope of your life, describing it as if you were looking into a crystal ball and writing your own ideal eulogy. For each time frame, list goals you would need to accomplish in order to live up to the person you describe.

A similar technique involves enumerating goals across separate domains of life, such as relationships, work, and spirituality. For each, describe the ideal outcomes, and then formulate goals around your descriptions.

It is difficult to underestimate how important our choice of goals is in maximizing how much joy we experience. Joy comes from enduringly experiencing what we value. Your goals will orient your daily action toward maximal long-term value as you work on them and mark your progress along the way as they are accomplished.

Defining what you want is vital for optimizing your actions. You can’t optimize without first defining what you want. It's all the more important to specify what you want in the ever-increasing complexity of the modern world. The more complex the circumstance, the less likely you are to get the best outcome without defining your intent, and the greater the difference will be between the best outcome and other outcomes.

What you want is not just a question of arbitrary feeling. It ought to be based on what you value, and by how much, both of which ought to be rationally determined and backed by solid reasons. If you really want to understand what you want and how much you want it, you’ll need to know why you want it.

An optimal goal will maximize your present joy given your circumstances and ensure your placement on the path to even greater joy. A suboptimal goal will vastly decrease the amount of joy you experience presently and, in the worst case, could also impose a hard limit on the joy you can obtain later.

From time to time, you should revisit your goals. We should expect the goals we set to change over time as we learn more about ourselves, others, and life. As you learn more about yourself and reality, the prioritization and content of your goals will shift. As you gain more time and experience, you need to ensure that what is written in your life plan completely reflects your present thoughts, feelings, and actions.

When the time comes to review your goals, ask.

Do your goals most effectively orient your daily tasks to the greatest possible progress in your purpose? Are your goals the most accurate way of measuring how well you are living the character qualities you desire? Do your goals maximize the value you experience in life? The greatest joy comes from setting your goals based on what has the greatest value. As we gain more experience and knowledge in life, what we value changes, and so should our goals. Do the relationships between your goals and the other portions of your life plan align with the beliefs you have written there? Have you found and are you following the best way to accomplish your stated goals with the least resources to ensure maximum resources for lesser goals? Do your goals have a clear ordering by importance, and do you execute tasks according to that prioritization?

You will get the most out of your goals as you continuously update your goals to reflect changes in your understanding and circumstances over time.

Your goals are essential to connecting your transcendent purpose with the daily tasks you will accomplish each day to advance in your purpose.

Without a life plan, your daily tasks will tend to be dissociated from what matters the most and will fail to provide much meaning to you. Having and living according to a life plan will help you perceive measurable progress in everything that matters most to you each day.

In order to fully transmit the meaning of your purpose down to the tasks you will accomplish each day, your goals must be completely aligned with the rest of your life plan. Your goals should demonstrate who you are, as described in your qualities section. They should also be prioritized based on your values.

Goals are an essential way to enjoy the journey towards your purpose. When fully aligned with your purpose, your goals give you a way to advance the joy you foresee in their eventual accomplishment down to the tasks that might otherwise be boring or meaningless. Formulating what it takes to accomplish your desires links the joy you associate with the outcome to the otherwise boring, difficult, or meaningless tasks you need to do to accomplish your goal.

Good goals will justify tasks that are more challenging than you would otherwise undertake. Goals give you sufficient reason to do more and better than you otherwise would. Without them, you will lack the motivation and meaning to act up to the fullness of your potential. With them, you have an exact measure to which you must stretch in order to match the meaning you are after.

Many people practice goal setting and accomplishment, and know well what downsides exist in the typical approach. Goals are great for motivating the start of a new endeavor, but their power begins to wane as you progress. You can experience sudden reductions in goal-based motivation when you encounter unexpected obstacles and even when you achieve what you set out to do. Furthermore, fixation on a goal can make it more difficult to notice and adapt to new information that would modify or even cause you to replace your goal when needful.

A purpose focus mitigates the downsides of goal setting. When you are purpose-focused, you more evenly maintain a sense of progress and motivation throughout the path to achieving a goal and, once you get there, your connection to the greater purpose will impart the momentum needed to roll right into the very next goal. When your goals are purpose-based, you will not hesitate to revise or replace a goal when it becomes clear that it no longer the best way to orient yourself to your purpose, because the changes better attain what is most important to you.

A focus on purpose is essential to maintaining motivation and meaning during the journey. It is how you achieve the often discussed but rarely explained appreciation of the process, not just the outcome. The problem with traditional goal setting is that these goals stand alone instead of being connected to an overarching purpose.

In order to extract all the value of purposed-based goals, you need to align yourself with the desired outcome by actually enumerating and fully engaging in tasks that you are convinced will lead to the outcome you seek. While you engage only partially with these tasks, or when they do not convince you of eventual victory, you will not experience the interim feelings of fulfillment that, in aggregate, outweigh the payoff at the goal’s accomplishment. Partial engagement feeds together with less-than-perfect confidence in your eventual victory, fueling a negative feedback loop leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.

The reward along the way, when properly engaged, will dwarf the reward at the end of the path. Goals will get you there, as long as they are aligned toward and prioritized according to impact on your purpose.

Goals should be audacious. Audacious means bold, daring, and without respect to the expectations of others. Audacious goals attempt more and better than what already is, and they do so through discovering and weighing the opportunity and danger of potential options.

An audacious goal will not be what everyone else does. Audacious goals recognize that exemplary outcomes cannot come through normal actions. An audacious goal will be an option that other people either do not consider possible or do not consider worthwhile. But audacious goals are not reckless.

Audacious goals are the right kind of risk. Risk is the composite of opportunity and danger. While plenty of danger exists in situations with insufficient opportunity to warrant the risk, no opportunity exists independent of danger. Audacious goals are built around situations where the expected opportunity exceeds the expected danger in ways others do not believe, either because they lack the information you possess, they do not employ the danger mitigations you do, or because they undervalue the opportunity you see.

As we live life day by day, it is fairly common to face existential circumstances. Unexpected tragedy occurs often enough that every person has a catalogue of terrible things they’ve either experienced or witnessed. While you necessarily encounter the existential in your daily life, you don’t contend with it there. The only weapon that can contend with the transcendent difficulty of life is your transcendent purpose in life. The life plan connects your transcendent purpose to your daily life, and your goals are the vital link in the chain that empower you to truly confide in what you claim.

The audacity of your goals is how you will prove to yourself that you actually believe what you claim to believe. Every audacious goal you set and accomplish will add to the body of evidence of the worthiness of your purpose that you will lean on each time you are confronted with a revelation of darkness in life that exceeds what you could otherwise face.

Purpose gives you reasons to make your goals audacious and gives you the power to accomplish them. Goals aligned with and emitted from a transcendent purpose provide motivation that exceeds what a standalone goal can provide in the same way that the sun shines beyond the dark disk of the moon during a full lunar eclipse. Your purpose will crown your aligned goals with motivation that can make all the difference during hard times, and may be the very thing that crowns.

you with victory against challenges that would otherwise overcome you. Life contains costs that nothing less than a transcendent purpose can justify. To make life worth living, audacious goals must be attempted, but attempting to accomplish audacious goals without the power of a transcendent purpose will all but guarantee failure, as the price of existence exceeds what goals alone can justify.

Many people set goals, but few experience the power of goals emitted from a transcendent purpose. Anyone can create a goal with any level of commitment to achieving it. Weak commitment will always garner weak results. A goal emitted from a transcendent purpose inherits the supreme priority of that purpose. It carries power that no lesser goal can.

While many people have suggested the importance of setting goals, few explain how to synthesize them. How do multiple goals work together? Can they? How does a goal fit into the rest of what you need to do in life, since you can’t just exclusively work on the most important goal until complete? How do you switch between many different goals during any given day, when you can only do one thing at a time?

The answers to these questions are not terribly complicated, but they require the universality your life’s purpose alone provides. Other discussions on goals have to make a separation between different segments of life, such as work and home, because they lack a unifying context over which everything in your life can be ranked. The maximization of joy gives us that missing piece.

Purpose provides a practical way to handle having more than one goal at a time. When you pursue all aspects of your life for the same purpose, it becomes practical and even easy to rank goals applying to home, work, and every other facet of your life. Your purpose gives you a way to universally compare and connect each of these parts of your life, which makes it possible to mix and match different tasks from different goals based on the overarching progress in your purpose. A transcendent purpose provides the necessary power to prioritize all subordinate pieces of the model in a terrifically flexible manner.

An important part of the life plan is making space for the most important things. Living a life plan will provide you with more resources in at least two ways: first, by freeing up the resources occupied by low impact actions and emotions, and second, by replacing them with high impact actions and emotions, which share the quality of increasing your resources.

Writing and prioritizing your goals will help you make space for the most important things, ensuring adequate resources are allocated for the greatest possible outcomes.

If resources were infinite, there would be no need to prioritize anything, but because resources are finite, all goals compete with each other to a certain degree. As a consequence, it’s important to understand the relative priority difference between goals.

The higher the impact of the goals you set, the more likely they are to require significant resources. Audacious goals require greater sacrifice over a longer time than lesser goals. Audacious goals require resources; trying to accomplish them in an already full life is like fitting large objects into an already-full box—it just won’t work.

Goals can be ranked by importance, according to their impact on your purpose. As you consider the resources required for your highest priority goals, you may be surprised at just how few goals you can pursue at once. Though a clear purpose and other aspects of this framework provide you with a mechanism to pursue multiple goals, you will find that your resources will limit progress to the small set of goals most important to you, and cascade towards other goals only after these are completed without being replaced by something more important.

Goals can relate to each other in helpful and unhelpful ways. Some goals will independently contribute to your purpose. Other goals will boost each other, and some goals will diminish one another.

In some cases, one goal will so thoroughly disrupt another that it will make its accomplishment impossible. Any goals that are mutually exclusive to more important goals should be abandoned. A goal could be a wonderful idea in isolation, but still shouldn’t be pursued if a more important goal exists.

Higher impact goals should be prioritized above lower impact goals. Furthermore, the limitation of resources makes it so that goals that boost resources as a result of accomplishing them tend to have a higher priority than goals that do not.

When we speak of benefit, we need to be specific about the units of the value we are using. It is easy to enumerate benefit in an infinite array of things we find beneficial, but this makes it unnecessarily difficult to compare between alternatives. How do you compare the benefit of a delicious plate of food, an enjoyable vacation, and a needed afternoon nap? The key lies in thinking about all benefit in terms of long-term benefit. Fundamentally, all benefit is either joy or something expected to lead to it, and we value it in accordance with how much joy we expect to receive through it.

Most often, audacious goals are not pursued by others simply because most people have a very low tolerance for danger, no matter how great the opportunity. You can very simply calculate whether a risk is worth taking by estimating its expected value.

If something has a negative expected value, you shouldn’t do it.

Goals should be prioritized according to net benefit. You should do what has the highest expected value among the set of options available to you.

As long as you define your self-worth in terms of what others think and do, you will fail to achieve the self-satisfaction that comes from doing your best, and you will be imprisoned by the action or inaction of others.

Other people have different standards than you. Living up to their ideals will not make you feel nearly as good as living up to your own.

because you will feel bad if you neglect your own higher standards for those of others, and you’ll feel guilty and depressed if you fail to measure up to higher standards from others that you never bought into and subsequently never reached.

Don’t define your self-worth based on what others think or do. Define it by what you know and what you do. That way, the action or inaction of others and what they think about what you do or don’t do will matter as little as it should.

The only measuring stick that matters is whether you do your best or not. Are you working as hard as you can, as long as you can, and as smart as you can? Are you constantly holding yourself to the standard of being the best person you can be? Are you living up to your standards in what you do, in what you think about, in what you desire, and how you treat others?

Goals and problems are actually different lenses on the same thing, though both words are used ambiguously. A goal is usually a desired outcome. A problem is every aspect of a start state that precludes the desired outcome.

Problems must be solved in order for goals to be achieved. In some related literature, some authors refer to “projects” as a related concept to goals and tasks. In the life plan, there is no real need for projects as a separate idea. A project is the implementation of the solution to a problem, or the tasks you will perform to achieve all causes required to obtain the effect described by the goal.

All goals require you to recognize the start state, even if you don’t think of it formally as a problem, because you can’t enumerate the steps to accomplish a goal without knowing your start state. Recall that beliefs are reputed mappings of cause and effect. Your beliefs will provide you the connection between your goals and your tasks by suggesting what needs to be done to obtain the outcomes you seek. Your goal describes the effect you seek, and the tasks you will generate are the causes in that particular belief that you have not yet fulfilled. In order to know the causes you have not yet fulfilled, you need to know the ones you have.

Sometimes, you might not already have a belief that provides the outcome you seek through your goal. In this case, the first and most important task in your goal will be to research whether anyone else has been successful in finding what you seek, and to investigate how they obtained it. If you can’t find anyone who has, you’ll have to design your own experiments to try to find the way to what you seek. In almost every case, you can readily follow the example of someone who has successfully solved the problem you face. Devising a novel solution will likely be many more times more difficult and less likely to be successful compared to finding and following the example of someone who already figured it out. To save time, research and exclude every unsuccessful attempt made by others to obtain what you seek.

You can be confident in your efficacy in solving problems when you are engaged in intentional improvement, you recognize problems early, your situation is obviously improving over time, difficult things get easier, and impossible things become possible.

Goals are not just for finding what you want and do not have, but also of identifying and solving problems, ideally before they become significant.

As you advance in your purpose, you will notice problems that threaten to reverse prior attainments. There is a difference between advancing your purpose and maintaining the purpose advancements you’ve already achieved. To make this distinction clearer, consider the analogy of a general tasked with conquering a country. Taking new areas is different than shoring up those already held, and yet without the latter, the former is fleeting.

Do not ignore the problems you perceive. If you ignore your problems, you’ll never be willing to do what it takes to find and implement a working solution. You need to recognize and acknowledge unanswered needs in order to motivate the necessary search for the solution to problems and to have the willingness to pay the adequate price to solve it.

As we ignore problems, we tend to lose awareness of the scope of negative effects they cause in our lives. Often, our perception of unsolved problems is a hazy middle ground between something that fully occupies our attention and something we are not particularly thinking about. Don’t fool yourself into minimizing the negative drain this causes on your mental and emotional capability and the problems this causes on what you can accomplish.

Each ignored problem is like a oil leak in your car’s engine: If you leave them in your life they will steal vital bandwidth away from advancing your purpose and can cause catastrophic and permanent damage if left long enough.

Each unsolved problem can cause increased friction as we try to progress in life. Reduce the friction in your life by paying attention to and solving problems. If something bothers you, fix it with a priority matching how much it bothers you. As you resolve these seemingly small issues in your life you will begin to focus more and more of your energy on progressing towards your priority.

People tend to live life as a chain of reactions to problems as they manifest. Not surprisingly, this exhausting game of whack-a-mole seems to never reach the point where a person feels like they are winning; resources usually give out before the problems stop, and one continues falling further and further behind.

It is possible to get out ahead of the problems. The life plan framework gives you a way to more efficiently handle the most urgent present problems, providing extra space and a mechanism for identifying and solving future problems—most of the time, before they even occur.

While the typical way of living life compounds stress as delay and poor decisions pile upon one another, your life plan creates and sustains a feedback loop that feeds you peace and contentment about your life. Proactivity yields cascading and compounding positive consequences, including more resources, greater peace, less stress, and greater confidence.

You may not think you are capable of anything that could carry the depth of meaning described here as necessary for your life’s purpose. Sometimes, what makes a person exceptional is not their capacity to do what no one else can, but their willingness to do what no one else will.

If you ever find yourself contending against self-doubt, just open your eyes and take a look around. Note how difficult it is to find people willing to be consistently good, consistently reliable, or consistently helpful. There are many willing to do what is easy, but far fewer willing to do what is difficult.

Though differences exist in capacity, there are far more critical things left undone due to unwillingness than there are those left undone due to lack of capacity. The modern world sorely needs engaged fathers and mothers, reliable friends, and helpful mentors—none of which requires any special talent, but all of which require uncommon willingness. Competent and trustworthy workers are hard to find in any field. And the list goes on and on.

You can impart a tremendous difference in this world without any special capability at all just by being the only person willing to do what everyone could and should. All you need is an uncommon heart, and that’s fully your choice—no special ingredients required.

Nearly everyone has a unique combination of skills that make them the best at something under some particular circumstances, and if they don’t, they probably could. Very few people choose paths in life that best leverage their capabilities to the greatest impact.

Focusing on only what you can do is highly likely to generate greater meaning for you in life than other paths could.

Tasks

A task is a specific action you will take to advance your purpose. The resolution of a task generally begins at a higher level (for example, “clean my room”) and subdivides into finer details as you plan and work (for example, “make my bed”).

Tasks are how you implement your life plan through what you do each day. Your daily tasks advance your purpose by demonstrating who you are (qualities) in accordance with your priorities (values) to accomplish your goals, according to your beliefs.

While your life plan describes how you would like to be, you won’t complete the decision of becoming that person until and unless you actually do what is described. The tasks you accomplish will uniquely determine how fully you live up to your purpose, qualities, values, and beliefs.

Everything you ever accomplish will happen through what you choose to do each day. No matter how grand the vision you have for your life, it will happen or not based only on what you do each and every day. The life plan gives you a way of discovering what tasks you can do every day that best produce progress in what matters most to you.

The whole purpose of a life plan is to choose, prioritize, and motivate the specific tasks you do each day. Daily tasks are the unique window through which you implement everything you have described in your life plan.

Your life plan is the bridge between your transcendent purpose and your daily activities. Your plan is an engineered flow from the greatest meaning in your life down to each moment in your life.

Your life plan spans the largest macro view down to the most minor daily detail. The act of making a plan brings your excitement for major accomplishments down into the daily tasks required to achieve them.

As such, while the life plan is designed and modified in the macro view, its power is transferred into your life in the micro view. The tool through which every part of your life plan transfers to your actual execution is your to do list.

The plan provides the reason to believe that your daily tasks will best orient you toward the greatest joy. It is what allows you to convincingly claim that the way you will achieve your purpose each day is by fully focusing everything on the task list for that day. In this way, you harness all the power of your purpose—no matter how grandiose, into your daily tasks—no matter how mundane they may be.

A tremendous benefit of obtaining and retaining a task-based focus is that you experience a greater quantity and frequency of satisfaction and progress than you would by focusing on a goal alone. Tasks provide evidence of incremental progress on your goals, which imparts happiness and momentum.

As you execute the tasks you’ve decomposed from each goal, you bring the satisfaction of accomplishing that goal down to the accomplishment of each task, and the satisfaction of progress on that goal down to progress on each task. Beyond making the journey much more enjoyable, you will find yourself much more motivated to make progress—no matter how mundane the task at hand, while locking in joy whether the goal is actually achieved or not.

Many goals depend on the choices of others. A task-based focus will grant you the greatest possible independence from the actions or inactions of others, as well as unanticipated changes. If you truly believe you’ve identified the list of tasks that describe all you can do to achieve the goal, you can claim a great deal of the satisfaction you would have if you achieved it independent of the factors you cannot control.

When you enumerate tasks, the success of the goal ceases to be a question of whether you achieve it directly—which may become impossible due to the choices of others—but whether you did all you needed to do to contribute your part to its success. You will be surprised to find how much of the satisfaction of completing a goal can be enjoyed when you do your part, even if the goal itself isn’t achieved.

You don’t find peace about your to do list through finishing it, but by being fully engaged in the highest priority items from it. When you are consuming your resources on the highest priorities, everything else ceases to matter until or unless priorities change or new resources emerge.

Goals can and should be used to generate the specific tasks that will accomplish them. Goals without accompanying tasks to accomplish them will provide drastically reduced benefits compared to a complete plan.

Goals are not wishes. The presence or absence of a plausible plan to accomplish your goals will determine how wholeheartedly you pursue each task required to achieve them.

Planning reduces anxiety by providing evidence that you have a plausible solution to the problems you face. Overthinking about a problem is one source of anxiety. Making a plan for what you will do while fully processing all important factors alleviates this kind of anxiety. Once something is planned, there is no need to revisit it unless you have new information.

Vacuous hope is a senseless fantasy. True hope requires a plausible plan consisting of concrete steps and sufficient reasons to believe they will work.

Many people refuse to take any action whatsoever to approach what they claim to want because they know they are unwilling to do what is required to get it, preferring vacuous hope in the impossible to uncertainty in what is attemptable. Vacuous wishes can never provide the confidence of plausible hope.

Once goals are set, they are used to define specific tasks. Goals serve as the source and outcome of the tasks you will accomplish. Tasks are your best guess as to how to achieve your goals. They are well-defined actions that you could put on a daily to do list.

Great accomplishments always require exceptional effort over time. You must learn how to write the story that convincingly leads from where you are to where you want to go. Rare indeed is the person who not only has a goal for the future, but a plausible plan for how to get there. It is much easier to have a goal for the future than it is to develop and commit to a plausible plan to get there.

Every goal, no matter how audacious, can be decomposed into tasks that describe what to do in a given moment. Just as your goals decompose your purpose into quantifiable achievements, your tasks decompose your goals into manageably specific actions. Audacious goals will typically require more than one task to accomplish. Some goals will require many tasks to accomplish.

In order to accomplish audacious goals, you must learn how to deconstruct them into discrete actions in specific times and places. The process is incomplete until it yields the specific list of what you’ll be doing today. To the degree that you can’t readily recite what you are doing today and don’t sincerely believe it to be what will give you the greatest long-term joy, you will miss out on the endurance, power, focus, and satisfaction you would otherwise have.

Many people set goals without specifically enumerating tasks. Goals without tasks lack the power of goals with tasks. Decomposing a goal into tasks is like decomposing a war into a series of battles. Wars are fought one battle at a time. Imagine a general passing detailed orders down to a colonel, only for the colonel to leave his captains to figure out the rest for themselves. Deconstructing goals into tasks brings down all the benefits of goals into the decisions of each moment rather than leaving them for themselves. How ridiculous would it be to run miles of electric cable only to stop at your property boundary and hope your circuits will somehow connect on their own?

Your set of tasks for each goal should persuasively describe what would achieve the goal as set. Backwards planning is a powerful tool to assist you in enumerating the necessary tasks to accomplish each of your goals. Backwards planning starts with the desired outcome, then tracks through each precondition required to achieve it. For example, if you want a boiled egg, you need to boil an egg for 15 minutes, which requires you to get a pot and water and an egg, and also requires a source of heat. If you lack one or more of these, you’ll have to build a process to obtain them before you can even begin making a boiled egg.

If it’s difficult to believe that the tasks you have enumerated would convincingly accomplish the goal, you need to add or reformulate tasks until it does. You are finished enumerating tasks for your goals when you have a set of tasks that you are fully convinced will accomplish the goal you have set.

Often, you won’t know enough to create a list that you are confident will complete the goal. Sometimes this is because you need information that the completion of initial tasks will provide in order to list subsequent tasks. In this case, break apart your goal to separate the initial subtasks from what comes later. Sometimes, you won’t have enough information to know the steps to complete a goal, in which case your next task will consist of what you can do to find out more. As you live what you know, you’ll learn more of what you don’t know, and you’ll be able to return to your life plan and add missing details. Remember, this is a malleable document. Part of its power is the feedback loop where you will make changes as you live your plan and learn more about what you want and how to get it.

If you have more than one goal, it is only possible to create a prioritized list of how these goals interact through enumerating and ranking the tasks required to achieve them.

The priority of the goal to which a task pertains establishes the default priority of the task. Additional factors will fine tune the priority, such as prerequisites, convenience, unexpected opportunities, and boosting tasks that pertain to more than one goal.

One help in prioritizing the tasks of a goal is to frame it as a problem by asking: “What is the greatest barrier to accomplishing this goal?” It is usually easier to see what impedes progress than what accelerates it. Whatever detracts most from your goal might be a good candidate for what to address first.

Happiness is not a mystery, even if we treat it as one. It’s long been known that happiness comes through perceived progress on a worthwhile goal, but very few people act in concert with this understanding.

The secret to unlocking greater happiness is to realize you can’t choose happiness directly—you choose it by choosing what causes it. You can tell yourself to be happy all you want, but that’s like telling yourself not to be hungry when you haven't eaten.

In order to be happy, you need to want something and you need to live according to a plausible plan for obtaining it.

Feed your joy through making a life plan and living out the tasks you determine will lead you toward accomplishing your audacious goals. When you are completing tasks that consist of what is rationally required to achieve a goal, you will experience a flow of confidence in eventual completion of the goal and a preview of the contentment you will feel when you accomplish the goal.

How much do you enjoy the tasks you face each day? If you find a significant difference in how you feel about the things you want to do and things you have to do, ask yourself the following.

Are you honest about what you want and why you want it? Have you set your goals based on the qualities you have listed in your life plan? Are you doing the most important things? Do you organize each day, and each period of each day, according to the priorities you have set in the values section of your life plan? Are you doing the right things? Do the goals you have set circumscribe the things you have to do each day? If not, how can you change your goals to include everything you need to do? How can you change your tasks to remove what does not contribute to your goals?

As long as your daily actions are misaligned with the rest of your life plan, you won’t experience the full benefits of your transcendent purpose in your daily life. The daily barriers to excellence will always outweigh the daily motivators for overcoming them when the daily tasks are taken independent of your purpose.

When you realize you are lacking motivation in any moment on any day, you can and should be able to ask: “Why am I doing this?” If you have earnestly followed the life plan framework, your sincere answer will always be: “Because this will lead me to the greatest joy.”

Because a life plan provides a mapping between daily tasks and your transcendent purpose, you will find yourself with overwhelmingly sufficient reasons to not only accomplish much more each day, but with joy and satisfaction in what would previously be a chore. You will do more and better than you thought you could and sacrifice what you thought you wanted because of what you want even more. You will also discover that you have previously unrecognized opportunities daily to engage with particularly difficult tasks that were simply beyond your ability to cope with under the prior paradigm.

The hierarchical nature of the life plan orders and incentivizes the unglamorous activities that are completely necessary to achieve what you say you want the most. Without it, you have no idea just how many of the things you feel are important and enjoyable detract from—and even prevent—what you really want the most. With it, you will routinely set aside what your former self would have avidly pursued in order to do what your former self would have found too boring, tedious, or unimportant because you will recognize what the former prevents and the latter enables.

When you realize the connection between your daily toil— whatever it may be—and your purpose, you will find power and motivation in what would otherwise be perceived as distractions from what you really want. You have to see the things you need to do as essential to what you want to do. The life plan will help you connect these, and with the connection comes a flow of power and purpose.

Executing Your Day’s Tasks

Once you’ve prepared your day’s to do list, put it prominently in front of you while working. If you are mobile, keep it in your pocket. This is easy if your list is on your phone, but there is special benefit to copying your day’s list onto a small piece of paper. The physical boundary between today’s tasks and everything else in your life is surprisingly effective to help you focus and reduce any unnecessary stress. If you are desk-bound, make it one of the few things that sit on your desk. As you complete each task, remove it from the list.

The life plan maximizes long-term joy by helping you generate what you should do next and why you should do it. Many of the benefits of a life plan require that your actions completely reflect what is written.

What if someone you knew well saw your life plan? How well would it match the person they know? What if someone were following you all the time comparing you to the paper? Would you want your kids to live the same contract? Would you want them to see yours?

Discipline yourself so that your actions only come from your to do list. Discipline does not describe a lack of freedom, but how you use it. You can’t be disciplined without one, and without discipline, you’ll never achieve what you would if you had it. Your purpose, goals, and tasks are a contract. You can choose what you are a disciple to, but live up to what you choose.

Ideally, every single action you ever take will come from your to do list and your curation process. This would mean that there are no random reactions, no unstructured deviations from the plan, and so on. Whenever you are doing anything, you should ask where this is on your life plan. If it isn’t there and needs to be, add it. If it isn’t there and doesn’t have a place, there is something better for you to spend your time on.

Intentionality requires being honest with yourself, not lying in the moment by excusing deviations from what it is you say you want because it is easy, convenient, or comfortable to do so. You abstain from those things that detract in any way from what it is you want, why it is you want it, and how it is you think you’ll get it.

The simplest strategy each day is to begin your next highest priority task, barricade yourself until it is done, and repeat. But often, you’ll have to adjust from this ideal.

Always doing what is most important is the simplest but not the best strategy for achieving the greatest outcomes. To advance productivity beyond this level, one must remain aware of and take advantage of unforeseen circumstances during execution.

Shifting circumstances can reveal an unforeseen advantage or opportunity: a convenience not previously expected, something that becomes very easy along the way to something else, a swell of positive emotion, a surplus of energy, and so on. Shifting circumstances can also be negative: an inconvenience not previously expected, something that becomes much harder as you proceed, a swell of negative emotion, a drop in energy, and the like.

Circumstances are always shifting. We ought to be resilient against these shifts when they directly contradict our intent, but also leverage them when they have the capacity to forward our intent. Like wind for a sailboat, we can posture ourselves both to contend with and leverage the shifting circumstances.

Achieve maximal productivity through flexible execution of the highest priority. When you face shifting conditions, ask yourself: “What can I do right now that would yield the greatest progress towards my goals?”

Your prioritized list will help you respond and fill in the gaps in a way that still generates the highest possible impact. It’s much easier to simply move down your list rather than need to think about them from scratch.

We feel happy when we perceive ourselves to be making progress on worthwhile goals. When you conduct your tasks looking for and taking advantage of unforeseen opportunities, you will feel in the moment like your schedule is slipping and you aren’t getting as much done. This is because you are overly focusing on your short list of tasks and not measuring your overall impact. Focus on the impact.

When you realize that you have unexpected opportunities to take advantage of, revise your to do list. As silly as it seems, the act of adding the new items to your list will have a surprisingly strong effect on your sense that you are making progress. All of a sudden, the stress you feel from extra things to do will be replaced with the satisfaction of getting so many extra things done, and that satisfaction will propel you forward in your current projects and everything that follows.

Leveraging unexpected opportunities while aligning your emotional perspective with the greatest impact will drastically accelerate your productivity and dramatically increase the joy you feel in the work of each day.

Be intense, even in the little things. Remembering that each task you work on from your daily to do list is the most direct step toward the greatest possible joy will alleviate the daily drudgery, no matter how mundane your present task may have seemed before.

If anything is worth doing, it is worth doing with your whole soul. Do not withhold from your maximal capacity when executing what you have decided is most important. Standards for success are set in planning, not execution, and until you reach them or encounter sufficient reasons to return to planning mode, you should carry out your intentions with all your emotional, mental, and physical capacity.

Do everything you can. If you want to feel deeply satisfied no matter the outcome, you have to reach the point where you can look yourself in the mirror and say there was nothing more you could do. The only way you’ll leverage the greatest proportion of motivation from your overarching purpose in your daily life is if you assume that every additional increment of action will have a disproportionately large effect on the outcome.

When you haphazardly decide how to spend your time, you will not only choose to pursue tasks that do not best advance what matters most, you will also have fewer resources left for the things that do.

Your to do list is an amazingly powerful tool for keeping your mental, emotional, and other resources focused on what is most important. When you write down all your ideas and organize them as described in the life plan, you will put the best resources towards what matters most.

Multiple times throughout each day, you should find yourself recognizing and taking advantage of opportunities to choose tasks of a higher priority. As you adopt this practice, you stand to gain massive increases in productivity through thinking about and actively selecting activities of greater importance than what you would otherwise do.

Great confidence, peace, and productivity are available for those who learn to navigate each day based on an intentional, well-reasoned prioritization. When you order your life by priority and intentionally direct your efforts to the highest impact, you feel zero stress or anxiety about what you don’t quite get to. You know and choose to prefer what is more important, and in achieving what is most important, you will have and feel more and better than you otherwise would.

Focus on your joy above lesser motivations. Purpose-driven performance will give you reasons to do what you are doing better and for longer than you would for a lesser motivation. How much of your behavior is based on your purpose, and how much is due to the expectations of others?

A person who operates for their own joy does not need to be motivated, promoted, or punished by others. They do not need to be supervised or micromanaged. They will do their best whether anyone is watching or not, and will also do their best no matter who might be offended by it.

Focus on your joy above others’ expectations. If you are doing something because it is the greatest contribution you can make to your joy, you are going to do it very differently than you would if you were just trying to avoid negative feedback from others. Sometimes, purpose-driven performance will require you to do what others will dislike and maybe even hate you for. Whenever you face a conflict between the expectations of others and your purpose, always go with your purpose.

As you get older, you will have less time and less energy. As you age, your productivity may continue to increase even as some parts of your body and mind decline due to the wisdom of experience, but sooner or later it will level off and decline. It is a sure thing, though the exact time varies due to factors within and outside of your control.

Whether through old age or accident, and whether permanently or forever, your capacity is going to wane. When it does, the life plan will help you feel greater satisfaction with what you can do no matter how much or how little that might be. There is no better way to prepare for the eventuality of a reduced output than recognizing and learning to cope with the fact that there is more than you could ever do even while you are in your prime.

As you grow comfortable contending with a never-ending to do list now, you will be able to instantly adjust to any decrease in capacity when the time comes, because you will already have adopted the system that enables you to feel fully satisfied and joyful in spite of the fact that you can never do everything you imagine doing. This is as smooth as fasting when you are already on a no-carb diet: you can instantly begin metabolizing stored fat without the prolonged discomfort of switching over from carbohydrates.

Planning and execution are substantially distinct activities. Commingling them reduces the effectiveness of both while increasing the resources required to do either. Planning and execution are completely different cognitive and emotional states. Planning is when you articulate potential through design. Execution is when you actualize potential through action. Planning is infinite, while execution consists of discrete tasks. Planning takes intense courage, concentration, and hope, while execution requires the different kind of intensity of plodding through things until they are complete. Planning is open-ended, but execution is focused. Planning is proactive, but execution is reactive. Planning is free-form, but execution is organized. Planning is driven by inspiration, but execution is driven by discipline. Planning is imaginative, but execution is closed-minded. Planning is whispy, and execution is gritty.

One common example of mixing planning and execution is scrolling through social media. No one scrolls through social media to achieve a goal. You browse social media because you don’t know what is there, and then you get worked up about one thing or another as doing so were central to your prior purpose. You scroll through social media to find purpose, not to fulfill it. That will never make you feel as good as an intentional act that specifically advances your long-term joy more than anything else. A much more effective use of downtime would be to read a book.

Too few people ever bother thinking about what they are doing, why, and what alternative options they have. You have to think about your work before you do it. But if you want to get the most out of life with the least wasted effort and emotion, you need to learn how to separate the thinking and the working.

There is a difference between designing a machine and operating one. Planning is where you build the machine, and execution is where you run it. Relentlessly consider the expected outcomes of your actions when prioritizing and planning. But during execution, the only thing that matters is effort. Work like a maniac with laser focus on your stated plan.

Once you’ve completed your day’s to do list, you can and must shut planning out of your mind. In execution mode, you free up your mental and emotional resources for actually doing what you have already decided to do. You draw a box around the task at hand, and ignore the rest of the world. You exit the infinite and uncertain world of what might be, and shift into the well-defined realm of the discrete. This frees you from any anxiety and grossly curtails otherwise unbounded uncertainty. Everything that matters is on that little square of paper containing your day’s to do list.

It’s odd to talk about the need to robotically execute while discussing the need to live life with your whole soul, but these aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. During planning, you engage the exploratory capacity of your mental and emotional channels as if they were an ambient light. When you get into the execution state, you bridle your heart and mind toward the task at hand with the focus of a laser, avoiding the many distractions that would otherwise occur. During execution, there is no surplus energy available in execution mode for daydreaming, yearning, or second-guessing. What is a vital part of planning becomes a bottleneck in execution, and vice-versa. In short, when moving from planning to execution, you replace “if ”and “should” with “must.”

Once you have set your priorities, the absolute only thing that matters is the very next thing. The only time anything else matters is when new information or an external event changes the priorities.

As you go through each day, you’ll come across new thoughts or new information that entail details outside of the scope of your day’s to do list. These could range from items pertaining to later in the week all the way to information that might cause you to reconsider your purpose.

With each piece of information, you’ll have to quickly decide to what degree to temporarily break out of the daily to do list mindset. It’s unlikely you’ll need to curate your master list outside of an official planning session. In almost every case, the emergent information should simply be added to the unsorted to do list. Even when changes occur, you only have to re-enter planning as far as necessary to yield the next task. For example, in the event that you complete your day’s tasks earlier than anticipated, just attack the highest priority item on your master to do list that fits your remaining resources.

When breaking your flow to note down ideas, you’ll want to return to the task at hand as quickly as possible. To understand why, realize that your mind’s ability to focus on a task is like you taking a hot shower. It’s better not to interrupt at all, but if you are going to, it’s very important to get back to it as soon as you can. The negative effects of cognitive frame breaks will increase geometrically with their length.

Planning and executing can’t be done at the same time, and it is surprisingly difficult to jump from one to the other when it would benefit to do so. Planning and execution are not equivalent tasks in difficulty or value. There are far fewer people who can plan than there are those who can execute. There are fewer still who can do both, as this requires not just the presence of two highly independent skills, but the rare ability to move between them at the appropriate time. This is the most difficult skill of the three, since it takes something special to be able to sense when the switch is needed without detracting from the whole focus needed to design or execute well.

While you need a system to capture all thoughts as you have them, you will inevitably encounter tasks that you can predict will suffer if you delay them. These could include short tasks that take less time to perform than to persist and recover from notes or creative tasks where inspiration has come upon you in the moment. Sometimes, you’ll be in a particular mindset where you are completely engaged in some type of work. In such circumstances, consider whether it is more efficient to simply complete a lower priority emergent task than it would be to queue it up for later.

When you transition between tasks with different contexts, it creates emotional and mental costs that are considerable, but not necessarily consciously recognized. You can reduce the number of context switches incurred in a day by batching together tasks that are related in some way.

Batching is an effective way to accomplish the greatest number of tasks with the lowest context switching overhead. Batching consists of consecutively executing related tasks to avoid the mental energy required to context switch. The principle here is simple: organize like things together and execute them as a group. For example, suppose you are a university teacher. You could batch together the blocks of time you spend teaching, time you spend grading (or even grading the same question across all tests at the same time), research meetings with students, and time you spend responding to student emails.

Batching promotes the priority of less important tasks based on shared overhead with more important tasks. Every task has some sort of startup cost. Batching takes advantage of already paid startup costs, executing other activities that share that startup cost in order to minimize costs across tasks. A batching shopper would visit adjacent stores for lower priority purchases because she is already there. A batching woodworker would use the jig for other jobs that need it, even if they aren’t as high a priority as those that don’t.

Batching takes advantage of the fact that the net benefit of a certain action is a function of its cost. When a higher priority task necessitates at least some of the cost required for lower priority tasks, the net benefit of those tasks increases, and might become high enough to boost the priority to above the threshold of execution. This is frequently the case even when the lower priority item still has additional cost. In both examples provided above, the additional tasks require additional time, even though a great deal of the time they would take from scratch has been reduced by the higher priority task. It’s an easy calculation to make when you take the long-term view: Will the expense of slightly more now result in much less expense later? If so, do it.

Sometimes, batchable tasks will naturally exist and cluster in your process of generating a to do list. Most times, you will have to intentionally increase the occurrence of task batching through saving them up.

When you come across a low urgency task, think about whether there is a way to queue it for later in ways that can take advantage of the benefits of batching (items of similar context or overlapping overhead), or unexpected opportunities (so that you have something meaningful to do when surprised with unexpected delays). If any of these is the case, it is wise to save the low urgency task for a later date, and to move on in your to do list. For example, if you come across a book you would like to read, but that is not urgent, you could choose to store it in your car in anticipation of some unexpected delay, or save it for an upcoming plane trip.

Batching is one of many tactics for productivity that will cause you to act in ways that differ significantly from your peers. For example, if you batch your work emails, you will need to inform your colleagues that they should not expect immediate replies from you. While you can give them a maximum timeframe when they can expect a response (say, every 24 hours in a business day), you should give them another method of notifying you in the event they need your urgent reply (such as a phone call or knock on your office door).

Batching is a single technique that will result in such an immense gain in productivity that you will not believe it until you try it.

Routines form the brainless scaffold around which you plan and execute variable tasks. The human mind has an extraordinary capacity to get used to things. One aspect of this ability is how we begin to treat routines consisting of many steps as one thing. Think of the many things you do often to verify this. For example, think of all the individual steps in showering, but because you do the same thing every time, you treat it as just one thing. There is little to no cost in switching between the subtasks of showering because it is routinized. It doesn’t require your active attention.

Routinize every repetitive thing in your life. For example, consider converting at least some portion of your eating, workout, sleeping, and bathroom activities into a routine. By making every repetitive, unavoidable, overhead task as close to a routine as possible, you will preserve the most resources for what matters the most.

Routines can become a double-edged sword in the sense that the power they lend in removing things from your awareness also makes it easy to miss cues that it is time to change them up.

You can gain great efficiency from recognizing what events in your life you can reduce to habit through making them a thoughtless routine, but you still need to openly seek for how you can improve them. For example, if you’ve created a routine of your workout plans, make it better by adding the habit of listening to thought-provoking podcasts while working out.

Routines should be noticed and discontinued when they no longer serve their intended purpose. “Because we always have” is not a good reason for doing anything. The existence of something suggests there is a reason for it, and a reason for looking for that reason, but it is not itself a reason. Who hasn’t attended a recurring meeting that had no purpose?

As a special note, routinization is a massive potential efficiency gain for parents. So much about a child’s life is repetitive, but parents tend to only infrequently treat it that way. Get into routines in everything that makes sense. Only leave variable the things that provide value in doing so. Look carefully at your schedule. Everything from meals to daily activities can be routinized. Even when variety needs to be preserved, loose routines can still vastly reduce the energy required to take care of daily necessities. For example, if every Monday is Mexican night, that makes it much simpler to plan and execute dinners and even to do the grocery shopping. If a stay at home mother plans recess where kids go outside to play every day from 2-3pm, that vastly simplifies a chunk of her daily life, as well as gives structure to the kids, who now can look forward to that each day. Get creative!

While you are new to the life plan paradigm, you will want to be as exacting as you can. Over the years, you’ll reach a point where your purpose becomes so engrained within you that the process itself becomes sometimes redundant.

While living with rigid exactitude to written plans presents one important level of discipline, it is also the gateway to a greater form, which embraces the purpose so well that the rigidity begins being more of a hinderance to it rather than a benefit. When you become this seasoned, you will notice situations where your dedication to your overarching purpose requires you to deviate from the plan as written, whether at the task or goal level.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can skip directly to the advanced, more flexible stage of the life plan without a prolonged period of strictly adhering to your plan. The direct implementation of a purpose is not a shortcut. It is not easier than what is otherwise described here—it is harder. Flexibility is done because it advances the purpose further than a rigid approach can, not to provide a shortcut to those unwilling to advance their purpose as much as strictness will. While you fail to live a life plan as written, you will never be capable of doing something better.

Incorporating Feedback Into Your Plan

You can’t intentionally change the future without planning. All effective action requires a plan. The more effectively you plan, the more effectively you will achieve what you want in the future. Most decisions are made without consciously planning. Leaving important things to automatic processes is almost always a bad idea for the same reason that throwing darts without aiming will never win the game. Nearly any subconscious plan is going to be inferior to any conscious plan.

Planning is simple in theory: You make good decisions by using your intelligence to enumerate options of action and estimate what would produce the greatest benefit. You list out potential positive and negative outcomes for each choice, and choose the choice with the greatest net benefit.

In situations big and small, it is very difficult to accurately predict the importance of specific actions ahead of time. As important as planning is, perhaps its greatest asset is in the benefits it renders when incorporated into a feedback loop with execution. Every decision you make is an experiment, and as such, provides the opportunity for you to improve your model of reality. As we take the path that seems more positive, we will know with a surety whether that path is how we imagined it; our actions result in the expected outcomes, for better or worse. This is a process that happens as quickly as our actions are bold.

As you execute your plans, you will frequently find your expectations violated. Sometimes, this happens with the pleasant surprise of things going better than you expected. The costs may be less than you expected, or the benefits greater than you expected. More often, things will go worse than you planned. The costs may be higher than expected, or the benefits might be lower than expected.

When your expectations are violated, you’ll have to traverse up the chain in your life plan to find the ideas you need to update to reconcile with what you’ve learned about reality.

Every decision you make should, at a minimum, feed back to your beliefs, either strengthening them through providing supporting evidence, or weakening them through providing counterexamples. Everything you do should either strengthen or weaken your beliefs. The strengthening of a given belief should result in you increasing in the boldness with which you act in that regard. The weakening of a particular belief should result in you being more cautious in how you act in that context, make you more receptive to alternatives to that belief, and potentially cause you to search for a better belief with which to replace the existing one.

It’s an odd thing for most people to reconcile, but you need to master both the flexible and rigid aspects of the life plan. In order to unleash the power of the life plan, you will need to rigidly perform everything you say is most important and say no to all the things that would detract from it. At the same time, you can change your life plan at any time, and you should do so regularly. Your life plan is a tool that you control to help you get more of what you want. It isn’t something you are enslaved by.

Don’t keep doing what you know does not work. Don’t allow yourself to be drawn into sunken cost—that you can’t change a path due to how much you’ve put into the path so far. Don’t stick to certain tasks just because that’s the way it was done before. Your goal is your goal, not what you previously thought would achieve it. Your goals themselves exist only to further your purpose, and should be replaced if and when life reveals they do not do this. You control your beliefs; your beliefs do not control you. Your allegiance to past understanding will net you nothing. You get to decide what qualities you will possess. You get to decide what brings you joy.

In general, when you are disappointed in your expectations, exert the effort to find something that yields what you want. When you find something that provides what you seek better than any other alternative, double down on it, and stick with it until or unless it shows its limits.

Always remember that your life plan is yours alone. You can edit your life plan any time and as much as you want. Your ability to make any change you choose is part of the remarkable power of this framework, the other component being the power afforded by being accountable to what you choose to include in it.

Composing a life plan is a naturally iterative process. Don’t stress yourself about making it perfect. It could easily be years after adopting this framework before your purpose begins to maintain one form for a prolonged period of time. Tremendous benefits are available to you even while your life plan is in flux. It is far better to do more and better through executing an imperfect life plan than it is to persist without improvement while you endlessly work on designing what you believe will be a perfect life plan.

Don’t be discouraged when you perceive that it needs to be changed. If anything, be worried when it has been too long since you edited your plan. Every single change reflects learning and improvement, and the lack thereof might indicate you need to pay closer attention to or seek more of the feedback life provides you with. You’ll find that living what is on the sheet has a way of providing sufficient guidance for what to change and when. Change your plan when you have reason to, but don’t change your plan unless there has been a material change in the information upon which your plan is based. Remember, it’s a contract.

As you regularly revisit your document, you are going to find apparent ways to make it better. The easiest changes to your life plan will be additions. Sometimes, you’ll see obvious elements that need to be removed. You’ll also see opportunities to edit or combine existing components.

The best way to know when to change any part of your life plan is to live it fully. While you execute, pay attention to any emerging evidence that suggests that the understanding has changed. If the understanding you used to generate your purpose, goals, and tasks, and which you used to prioritize your tasks has changed, you should modify these things accordingly and instantly.

During planning sessions, revisit what you are doing and have done since the last planning session. Ask yourself why you did what you did, and how well it matched the intended result. If there is a gap between what you intended and what actually happened, what lessons can you extract from the difference? What caused the results? What improvements might be made in the future? What can be done to continue to benefit from positive results? If the task is still in progress, what changes are necessary to draw your actions closer to the intended result?

Anything that is worth doing is worth evaluating. Review your day each day. Review things within your day. What did you learn, and how will you integrate it into your life plan?

You will only improve in the areas you measure. What were you expecting to happen? What actually happened? What changes can you make to improve results?

Think about what you are doing, how you are doing it, and why you are doing it. Is there a better way to get what you want? How can you reduce the time required? How can you improve quality? How can you make it easier? Find the best way to do things, then keep doing them that way until you find a reason to make a change.

Always devote a portion of your energy to the discovery of previously unknown options and new information regarding known options. For each action ask, “Is this the best way?”

As you carry out your life plan, notice and address any sources of friction or drag. Friction describes resistance that can make starting a task more difficult. The effects of friction are relatively constant, so the best way to overcome it is by being and doing better. Like friction, drag is resistance against your purpose, but it is not so easily overcome as friction. Drag increases the harder you try. It is an unavoidable fact that each additional increment of improvement will cost exponentially more energy. This is why the number of people who have overcome increasingly greater opposition shrinks exponentially.

One way to reduce drag is to reduce the resistance you produce. Your life is probably full of ways in which you unknowingly fight against what you say you value, and each of them will make it harder for you to advance your purpose in the same way a parachute makes it harder for a runner to sprint. Through identifying and removing those inconsistencies, you can streamline your life and enable greater progress in your purpose.

Drag can be reduced by changing the medium in which you operate. Changing the basis of where you live, work, and play can make a surprisingly outsized impact on your progress in what matters most to you in the same way that it is much easier to walk through air than water—816 times easier, in fact.

The last way to reduce drag is counterintuitive, and that is to intentionally reduce your speed. Drag increases with velocity. In fact, for every increment of velocity, drag will much more than double. The more productive you are in life, the more drag will affect you. Sometimes, taking more time to do fewer things of greater importance will result in greater overall progress in your purpose. If you attempt this remedy, remember the 80/20 rule: remove items from the 80% that are least important to you.

Human Relationships

Until now, this book has focused on how you are and what you do. However, what you can do as an individual will always be limited both in terms of actual output and in terms of the joy you encounter.

We live in a time when most people feel lonely and long for more meaningful interactions with others. Imagine what it would be like to experience one or more orders of magnitude greater meaning in the interactions you experience with others.

For the few willing to believe that significantly greater meaning in relationships is possible, most would guess that the answer lies in having more interactions with more people. This is completely false, and that’s why those who attempt it end up even more lonely than before.

People are as different from one another as are their fingerprints. Most people treat nearly all human interactions the same, and then wonder why interactions with others are such a stressful and taxing part of their lives.

Elsewhere in this book, the vast difference in the outcomes of different decisions is discussed with reference to the Pareto distribution. If human decisions yield Pareto differences in production, such that 20% of people produce 80% of results, why should you expect that the fruitfulness of your relationships with different people should produce uniform outcomes?

Understand that the usefulness of the people in your life will follow the Pareto distribution: 80% of the meaning will come from 20% of the people with whom you interact. If you don’t distribute your time accordingly—spending 80% of your time with 20% of the people who are truly most important—you will experience a massive deficit in both what you are able to accomplish in life and the joy you experience in doing so.

And the pattern isn’t limited to differences between people. It also holds in interactions with specific people. Of 100 interactions with a given person, you will find that 80% of the meaning and usefulness occurs in just 20 of them. To maximize the value of your relationship with any given person, you need to learn to recognize and make the most of the most valuable moments. If you treat the 20% most valuable interactions the same as the 80% less valuable interactions, you will absolutely miss out on almost all of the potential value in the relationship.

Remember the lessons from goals and tasks: the best things don’t compete with placeholders. If you fill your time and life with people and interactions that don’t matter, don’t expect someone or something better to interrupt you. You must actively curate who you spend your time with and how you spend it.

If you want to maximize meaning and utility in your life, you need to increase the number of twenty percent people in your life, and you need to concentrate your time on the twenty percent interactions with them. Doing both of these will geometrically increase the interpersonal meaning you experience in life.

The most valuable interactions with a given person are limited to about twenty percent of what a normal person would do. How can you make more of your interactions with others into those of the highest quality?

Avoid the trap of seeking fulfillment in busyness. Seek what you do and who you do it with based on what you actually value instead of what is easy or available.

Be more vocal about what matters to you. If someone asks you to do something that you don’t care about, don’t just do it or make up some excuse; tell them that you won’t do it because you don’t care.

Ask the important people in your life what you do that matters most to them, and tell them what matters to you. It is exceedingly likely that what is most important to you is not what is most important to them, and vice-versa. Don’t guess their 20%, and don’t expect them to guess yours. Do this in your romantic relationships, your family, your friendships, and your work connections. While there are some people who know what is most important to their supervisor at work, many don’t, and hardly anyone has had this conversation in families or friendships. How many parents are spending enormous time on extra curricular activities or expensive gifts for a child who might strongly prefer a little one-on-one time at home?

Focus your actions on what matters most. Cut out all small talk. Cut out optional interactions with people that don’t matter. Stop going to meetings or doing things that don’t contribute to what you or someone you care about cares about.

Stop making yourself equally available to all people. Stop checking your email at all times of the day. Make an auto response that indicates you will check email once per business day. Pare down marketing emails by unsubscribing. Stop answering your phone when it’s someone you don’t want to talk to.

Stop making an effort with people who don’t care about you. Implement a rule that defines how many times you will contact someone without being contacted back. At the extreme, you can make your motto: “I will treat those who ghost me as if they were dead.”

The most valuable human interactions will only be experienced with about 20% of people. How will you find these people? What are they like?

These people will not waste time on uninteresting people. Those who seek what matters most in life are seeking improvement. They have little regard for conventional practices and conventional wisdom. They march to the beat of their own drum. They say what they really think, and they do what they really believe. They are always learning, and prefer to spend their time with people who have something new and interesting to say. They appreciate what has deep meaning, and abhor shallow experiences and small talk.

How do you balance your daily toil and the people who are important to you? Do the people important to you get the energy they need from you, or do they just get what’s left?

One trick to squeeze out more energy when you feel depleted is to make use of your ability to plan for that time while you still feel energized. It is much easier to execute while depleted than it is to plan and execute.

If you find yourself lacking the energy you need for the people who are important to you, try changing your schedule around. It’s different, but there is no rule against spending early morning time with your family or friends, either in person or on the phone, in addition to or instead of evening time.

Instead of making new time, you can also make slight adjustments to how you carry out your present activities. Are there opportunities to merge the activities that are important to you and the people who are important to you? Could you work together on what needs to be done? If not, could you reduce the spatial distance between where you are working and where they are working? Spouses can work in the same area to facilitate lunches together or joint commutes, parents can bring children along when doing errands, people can work from home, and parents can homeschool. Smaller changes can also have an outsized impact, like scheduling a short recurring phone call in the middle of the day or occasionally bringing a child to work.

The people and situations with which you hesitate to engage can significantly affect your ability to know and achieve your potential. Some people can inspire you so much that you are able to do what you didn’t even think was possible before. Some people can degrade you so much that they make it nearly impossible to even survive.

Emotional friction can wear you down to the point where it significantly affects your quality of life. Though most cases are painfully obvious, it is possible that the undesirable people or situations are so subtle or so longstanding that you don’t notice them. Do you avoid, procrastinate, or dread certain interactions or situations? If so, you might be caught up in emotional friction.

The presence or absence of certain kinds of people in our lives has such strong effects that it begs the question of why so many are surrounded by such toxic people, and why so few leverage the benefits of those who would inspire them to be better. The answer is simple, but sad.

First, people don’t realize they have a choice. No one is obligated to drag along a person who constantly wears them down. Whether it’s a family member, friend, neighbor, or even coworker, everyone has the ability to change their circumstances. When you honestly communicate your expectations and boundaries, as previously recommended, you give others the ability to choose whether or not you will maintain the relationship without immaturely ghosting them.

Second, people are not naturally inclined towards the kinds of people who inspire them to be the best they can be. Some toxic people are obviously unpleasant, but a toxic person can also be quite fun to be around. Do your associates inspire and push you or do they encourage you to do less than your best? Ironically, the kind of person who will bring out the best in you is often confused for a toxic person who causes you emotional friction. To discern between these, ask whether the person is inclining you toward or away from improvement.

When someone’s actions or words make you feel bad, take some time alone to think and write about what is causing you grief. Try to ask yourself what bothers you so much about it. Sometimes, these situations bother us because of undesirable qualities they reveal or emphasize in us. In this case, use the tools in this book to enumerate what you can do to improve in ways that make the person or scenario less difficult.

Seek out those who catalyze your growth, not those who comfort you in your present state. Those who want to be the best they can be will find and spend time with those who help them do just that.

Previously, the principles of friction and drag were discussed. Each of these has an application in your interpersonal interactions.

People can produce friction. For example, you want to start a business, but your significant other keeps emphasizing the reasons against it. Friction reduces with velocity. The best way to reduce friction with people is to be a better person. The less often you disappoint or offend others because of your faults, the less often you will have to deal with the friction caused by their reactions. In the business example, if you are a highly successful person with a stellar track record and surplus income, your spouse will probably be less worried about you starting a business than if you are none of those things.

People can produce drag. Drag describes resistance against your purpose. An example of drag is when you are progressing through a project at work that is pushing you to the limits of what you are able to think, feel, and do, while also being confronted on a regular basis with someone at home who is unwilling to meet the very minimal expectations upon them, causing an even greater deficit of emotional and mental resources left for work.

There are several ways to reduce interpersonal drag, and they fall into two categories: what you can change about yourself, and what you can change about the other people you spend time with.

The changes you can make to yourself to reduce interpersonal drag consist of who you are and what you do in relationship to others. You can change yourself to reduce interpersonal drag by becoming stronger, for example by being less reactive to others and less needy. You can also fight interpersonal drag by reducing the resistance you produce by avoiding the triggers of other people on situations that are not worth the results that would ensue.

The changes you can make to the people you spend time with consist of focusing your time on better people. You can fight interpersonal drag by changing the medium, which is to say through choosing to spend your time with people who provide much more benefit than cost. Finally, you can reduce interpersonal drag through spending more time with fewer people, choosing to maximize your time with the 20% of people who provide 80% of your meaning.

Those who surround you have a much greater effect on so much more of you than you might believe. Motivational speaker Jim Rohn would often repeat the adage: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” He also claimed: “show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future.” The wisdom of these ideas has played out across countless lives, and been echoed in statements by more recent thinkers, such as author and speaker Tim Ferriss. It’s actually a very old idea. The ancient Stoic Epictetus wrote.

The differences between any two people create a gravitational pull towards a sort of multi-person equilibrium. The differences between individuals are so extensive that it is essentially impossible that any person will be significantly like you. The people around you will draw you up in the ways they are better than you, and down in the ways they are worse. You will do the same to them. You can fight the influence, but its constancy will always have a long-term effect.

When someone is better than you in something, they will raise your standards for that thing on yourself, whether you like it or not. Most people are more than capable of excusing themselves for thoughts about the possibility of being better, but this all changes in the face of a living example of improvement. In order to maintain a feeling of ease, a person exposed to an example of what is better must change—either by becoming more like the example, or by at least increasing the value they appraise in that person. Human nature would prefer to do neither, as the first requires work and the second requires adopting a lower selfvaluation. Most people respond to examples of improvement by removing them—either through ignoring the invitation, ghosting the individual, or artificially reducing their example through intentionally misrepresenting their character to others.

The best friends you can have are the best people you can find who will tolerate you. These people don’t have to live in your area. In fact, they don’t need to be living at all. Modern technology and media gives all people the opportunity to connect with people who live far away in time and space through biographies, videos, and interactive settings.

Your efforts to find and befriend those who are better than you will have a greater effect on improving yourself than any direct efforts you make to do the same. Whatever temporary discomfort you experience in their presence is merely a signal of ways in which you can improve.

The second best kinds of friends you can have are those who can receive the greatest good from your own example, but you have to realize the cost that this incurs to you. In the best case, they will create a great deal of friction in your life as they present constant mental and emotional costs to you as you attempt to tactfully encourage them toward improvement. In the worst case, they will respond to your efforts by doing to you and saying about you terrible things that are far worse than you deserve. Since the odds of benefit are low and the risks of maltreatment are high, you may ask why anyone would bother being a friend to someone who might benefit from their example. The answer is that while great joy comes from improvement of self, the only joy greater comes from improving others at cost to self.

The prioritization of each day by importance is going to require you to arrange your day differently than you did before, and differently than others would. As you begin paying more attention to what you do and why you do it, you are going to notice that there is an awful lot that we all do in our lives without any good reason to, as well as a lot that we do not do although we have every reason to. So much of our lives are based on unspoken rules that everyone adopts without really thinking about them, and very few of those rules actually help us get to where we want to go in life.

While most people are confident in what they do because everyone else is doing it or because others expect it of them, this kind of false confidence evaporates the moment its negative consequences suddenly appear. When your confidence is based on a rational process of thinking about everything you could do and choosing the actions that best align with what you actually want the most, you will feel confident and content no matter what kind of obstacles present themselves. This true internally-produced confidence surpass the limits of those who do what they do only because of external examples or expectations.

The fact that others do things a certain way does not provide evidence in itself that this is the best way to do things. You have to ask why, and there has to be a good reason. You have to move past the comfort of conventions. Conventional wisdom can only generate conventional results, and conventional results are embarrassingly terrible.

Intentional people will do things that other people are unwilling to do because they are willing to submit to reason instead of being beholden to the desire to be comfortable, popular, or ignorant.

Intentional people will also abstain from things that other people readily do. They won’t do things just because other people are doing them or because others expect them to. They won’t act contrary to their principles, even if everyone else does.

If you are going to live with intention, you are going to have to get used to being different than you were before. In fact, you are going to need to get used to never getting used to anything. This is both possible and incredibly useful, but it also requires those around you to do the same, and some prior relationships simply can’t endure the changes that will become a permanent part of who and how you are.

When you set out for the things you truly want in life, you are going to find that either you will want different things than others want, or you want to actually obtain what others claim they desire but do not get. In either case, you have to realize that in order to get what others do not have, you have to be willing to do differently than what they are willing to do.

Trustworthiness is a simple trait with outsized effects. A person who does what they say they will do should not be hard to find, but they are. Whenever you deal with normal people, you have to carry the overhead of the possibility that they fail to do what they said they would. When they disappoint you, you will need to allocate the resources required to recover from their failure while enduring the emotional hurt of their choice to prioritize something over that for which you depended upon them. Reliable people allow you to do much more than you otherwise would because you can consider whatever they commit to as good as done. Every existing task you hand to a reliable person is one more new task you can complete yourself. Be a reliable person, and surround yourself with the same.

Interruptions were historically limited to often-significant dangers or opportunities. If you are farming and a lightning storm approaches, you need to interrupt your plan and seek shelter. If you are walking through the forest and are rushed by a grizzly bear, it suddenly doesn’t matter where you were headed. In the modern world, we are inundated by an unbroken stream of interruptions, and very few of them are worth paying attention to.

Our modern world is not designed around unbroken concentration. We have email, phones, common work areas, and all sorts of other ubiquitous sources of interruption.

As you attempt to focus on each subsequent highest priority task until it is complete, you’ll have to tenaciously protect yourself from interruptions. In every case, ask whether the interruption will better advance your purpose than the task at hand.

Realize that interruptions are the mortal enemy to productivity. Fragmented work is low-efficiency work. Every interruption will significantly reduce the amount of resources you have to focus on the task at hand, and will continue on as a residual attention parasite even after the interruption is completed.

Some changes you can make on your own. For example, you can adopt a habit of refusing to check your email, the news, or social media as a gap-filler. Instead, set times for these activities. You can check your email at the end of the day instead of the beginning. You can check your phone or catch up on the news while eating lunch. When on task, you’ll want to remove these distractions: close your email window, turn off your phone, and do whatever else you need to do to isolate your concerns to the intentionally chosen task at hand. You’ll find that there are very few actual emergencies. Almost nothing will be very different if it needs to wait a few hours, and your overall capability to do nearly everything will vastly improve by putting in these protections. If absolutely necessary, you can create a specific channel to provide a way of getting through, as long as you only share that with people who will respect your specific instructions that it is only for emergencies. This might be an app on your phone that you leave on while everything else is on silent, or even a special email address whose window you leave open on your computer.

Other changes are going to require the support of others. For example, you might be in an office culture where others like to stop by and socialize. You’ll have to explain to people that you are trying to be more efficient, that you’re going to start shutting your door, that you’d like them to only knock in the event of an emergency, and to send an email if it can wait. You might place a sign on your door: “Please contact me by email and set up an appointment unless you need my immediate attention, in which case you should call or knock. I will respond to your email within one business day.” You might do something similar on your phone voicemail: “If this is not an ” emergency, please reach me by email at TOOOOOOOOOOOO.

As you set up barriers for others to engage with you, you may find that there is a lot of resistance, particularly from low productivity people, who will struggle to disentangle your valuation of what they are interrupting you with for your valuation of them personally. You will have to be firm with people. The productivity you gain will make it worth whatever pushback you encounter. In a work environment, you might respond to strong resistance by changing jobs, where you will earn greater peace and pay in an environment that knows what is most valuable. In a friend relationship, you might need to find a new friend. In a family relationship, you might need to ease into the adjustments and allow the evidence of the benefits to provide further support for further changes.

As a rule, while you should remove yourself from the interruptions of others, you should also be more willing to interrupt others. This might seem contradictory, but it isn’t. It is the focus on purpose that drives both changes. Never let the task at hand promote itself beyond the goal you are working on or your transcendent purpose. Interrupt anything your priorities require you to.

An intentional person has to merge their own prioritization with the world around them, and the more they have thought about and lived up to their own prioritization, the more often their own prioritization will be better than that of those around them. If someone is babbling about something that doesn’t matter, interrupt them. If you need something from someone and they are busy with something that is truly less important, interrupt them. And interrupt yourself, if that’s what your priorities require: If you encounter new information during your day that needs to be attended to, interrupt what you are doing.

Every person has different capabilities and willingness. To generate the greatest productivity, each person ought to be in the place where they can make the greatest positive contribution. Whoever is willing and able to do what is difficult should delegate anything that isn’t to others who are not.

Often, work with others entails unpredictably long times while you wait for them to respond or complete a dependent task. Your prioritized to do list will enable you to keep making progress in other tasks while awaiting those dependent on others. When you are waiting on other people, you will move on with the next item in the priority queue, following up with the person as a separate task, and while being ready to interrupt whatever you move onto as appropriate in the event they get back to you.

Motivational Management

Most of your emotions will not come as the result of your immediate choices, but on a much longer arc of your long term decisions, so what you can do about them in the moment will be limited to mitigation, not outright control.

Part of maximizing your output is changing your tack depending on your mood. Managing your moods is like shifting a vehicle with a manual transmission to maximize miles per gallon of fuel as you navigate hills in several ways. When your mood is good, you’ll want to increase your pace. When your mood is poor, downshift as necessary to grit through as much as you can.

Increasing your pace when your mood is good will run counter to your natural desire, which will be to try to persist in good feelings.

The best time to begin a very difficult task is as you complete or are making good progress on another task. Perhaps surprisingly, this is also the hardest time to begin a difficult task. Your positive momentum will be held back by the fact that you will subconsciously avoid tasks where you anticipate challenges, preferring to hold onto good feelings rather than risk them on something that might cause them to end. You will be surprised how inclined you are to slow down, suspend rational regulation of your behavior, or otherwise deviate from your intentional path when you feel good.

While it might seem that this approach robs you of the enjoyment of your accomplishments, the truth is quite different. By default, people try to maximize how they feel here and now. The problem is that focusing on how you feel right now is the worst way to feel best long term. Don’t succumb to the temptation to rest in the good feelings of getting something done. The emotional high you are on will not last forever. When it goes, you will feel much better if you spent the good times doing more good things. When you aren’t progressing, you will slip into mental states where focus, hard work, and progress are all significantly hampered.

Instead of focusing on what feels good right now, focus on doing what is best all the time. Long-term positive feelings always result in greater duration of positive feelings by definition. Sacrifice present good moods to present achievement in order to win future good moods that exist independent of future achievement. Act so as to maximize your future feelings by choosing to do the best you know right now rather than trying to feel as good as you can right now.

The more you achieve when you feel good, the less frequently and intensely you will feel bad. The average long term joy and meaning you feel will increase geometrically when you use achievements to impart momentum to subsequent tasks. Every step you take towards living productively will impart momentum to your process; every win will make you more capable of the next. The more you chain together, the much more intense and enduring the good feelings will be. Operating at a fast pace during a good mood builds your momentum, making it easier to continue to be productive as you hit obstructions. Like an object rolling down a hill, the larger it is and faster it’s rolling, the less the obstacle will matter. Overwhelm, hopelessness, anxiety, depression, and every other negative emotional state are easier to avoid when you have made or are making obvious progress in your purpose.

Use positive feelings from completing a task to impart momentum into the very next task. The best way to make the most progress on tasks is to leverage the momentum that comes from completing tasks to start, continue, and finish other tasks. If you need to take a break, wait until after you get the next task started, and try to go as long as you can before doing so.

The rest of this chapter will focus on techniques you can use to be as productive as possible in spite of a poor mood.

The problem with most things that make us feel good right now is that they tend to cause you to either do less or worse than you would without them. But there are many things you can do that will feel good right now, and some of them can be used to increase your productivity in achieving what provides enduring and residual good feelings by advancing your purpose.

Do not seek lasting meaning by pretending that something that feels good right now has enduring value if it doesn’t. Use things that feel good right now to supercharge the advancement of your purpose, not to detract from it.

For example, use something that feels good right now as short-term synthetic rewards for long-term efforts. Use assigned rewards to impart motivation to lackluster, long-term, or laborious tasks. Use the things you find enjoyable to motivate the things you do not. This will compound the positive reward with the satisfaction of doing what you need to do combined with the pleasure of doing what you want to do. It will also condition you to associate work with pleasure.

You are the master of your own life, and you have the power to arbitrarily link any reward to any task. For example, if you like snacks, have them right before a weight-lifting session. Doing so will not just help you gain motivation to work out; the easy-to-digest calories will increase your workout performance, and the exercise will metabolize it before it has a chance to turn into fat. If you like coffee, reserve it as a reward to co-occur with work, rather than something to precede it.

If you enjoy a leisure activity, tell yourself that you get to play for 15 minutes if you finish a key task. If you like scrolling the internet, do so as a reward you can look forward to after a stated increment of measured progress—more often than not, once you achieve the progress, you will feel better about that than the internet, and will just keep working.

If you are struggling to pay attention to something that bores you, like reading a required report, interleave the activity with reading something you find enjoyable using some ratio that favors the task you need to do. If you need to crunch through some intense calculations, and you love books, make a deal with yourself that you’ll read for 5 minutes out of every hour until the task is done, and you’ll be shocked at how much more enjoyable the task becomes. Use music when it makes your work more productive and enjoyable—such as blasting upbeat music during backbreaking work, but not when it makes it more enjoyable at the cost of slowed production—such as some music does when you really need to think deeply about complicated information.

For even greater benefits, use something less important from your to do list that is more enjoyable or less difficult than what you are doing as your short-term reward. For example, “reward” yourself for preparing for a tough presentation by answering an email from your spouse.

Those of us with stern parents, micromanaging supervisors, or military experience know what it is like to have a person who will instantly make you regret any attempt to cut corners or do anything but what we ought. That kind of motivation is powerful, but it requires the continued presence of the instigator.

We can replicate many of the benefits of such a person without any need for anyone else. Each of us has the ability to engineer the most stringent supervisor in our own minds. Fans of David Goggins have heard him tell countless stories of how his alter ego “Goggins” prods him any time he does less than his best. It doesn’t matter that David Goggins’ best is considered superhuman to many others—David knows he can do it, and Goggins won’t let him stop until he fulfills his own potential.

You create your own alter ego as you write and revise the life plan described in this book. This person represents the ideal you, and because you’ve done the work to describe him or her, from their character qualities down to what they do, when, and why, you know this person better than you do anyone else. You know exactly what they would do at any time and in any place. You should consult your mental model of this person at all times and in all places. Your life plan gives you a map that you can consult at any time in place of doing, thinking, or feeling what the old you would. Defer to the map in all times of conflict between the two.

Hold yourself accountable to what you say is important, and take responsibility for aligning with what you say you will do. Your alter ego can assist to fight off the natural laziness that we all have. We will automatically start looking for the exit and making excuses when things get unpleasant, but we can be trained to be better.

Whenever you stray from your best capabilities, your alter ego should instantly get on your case and criticize you incessantly. After all, you are the one who made the plan, and that obligates you to live up to it more than anyone else’s expectations ever could.

Every athlete or warrior has faced countless situations where they must mentally and emotionally warm up for a task. There is a reason that motivational speeches are given by good leaders before difficult tasks. A minute of motivation prior to starting a task can yield massive increases in productivity. You don’t need to wait for someone else to pump you up. Use your alter ego!

Ask why you are doing it, and ask yourself whether you really care. Tell yourself things like: “If \\\\ really matters to me, then I need to \\\\\_ right now.”

If you are short on motivational material, use the modern tools at your disposal to gather the best from others. Keep a list of specific short talks, quotes, or videos that motivate you.

When you are completing a difficult task, one of the best things you can do for your long-term motivation and confidence is to voluntarily go beyond what is required. If you want to reverse your tendency to abandon what you said you would do when it gets harder than you expected, make it harder when you are tempted to quit.

As crazy as it sounds to suggest that difficult situations should be made harder, you will find that there is no greater payback than the little extra effort that can be imparted at the end of an already gargantuan task. There is great power in laughing in the face of exhaustion. Going beyond the previously establishing ending point by adding finishing touches, enduring the effort a little longer, or jumping right into the very next task instead of taking a break can do wonders for your confidence that you can do hard things well—and you can.

Train yourself by giving yourself evidence that you don’t take shortcuts. When you are tempted to quit early, work extra time. When you are tempted to violate your character qualities, double down in whatever the positive attribute is.

Character is contagious. As you stretch toward your best, you will catalyze improvement in others. Most of us have experienced how one person’s complaints among a group of people suffering the same affliction disproportionately brings everyone down. Fewer people have seen just what one person’s stretching towards excellence can do for the rest. Crack a joke amidst a particularly terrible trial, especially if it is abundantly obvious that you are carrying the heaviest load in your group. Suggest to your group that you make the task even harder, especially if no one else will see or care—make it a symbol of internal pride. See who wants to stay on a little longer, who wants to go on a little further, who wants to go a little faster. Watch what happens when you invert the situation from being the victim to making it yours.

Not only do your moments of exemplary performance help everyone who sees them, each will help you be better than you would otherwise be by providing evidence that you are better than you thought. Your own high water marks provide you with evidence of greater capability, and each one of them is like a deposit into an interest bearing account that can be drawn upon in your times of need.

Don’t just get tasks done; dominate them; vanquish them.

Your mind can easily generate significant barriers to what your heart is not excited to do. You can effortlessly avoid nearly anything through the sophisticated power of your brain to justify after the fact what you decided from a purely emotional position.

You can reverse the polarity of your brainpower from procrastination to productivity by tricking your body to get moving into a task without initially inviting your brain. Though this technique sounds strange, it’s no different from how you get duped into many time-wasting or downright harmful things: you get your body physically involved in something before you give your mind the chance to consider it, preventing it from throwing up barriers until momentum makes it difficult to stop.

In order to get the greatest impact out of your limited time, you need to cultivate the ability to get started on demand. The best way to get into an important task is to turn off your brain and get your body as close as possible to the action.

For example, get your body into the room you need to be in to do the appointed task. Trick yourself by only agreeing to go into the room. Once you are there, it will be an order of magnitude easier to do whatever comes next. If you need to do something on the computer, simply turning it on and opening the relevant program will take you most of the way.

In a similar vein, you can use physical context switches such as locations, movements, or even clothing to subconsciously enter into the mental state you need to be in to accomplish a task at hand. These physical routines help make the tasks associated with them more automatic. For example, maybe you do all your writing at one particular desk, you only answer emails from your phone, and you always have meetings in a conference room. Abstaining from work while in your bed at home will help you get more sleep, having a particular place where you watch TV will make it less likely that you watch when you have better things to do, and so on.

Your physical disposition has a significant impact on your productivity. Research shows that the slight boost of positive brain chemicals from a short round of physical movement significantly increases cognitive performance. Try it next time you have an important meeting, a test, or you are simply feeling tired.

Variations on this technique abound. Use it generously.

A significant slice of the negative emotion experienced by a typical person pertains to situations that have nothing to do with what lies at hand. Typically, stress and anxiety exert drag on your productivity like a parachute on a runner. But stress and anxiety can be beneficial at certain times and in limited quantities. One benefit is that it can help you achieve laser-like focus and promote your task to the existential level. A surprising number of people have never experienced this kind of focus, and are unaware of the kind of productivity it enables.

Another potentially helpful but potentially negative emotion is urgency. Urgency is never created—only recognized. Our time is always limited, and whether we realize it or not, there are tremendous outcomes hanging on how effectively we use it.

The ideal place to position your perspective is on the knife edge between the belief that you have enough time to do everything that matters, and that every second you waste significantly reduces what you care about most. You have enough time to do everything that matters, but not one moment extra.

Deadlines are priorities expressed on a calendar. They help generate urgency. By setting them, you recognize the urgency of getting your tasks completed, and you will activate certain mental mechanisms that help you get started faster, work harder, and finish earlier. Deadlines become particularly powerful tools when combined with backwards planning to break the deadline of a large task into earlier deadlines for its prerequisite components. Breaking up a task over time with deadlines at each step propagates the urgency of the task into each day in place of the complacency and procrastination that generally occurs when you perceive that you have plenty of time remaining to complete a task.

Normal people procrastinate far more than they realize, wasting amazing amounts of time that could be spent working towards what they believe is more important. They avoid decisions as much as they can, delay decisions as long as they can, and put off actions as long as they can.

If you want to test how much time you waste, get a stopwatch and compare the time you claim you are working on something to your actual time on task. It can easily be a 10:1 ratio! Imagine how much more you would accomplish if you had ten times as much time. This is exactly what you stand to gain if you stop procrastinating.

Why do most people find it so difficult to immediately undertake the tasks that they truly believe are most important? It isn’t as if they are being forced by someone else to do what they are delaying. It is their own choice.

Procrastination is not the problem, but just a symptom of the actual issue. What is the problem? A person who procrastinates prioritizes the emotions of the moment in themselves or others over what they rationally believe is more valuable. A rational person will immediately begin what is most valuable and will diligently continue in the same while it remains the highest priority, even if it doesn’t immediately make them feel better than any option. Your life plan will help you be more rational through helping you determine the value of each task you need to accomplish.

Procrastination can stem from misalignment between action and purpose. Too often, we attempt to remedy procrastination through action, but only end up wasting time because the action we choose has no connection to our purpose. This kind of procrastination can’t be cured through action, but through thinking. If you feel like you do not want to do the task you know you need to, ask yourself why you need to do it. Your life plan provides an explicit connection between the tasks you execute, the goals they support, and the purpose they feed.

Efficient people aren’t motivated by what they have to do, but seek what they get to do. They actively look for beneficial changes they can make and immediately jump into what they need to do to make them. They seek to maximize the value of the time they spend, because they understand that will maximize how they feel long-term, and they are willing to sacrifice how they feel in the moment to that end.

At any time, you should be able to provide an exact answer to why you are doing what you are doing, and a defense for why what you’re doing is the best way to do it. Any time you are dragging in your task at hand, ask yourself why you are doing it, and remind yourself of the purpose.

Visualize micro-goals for each task you undertake, explicitly partitioning off the task and the reward mentally before beginning it. Think in terms of the expected reward, not the action.

Asking why has important effects even outside the context of a life plan. Consistent, intentional, sensible actions will yield surprisingly positive results, both in terms of what you accomplish and in terms of how you do it.

The more clear and detailed your plan, the more likely you will do it. The easiest way to fight procrastination is to respond to it by initiating planning. If something seems too big to plausibly see from start to finish, you have not planned through it enough. When you have effectively created a plan, the barrier of entry into the first task drops down to next to nothing.

The more detailed the task, the more psychological leverage you will have in completing it. Every degree of uncertainty or lack of detail in a task will increase the emotional energy required to start and continue the task. The more details you have fleshed out, the easier it will be to feel as if progress is being made as you work.

So much procrastination and failure comes from people making the decision in the moment of action. There is no reason to wait until the moment of action to make the decision of how you will act. The act of planning is pre-executing the decision. All that remains is the action.

A specific list of explicit tasks will make it very clear what remains to be done. If you can’t say what the next few steps are in high detail, you haven’t thought about it enough.

No obstacle is insurmountable if it can be decomposed into small enough pieces. If you want to instantly be capable of moving any task forward, no matter how difficult it may be or how long it may take, all you need to do is figure out how to chop it down into bite-sized parts.

If you are struggling to get started, take the smallest possible action. It’s very hard to get up and run a marathon, but it is easy to get up and tie your shoes. By making the first step as small as it needs to be in order to be easy, you will remove all anxiety to attack it.

By discretizing the rest of the task, you will find all the motivation you need to do the work—the plausibility of the portions will be the evidence you need to believe the expected reward is both possible and worthwhile.

Even if you are stuck in procrastination, you can trick yourself into making progress through leaning on your to-do list. Instead of burning time on something other than what matters to you, procrastinate by working on something else from your to do list. If you procrastinate by starting other projects you really aren’t looking forward to, you can sneakily impart momentum to them so that they are even easier to continue once you get to them.

You can use this same trick to make your breaks much more effective. Use break times to forward other goals. Take a break from one task by doing something further down your priority list. For example, read a book from a prioritized list of books you want to read. To be prepared to best use these times, keep a list of things you would like to do or learn about.

Uncertainty is a prime driver for procrastination. If you aren’t sure how to further decompose the task at hand, you can create a surrogate by using time blocks. Commit that you will work for some prespecified time without taking a break.

By choosing a time limit for how long you will work on the task in the present sitting, you will bring the task into finite bounds and reduce the psychological blocks associated with interminable activities.

By sticking to the task for the chosen time, you will generate many of the same positive feelings and momentum that you would find in actually completing the task, which will further assist you in doing that later.

Every change you make to what you are focused on costs mental energy. A day spent switching back and forth from one context to another will absolutely drain your productivity compared to what you can achieve when focused deeply on just one thing at a time. Every time you switch tasks, you bring along a residual drain from everything you’ve focused on before, which will continue to reduce your available output for subsequent tasks. The only way to thoroughly purge these attention residues seems to be through a good night’s sleep. The overhead from prior tasks that increases throughout the day is yet another reason to prioritize each day’s tasks by highest priority.

Context switches can also assist you. When your momentum is dipping below threshold, you can leverage an intentional context switch to make faster progress on another task. Though switching to another task obviously stalls your progress on the first, wise use of intentional context switching will yield much higher productivity than dogmatically insisting on executing only one task until it is complete.

Picture the resources you have in a given day as being reset each morning. Every single thing you do, no matter how big or small, will reduce the day’s remaining resources.

Learn to queue up low-priority tasks that you can save for situations where you are short on time, energy, or other resources. In such states, it is very difficult to think clearly enough to enumerate such items on the spot. Potential entries can include errand calls where you know you will be placed on hold, catching up with old friends or slightly distant family members, performing outside chores, or catching up on the news. If you have more time but just as little energy, reading a book might be better use of your time.

Your environment matters. While most people understand that their environment has an effect on their output and will notice certain overtly distracting sights, sounds, or smells, they do not realize the import of things they may not even explicitly notice.

For instance, research has shown significant output increases in rooms with a temperature of about 70 degrees compared to rooms that are hotter or cooler, and the differences seem to increase with how much creative problem-solving the task requires.

Designers will tell you that the colors in your environment matter; natural tones boost focus and efficiency, and warm colors boost creativity. Order in your environment reduces emotional friction and distraction from the task at hand. Measured beauty in a space increases courage by boosting the emotional reserves to tackle the task at hand.

Pay attention to your environment. Spend time researching what changes you can make so that your environment boosts rather than detracts from your productivity.

Achieving peak performance requires preparing the necessary tools. The right environment will enable you to achieve better things in less time than otherwise. Abraham Lincoln is credited as having said: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Correctly attributed or not, the wisdom of this quote has endured longer than the familiarity with the subject matter. You may never cut down a tree with an axe, but if you did, you would readily recognize that attempting to do so with a blunt axe will not just take you many times longer than it would to first sharpen the axe, but will also be even more brutally unforgiving to your body than the already arduous task.

Our modern tools tend to be more technical than an axe—but not always. Whatever the tools of your trade may be, pay attention to what changes you might make so that they can help you be more effective. For example, if you use a computer for work, how often does it crash, slowly respond, or automatically update? Perhaps a better operating system or newer machine is in order. If you drive rideshare for work, how many miles per gallon does your car get? How much would you save if you traded your car for a more efficient model? If you homeschool, are there ready-made curricula that would do at least as good a job as what you spend your time creating from scratch?

Some tasks resist any further decomposition while still seeming insurmountable. Sometimes, you just need to stare into the abyss until you see the light. These tasks are like sledgehammering a granite boulder: try as you might, each attempt yields no sign of progress.

These tasks require existential promotion. You have to make them life or death; you have to leverage everything you’ve got. You whale on them until you collapse from exhaustion, then you immediately do it again, and you keep doing it until it yields.

Is there any task that could overwhelm you? You may be surprised to find how often you feel like you are completely lacking in what it takes to achieve what you have set out to do. You may be surprised at how many of these tasks lie along the path of an exceptional life. In these moments, let the strength of your purpose carry you.

How do you reach the point where the limits of time are your only limits? If you have a strong enough purpose and convincing reasons that a certain task is absolutely required to move forward in it, there is no limit to how long and how hard you will work to complete it.

A willingness to impart an unbounded effort will overcome any other limit. If you are willing to work two, ten, or a hundred times longer, harder, and smarter than anyone else, you will absolutely obtain what no one else can.

Positive Emotions Can Only Be Maximized Through Using Reason

Among all creatures on earth, we have unique capability for rational thought. Judging from the disposition of the average person, you would never guess it. Most people suffer from severe impediments to rational thought, suffering from underdeveloped critical thinking skills, unfounded confidence, and an inability to notice what is different or better than what they already think, desire, have, or do.

If these rational limitations were the only problem impeding the use of reason, society would be in a much better state than it is. The bigger problem is that those with the abilities to think critically and notice what is different or better willfully decline to use them. Most people today are so possessed by their emotions that they rarely exercise reason at all, except to rationalize their emotional actions after the fact.

The search for joy requires you to develop your rational capacity and learn to subordinate your feelings to reason. The benefits of preferring reason to emotion are not limited to the overarching purpose of maximizing joy, but cascade throughout your entire life.

Most people don’t make choices based on reason. Instead, they make choices based primarily on emotion. They act to maximize present pleasure and avoid present suffering. The problem is that seeking to feel good right now will never yield the greatest feelings long-term.

Actions that feel good in the moment are likely to generate much worse feelings in the long-term, and what feels good long-term will almost always feel bad in the present. The truthfulness of this relationship is enshrined in aphorisms such as: “Sacrifice the present for the future,” “the hardest thing is usually the right thing,” and “hard choices, easy life; easy choices, hard life.”

The search for what feels good now is not the search for enduring joy, as what will maximize joy long term cannot be found through what feels best now. Instead, reason alone demonstrates the path to enduring joy, independent of what feels good now.

It is no surprise that so many people are so unhappy when so many prefer irrational reactions to intentional rationality. Automatic, emotional reactions are guaranteed to limit a person to much less joy than they would otherwise have.

Decisions that optimize for long-term joy require thinking. Only through thinking can you discover, enumerate, and select what is best. While feelings are automatic, thinking is not. What little thinking occurs today seems mostly occupied with composing post-hoc reasons to justify decisions already made emotionally.

Reason is required to maximize the quality and duration of feelings. Prioritizing reason over feelings does not kill them; it makes them stronger, more enduring, and deeper.

Joy is not merely a sensation of the flesh, but a physical sensation coupled to and at least amplified (but sometimes wholly caused) by thought. Joy is the fusion of sensation with reason. The fulfillment of the potential of both sources is required to maximize the composite. To think of or experience joy only in terms of a physical sensation or solely as a product of the mind is to rob it of its richness.

If you seek to maximize your joy, you must increase your reasons for having it. You must understand the relationship between feelings and value. Feelings are the conduit through which you sense value. Feelings do not produce value—they flow from it and endure because of it. Value is maximized by reason, not feelings.

By nature, people seek intrinsic pleasure, prioritizing how they feel over the meaning of what they feel, think, and do. Intrinsic pleasure flows from feeling to thought: from the bodily sensation of what you accomplish, experience, give, or receive to your understanding of its meaning.

Joy is maximized through extrinsic pleasure, or by prioritizing the meaning of what you feel, think, and do over how you feel. Extrinsic pleasure flows from your thoughts: from the understanding of the meaning of what you accomplish, experience, give, or receive into the actions you take to advance your purpose in yourself and in the world. These feelings come because of the value you mentally associate with them. They can be just as intense as intrinsic pleasures, but they can endure as long as the meaning that generated them continues to prove true.

Joy from meaning is more enduring than joy from physical pleasure. Pleasure based on physical experience can only last as long as the physical situation that generated it. These feelings can be intense, but they are never enduring, and can disappear completely if future experiences reveal them to be other than what you thought they were. Joy from meaning is not as fickle as physical feelings. It is not limited to the continuation of a physical experience, and will continue as long as the underlying understanding guiding one’s thoughts about value and purpose remain unchanged.

Joy from meaning is stronger than joy from physical pleasure. Physical pleasure in and of itself is insufficient to overcome the many challenges that will threaten it, such as perspective-changing additional information or overwhelming emotional pain. However, when strong enough, meaning can provide sufficient motivation for you to continue to strive in your purpose against any negative feeling, including pain, sorrow, anxiety, fear, and depression.

Joy from meaning lies more within your control than physical pleasure. Meaning is not maximized through emotion, but through intentional exercise of reason. Your physical situation is subject to the choices of others; your reasons and choices are not.

The joy that comes from following your purpose will dwarf any joy that can come from the pleasure of a purely physical experience. With time, extrinsic pleasure will always come to dominate intrinsic pleasure. The mental meaning of what you find truly valuable will always overcome the feeling of what you experience only physically. No matter how pleasurable a physical experience might be, it will fade, but your mental appraisal of its value over time will remain to the extent your understanding of reality is correct.

It is common to think about happiness in terms of something that happens to us, as in: “What makes you happy?” But what happens to you is the least common, least valuable, and least enduring source of joy. Joy need not be limited to what happens to you. Joy can come from you.

The greatest joy comes when your circumstances within and without are aimed at what has the greatest value. While you can do a great deal to influence what happens external to you, you can’t fully control it. While your actions will have a limited effect on your external situation, your internal perception and interpretation of your external situation are fully within your control. You can choose to let go of what lies outside of your control, and that choice is easier to make the more you focus on what is within your control. You can have joy within you, no matter what happens around you. The joy that comes to you because of who you are inside cannot be affected by what happens to you on the outside.

Part of the joy that comes from the inside is due to the character qualities you develop and live according to. Outward outcomes are not the most important metric of the value of past choices. Who you are as a result of your choices is the most important outcome. You determine what qualities you embody through what you do, how you do it, and why you do it. The only way to feel good as often as possible is to seek out and correct all deviations from what is best in yourself and your life.

How you treat every aspect of your life can be characterized on a spectrum from fully passive to fully intentional. Each aspect of each person’s life will fall somewhere on this spectrum, and where you choose to be in each will make an enormous difference in your life.

Passive action is going with the flow. It is like putting a canoe in the river and allowing it to drift wherever the current takes it. While this may indeed be easier, it guarantees you will not arrive where you want to go. The reality of the situation is worse still. Passive action is neither as innocuous or as beneficial as coasting a canoe downstream.

Passive action is to act according to feelings, and your feelings will lead to substantially worse options than rational thought. Reality is very complex. You can’t find your way to a destination that involves navigating obstacles without intent. If you are optimizing subconsciously, you are also optimizing suboptimally. Not only will you aim at worse things, you will shift arbitrarily between multiple unrelated targets each and every day, vastly restricting the resources you have to achieve even the few aims you will have under reduced intentionality. Recall the prior analogy: Thinking that random action seasoned by human nature will produce outcomes even nearly as good as those produced through honest intention is even more foolish than expecting to hit the bullseye in a game of darts when you are blindfolded and spinning in a chair. Reality is very complex. You can’t find your way to a destination that involves navigating obstacles without intent.

Rational thought is like traveling to a predetermined destination in a canoe, paddling, steering, and navigating to intentionally traverse obstacles to get there. Operating from an attitude of intentional reason, you can both more clearly enumerate the available options for action and more accurately assess the cost and benefit of each, resulting in a much higher likelihood of a much better decision than operating merely on emotion.

The more explicit you make your actions, feelings, and thoughts, the more you can apply reason in choosing what you do. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

You should think of your emotions and your rational capability as occupying different parts of your brain, and assume that you can only operate one center at a time. If you are in the one, you must necessarily not be in the other. Whenever you act, ask yourself which center you are acting from.

Feelings and reason are not the same, nor are they equally useful. Feelings show you more about what is possible. They tell you nothing about how to obtain it. Feelings are a motivation to act; positive feelings invite us to act so as to maintain them, and negative feelings invite us to improve so as to overcome them. Reason is the sole source of discovering and walking the path to enduringly obtain the positive feelings you believe are possible while mitigating the negative feelings you might otherwise experience.

Maximizing long-term positive feelings and overcoming negative feelings is not the same as maximizing short-term positive feelings or avoiding negative feelings. The greatest long-term joy will require you to encounter and overcome many negative feelings, and the greatest long-term joy will require you to experience periods without it.

In order to maximize joy from meaning, you will have to intentionally strive for it and against the natural drift toward immediate gratification. Joy from meaning tends to be found in opposite paths than short-term pleasure. Joy is maximized through improvement, but shortterm pleasure tends to run contrary to improvement. Improvement frequently includes short-term pain, which is the opposite of short-term pleasure.

Desire for immediate pleasure will always compete with desire for long-term joy. In every moment, you must choose which you prefer. If you prefer the latter, you will do what will bring the greatest long-term benefit, irrespective of time.

It’s common to seek for rewards in the tasks we engage in from moment to moment, but the joy available through those means is inherently limited. To maximize your long-term joy, you must condition yourself to place the value of future consequences above your present situation. This is not as simple as preferring delayed gratification, as there is no reason that your overall purpose can’t connect to and generate positive feelings in the present. To find greater, longer-lasting joy, you must upgrade your motivation from the rewards available at the task level to the rewards available at the purpose level. This is one example of how the life plan provides a more sophisticated and correct paradigm for understanding so much of which can’t be understood in simpler structures.

The life plan helps you see the consequences of your actions with a more sophisticated and longer-term perspective. With it, you are armed with reasons to perceive your well-being as something other than however you feel in the moment. Instead of passive and unconscious bodily reactions, you perceive and receive punishments and rewards in the context of the bigger picture, with a more accurate understanding of the value of the choice at hand.

In this more amplified context, you can transcend the limitations of rewards and punishments at the task level. While you will continue to enjoy task-level rewards, your main motivation will be transcendent. For example, you won’t just lift weights to feel good while lifting weights, or even to look better in the mirror, but because you know exactly why you need to in the greater context of obtaining the greatest joy in life.

As you grow into a broader mindset, you will have to intentionally contradict the automatic association you make with your present action and the present result. You will have to learn to prefer the rational expectation of the long-term result for the immediate emotional response.

Using present good feelings to guide present choices is a surefire way to minimize future good feelings. Positive present feelings are the rewards for prudent past choices. Good feelings from good past choices are a key ingredient to maximal joy.

Because awareness increases through time towards greater truth, the only way to maximize joy long term is to maximize your knowledge of the truth and the alignment of your actions with it. How you feel about something will only align with how good it actually is to the extent you know the future.

What feels good today will only lead to what feels best tomorrow to the extent that you can accurately predict the future and confidently choose the best of the options before you. In the event that you correctly appraise all options and choose what has the greatest net benefit, you will continue to feel joy in your choices. In the event that you choose emotionally or incorrectly appraise the net benefit of the situation, you will eventually feel less joy because of it, and potentially even feel sorrow and regret that retroactively robs past joy.

An emotional mindset will never accurately anticipate the value of the future. To find greater joy, you must learn to predict and value the future honestly, and this can only occur through exercising reason in preference to emotion. Only the rational approach will result in your willing sacrifice of the present for the sake of the future.

Long-term maximal joy is found through learning and choosing what improves the most, which almost always means choosing against immediate pleasure in favor of much greater future gratification.

For some reason, humans conflate what feels good or bad with what is actually good or bad. We do this in spite of having the ability to reason, which empowers us to identify and choose what is best longterm even if it doesn’t feel best right now. Only by seeking for what is actually good—independent of how it feels right now—can you optimize your long-term feelings.

Reason is a powerful tool that allows us to transcend the limits of unthinking emotions to evaluate the actual costs and benefits of available options and calculate what is best. When we rationally judge something by its merits, we make a moral judgment of its value through comparing its cost and benefit as dictated by our beliefs. We do none of that when we merely judge something by whether it makes us feel good or bad.

The folly of allowing our emotions to guide us instead of using reason is like navigating to a desired outcome by walking in whatever direction takes the least effort compared to using a map and compass. Following the path of greatest-present-feeling is guaranteed to lead you to a place of lesser joy than what you would have reached through the exercise of reason.

What we colloquially call “good feelings” are, more often than not, not good at all, and what we call “bad feelings” can very often be good. Not only is the pleasure of the moment distinct from the actual goodness of the moment, it tends to be the opposite.

Whether a feeling is good is not determined by how pleasurable it is. Whether a feeling is good is determined by whether it yields perceived improvement or not. Perceived improvement will, in turn, yield joy, which is the most pleasurable feeling there is.

Never underestimate the effect of the meaning you perceive in the experiences of life. Enduring joy is derived from meaning, and the meaning we find or don’t find in life’s experience will determine how much joy we experience and hold onto in life. Internal meaning applied to external circumstances can provide enduring joy in spite of fluctuating external circumstances, including those that lie outside of our control. Internal perspective can transcend external circumstance and can perceive value beyond any amount of suffering possible here.

What makes an experience good is not the pleasure of the moment, but the meaning of the moment. When we experience what we perceive as valuable, we consider it good even if it is painful, and when we experience what we perceive as not valuable, we feel bad, even if it is pleasurable. While a person touching a hot stove would experience a bad feeling, the same sensation felt by a firefighter in rescuing a trapped person would elicit great value; a person suffering from lifethreatening pain might claim this is a pure negative sensation, but a mother giving birth interprets her pain differently. Meaning makes all the difference.

Those actuated by emotions think they are reacting to things outside of their control, as if the effects of their emotions were as inescapable as gravity is to a person who falls off a building. The truth is, you don’t have to feel bad even if bad things happen to you any more than you have to feel good when good things happen to you. You control how you feel by how you react to what happens to you, and you do this by how you interpret reality. Emotional reactions are just as information-based as the most deliberate rational choice. The only difference is whether the interpretation is intentional or passive.

Emotions are powerful tools that can assist us in beginning, continuing, and valuing what is good when they align with your purpose, but they don’t always align with your purpose, and quite regularly point in a different direction altogether.

You want your emotions in play when they help you achieve your goals. You don’t want them around when they make life harder than it already is.

It is possible to feel absolutely terrible while doing exactly what will best advance your purpose, and it is also possible to feel amazing in the moment you are acting as opposite as you can to your purpose.

Future feelings can only be maximized through present exercise of reason. Reason alone can accurately gauge long-term cost and benefit. To maximize long-term joy, you have to develop the ability to accurately predict the future and the discipline to choose the path of greatest long-term net benefit, even when this requires choices that presently feel much worse than alternatives.

The amount of joy that you encounter in this life will very much depend on how much you learn to appraise value through long-term rational calculation rather than short-term emotional experience.

Your ability to appraise and choose long-term rational value will depend on the wisdom you develop and the time you take to actively think about and reflect upon the past, present, and future.

Your ability to experience anticipatory pleasure can be changed, and as you change it, you will increase the audacity and timescales of the goals you are willing to attempt while experiencing much more joy along the way.

Humans, by default, assign enormous preference to the present, even at the expense of the future. It is human nature to prefer shortterm pleasure to long-term progress.

Test how well you are considering the future by injecting the following questions into every decision you make.

What timeframe am I considering when making this choice? It is rare to consider the effects of a decision over a lifetime, let alone for subsequent generations. Would I change my decision if the long-term consequences I expect occurred in the next 24 hours? Many decisions would be made differently if the decider valued their future as much as they value their present.

Much of what we see as an individual’s vices are really just an attenuated ability to register the value of future reward in the present. For example, researchers have shown that people with eating disorders do not experience pleasure from looking ahead to future events.

Through repeated iterations of setting and attaining goals, you will lengthen the time horizons of your experience of joy. With every iteration from planning to achievement of goals, you will gain increased evidence that long-term progress in your purpose provides greater joy than short-term pleasure.

What we feel is real—but it doesn’t necessarily reflect any part of reality except what exists inside of us. Emotions are a channel of information, but they are perhaps the least useful because they can have so little fidelity to reality. You are the conductor of a symphony of incoming information and outgoing action; emotions are merely one musician in the orchestra.

Emotions are very helpful for signaling that action is needed, but they don’t accurately help us determine what action is needed. They ought to trigger intentional entrance into rational mode, not dictate action directly while bypassing reason. Most people prefer a certain response when emotion is triggered: they get angry, they flee, or they ignore. Which do you prefer? When you notice yourself entering your fallback, stop and think about why you feel how you do, and what you can do about it.

You can and must acknowledge the reality of emotions without yielding to them. You can and must recognize the existence of your feelings without assuming there is a valid reason for having them. Your feelings do not justify your actions. They never can. Only reasons can justify actions, and if you choose to promote feelings to reasons, you are, by definition, an irrational person.

We live in an irrationally emotional society where peoples’ feelings take precedence over rational thought and even objective reality, as abundantly manifested by examples that increase in quantity and magnitude by the day.

The validity and worth of emotions is determined by how aligned with reality they are. A feeling divorced from reality cannot endure the revelation of what exists but is as-yet unknown. Because reason is the means through which we discover reality, enduring feelings cannot exist apart from reason. While feelings can exist and can be powerful without reason, they can only persist as long as the underlying ignorance upon which they are based endures.

To gain greater joy, you must understand something about objective reality—a concept that is antithetical to those who believe reality is constructed from their feelings. Those who insist on persisting in ignorance or willful delusion will only be disappointed time and again, as reality will eventually always force itself into and shatter any illusion with pain proportional to the degree of correction.

Pleasure based on ignorance cannot last, and it will always be replaced with greater misery in the face of reality. You will not continue to find joy in what is revealed to you as folly. This may well include something from the distant past, and it can happen no matter how significantly joyful you found it at the time.

Long-term maximal joy requires accuracy in understanding reality and living according to the greatest benefit. As you live according to your best understanding of reality, you will learn more about it. As you gain a greater understanding of reality, you will learn to value corrections in your beliefs rather than see them as unpleasant.

The way most people experience joy in the present is through baseless expectations based on wishes about the future. To the extent your expectations about the future are false, your present joy will be robbed from you and exact an emotional penalty that exceeds any benefit your false joy provided.

Accurate anticipation of the future holds the promise of greater present joy with fewer disappointments. Your ability to trust in your belief that your present actions will yield the future outcomes you predict will determine how much enduring joy you will bring forward into the present. The unwillingness of normal people to make and live plausible long-term plans precludes them from experiencing the greater portion of joy here and now. Meanwhile, surprises in one’s expectations of reality are almost always of the type that cause negative feelings until and unless one becomes so acclimated to the process of learning that they interpret discovery of their own previous limits in a positive light.

You’ll only perceive present opportunities and stretch towards future potential up to the limits of your belief in the value of what lies beyond what you presently see. As you consider the value of potential future options, don’t limit yourself to how things are here and now.

Your desire should expand to the fact that future outcomes exist that are far beyond the best thing you can currently imagine. Remember, joy is Pareto distributed, and that means that in all likelihood, whatever you have experienced in your life so far is insignificant compared to what is possible.

Discipline is the practice of acting in submission to a chosen purpose. Discipline is how well you execute what should be done in spite of how you feel about it.

Discipline comes from purpose, not feelings. When you transcend your feelings in service of your purpose, you become disciplined.

Feelings are fickle, and those governed by them are slaves to a master they can’t summon on demand. Your purpose, on the other hand, is always waiting for you whenever you choose to attend to it.

Discipline can overcome any feeling. You can’t always directly control how you feel right now, but you can always control what you think and do. When you are disciplined, you have complete control over your mind and your actions. You choose what you want to think and you do what you want to do.

Discipline is explicit and active. It requires intentional consideration of all options of action available and the selection and execution of the choice of the greatest long-term value.

Discipline detaches from the short-term. Discipline frequently requires you to act contrary to your short-term feelings.

The complexity of reality guarantees that those who are paying attention will look back at past decisions and realize that they would decide differently if they faced the same situations today.

Consideration of past decisions tends to fill people with guilt and shame. These feelings do not need to occur, even when you learn more and better after the fact. Guilt and shame come from a recognition that you did less than the best you knew at the time, not from having learned something better after the fact.

While you feel guilty about something, you still haven’t done all you can to fix it. When you have done all you can to address a problem, you no longer feel guilty about it. When you do all you can in all the most important things, you will be completely free from guilt.

There is never anything you can do to change the past. You can and should identify past mistakes because it means you have learned from them, won’t make them again, and now have the wisdom to help others avoid them. If you realize something you’ve done to hurt others in the past, it gives you the opportunity to try to make things right.

A wonderful benefit of the life plan is that it provides evidence that you did the necessary due diligence to formally define what your best looks like according the character qualities you most admire, your present values, your present understanding of reality, and the many demands of your present life.

As you live according to your life plan, you build protection against future guilt or shame. In the event that you upgrade the qualities you most admire, change your values, learn more about reality, and so on, you will know that what you did was exactly what you believed was best, and you will even have a written record of why you felt that way.

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

Many people believe that their choices are determined by their feelings, and that they can’t change their feelings. The common presumption is that your body controls your mind and that your happiness is a result of your external circumstances or your body chemistry. Those who believe this see their actions and emotions as fused together and act as if they have control of neither.

When people believe that their actions are dictated by their emotions, they will act more poorly than they otherwise would. Every facet of their lives, including their character, will only be as good as their environment. People like this can never feel good about themselves, because life is difficult enough often enough that evidence of the existence and optionality of their flaws will be too abundant to ignore.

While most people live their lives as slaves to their emotions, you must realize that you are the master of your own life. If you let your emotions dictate who and how you are, you will never have anything like what you could otherwise have.

How you feel certainly makes it easier to choose one way or another, but every person has the power to choose however they wish, no matter how they feel.

It’s not simple, it’s not easy, and it’s not instantly possible to fully achieve, but with consistent effort, you can learn to subdue your body to your mind and discern and choose the best options no matter how you feel.

Emotions come through the body, but both their generation and our response to them depend on choices in the mind. Emotions occur at a subconscious level, but the choices we make that influence their creation and dictate our response to them occur as conscious choices. A great deal of their generation comes from our past choices, and what we do with them thereafter is completely dictated by us.

How you feel about something is completely separate from what you do about it. As sentient beings, humans have the power to choose how we act based on our thoughts, no matter how we feel. It is possible to act to most fully advance your purpose even while feeling your worst.

Acting contrary to your emotions can feel as challenging at first as choosing to hold your breath while walking into tear gas: it is unnatural, you have to do it on purpose, and it is uncomfortable, but it is still obviously better than the alternative.

Often, it’s not enough to merely try to think differently. Contending with emotions can be a full body exercise. When you seek to feel differently than you do, engage in physical activities or go to physical spaces that are more likely to produce the feelings you seek. For example, when you are angry, you can do things that generate peace. When you are overwhelmed, you can do things that bring completion. When you are depressed, you can have some fun. When you are exhausted, you can rest.

The more you intentionally choose what is rational over what is emotional, the easier doing so will become. The more you practice rational self-control, the more you will find your emotions bending to your actions, rather than having your actions bending to your emotions.

A large component of emotional regulation consists of what we do with our emotions after they are generated.

Most people don’t choose how to act based on reason. Instead, they act in response to feelings formed as subconscious internal responses to their external environment.

For these people, reason is only used post-hoc to contrive justifications for decisions already made, typically subconsciously.

Basing your decisions on the interaction between your external environment and your subconscious emotional response to it is a terrible idea because it is so unlikely to even approach the possibilities that intentional response can.

You should never do or not do something only because of how you feel in the moment, whether those feelings are good or bad. If you operate only on what you feel, you will never undertake the conscious and deliberate effort required to attain the potential joy you can experience in life. There is a better way.

It is possible to exercise reason before acting, proactively shaping your environment, and enjoying the feelings that come from constantly doing the best you know.

In order to become more rational, it is necessary to learn to insert a separation between emotion and action. Learn the art of pausing and thinking, even in the most intense, surprising, or boring events.

The idea that human action is a choice has been resisted by some who ask: “What about unconscious actions?” Habits are situations where our reaction to stimuli is not determined in the moment, but determined by the sum total of many conscious decisions over time.

Where an unconscious action came from is far less important than the fact that its continuation is your choice. Regardless of the source, every action is subject to your choice of whether or not to change it. We can change the way we react to things.

Choice and difficulty of choice are two different topics. It is undeniably more difficult to lose several hundred pounds than it is to lose several pounds. It is undeniably more difficult to shed a lifelong habit of anger than it is a new one. But all of these are questions of cost, not questions of possibility. Every single habit is breakable—the formability of habits prove the possibility of their undoing.

Those struggling with unwanted habits frequently lament at how difficult they are to break. Habits can be broken the same way they are formed: one choice at a time. The amazing thing about habits is not how hard they are to break, but rather how quickly they can be broken relative to how long they take to form! In nearly if not every case, the time required to break a habit is only a fraction of the time taken to practice it.

Short-term negative emotions are frequently required in the path to the greatest long-term joy. To obtain the greatest long-term joy, you have to develop a continuous habit of sacrificing the present for the future.

Any limit on present sacrifice necessarily translates to a limit on future joy. Meaning is what produces the longest and strongest joy. Intimacy, investment, commitments, and all other things that generate the greatest meaning require the greatest sacrifice.

What makes you feel good right now will probably make you feel terrible long-term, and vice-versa. The path to unspeakably great longterm joy can be unspeakably terrible in the short-term. For example, great loss reveals areas where you lack what is required for greater joy, significant affliction seems to be the only path to gaining true appreciation for what you would otherwise undervalue, and both of these lessons are required to attain deep joy.

When it comes to joy, you can't have the greater positive without first going through a greater negative. If you see a purported path to greater joy that doesn't include new costs, the path is a lie, any apparent increase in joy from it will be temporary and, in the end, it will leave you with less joy than you started with.

Comfort almost always inclines away from growth, and growth alone can maximize long-term positive feelings. The pain of improvement is always less than the pain of staying the same.

Most decisions are made based on how we feel here and now, and yet so much of our feelings come from how we decided in the past. The composite of your past choices establishes the foundation of your present feelings.

Your present feelings are the result of a past chain of decisions, whether you recognize them or not. Feelings flow from long term choices, much as the water in your house will run in the direction and to the destination of the pipes that carry it, whether you see those pipes or whether they are hidden within the floor. Those familiar enough with how this works can accurately predict how you will feel later based on what you are doing and why you are doing it now, just as a plumber can locate and trace your pipes.

Even feelings that seem to occur all of a sudden are actually the result of a process. The more enduring a feeling, the greater the likelihood of longer processes to generate it. While intense feelings can occur in a moment, those that do don’t last. An enduring feeling builds over time across countless decisions, much like building a retirement account.

When the result of accumulated choices is negative, you will face the daunting but navigable challenge of reversing the course through successive actions oriented in the opposite direction. This visceral process is well-known by children who have had the pleasure of creating a whirlpool in a circular pool and then spinning around to reverse the flow.

When the result of accumulated choices is positive, you will face the tailwind of continuing to make things even better with the help of momentum already flowing in that direction. Every additional effort impels greater acceleration, much like cycling downhill while shifting gears.

In all likelihood, the amalgamation of your present mood is not the result of a monotonic process up or down, but the culmination of decisions that each yielded contributions in either direction. The more unified your actions are over time in one direction, the more actions it will take in the other direction to significantly alter your long-term feelings.

The connection to future feelings is through present actions, not present feelings. Present feelings only connect to future feelings through the actions you take in response to them.

The intensity of positive feeling in one moment does nothing to indicate what will be felt in the next. In fact, some of the strongest negative feelings are a result of greater joy retroactively revised by new unexpected information. For example, when someone you love very much betrays you, the pain is not limited to the action, but how it destroys the perspectives underlying the prior joy you experienced over the duration of your relationship.

We long for the past and future while being imperviously oblivious about the present, when the present has so much more to do with how we feel long-term than the past or the future.

The most important thing you can do when feeling less than ideal now is choose how to act to feel better later. You may not know how to turn a cloudy day sunny, but you can choose what you will do on cloudy days in order to best enjoy the sunny ones when they happen.

A person who generates feelings lives a life unrecognizable from one who follows feelings. One who makes choices to generate future feelings is wholly different from one who makes choices based on present feelings.

Are you a feeling generator or a feeling follower? Do you act according to how you feel now or because of how you want to feel later? Do you work, sleep, eat, exercise, play, or do anything else you do because of how you feel now, or because of how you will feel later?

It is well known that the more you think about your emotions, the more terrible you feel. Focus on improving your choices and your feelings will automatically improve. You change how you feel by changing how you act. There is no better way to feel better than to become better. The more you improve your actions, the better you feel. This is well-known in neuroscience, but you don’t need to be a scientist to figure out what every honest person understands easily enough.

You maximize present pleasure by doing what feels best now. But to maximize future pleasure, you must do what is best now, no matter how you feel. Act according to how you want to feel, not how you actually feel, and you will find yourself feeling better in no time at all —usually later in the same day, and almost always by the next morning.

How would you feel if you did the best you could possibly do, all the time? You would feel the best you possibly could! To maximize enduring joy, always do what is best. You will never feel your best while doing less than your best. You will never feel your best until you do your best.

When you don’t feel your best, it is much harder to do your best, but realize that when you don’t feel your best, your best becomes less than it would be if you did. Always do your present best, no matter how depleted you may feel. The investment of whatever you have to give is all it takes to turn around bad feelings.

Training yourself to push through bad feelings with good action is only possible through rational appraisal of long-term value. Relying on rationally-calculated long-term value is required to entice a person to do what does not feel good at first or in the moment in order to encounter greater long-term outcomes.

One way to change how you feel is to make and follow a plan: enumerate and choose actions that best advance your purpose, given.

your present resources. When you find yourself in a poor mood, focus on planting your next crop. Every gloomy moment is the fertile soil on a rainy day that provides the ideal environment for planting a bumper crop for the next harvest.

Your power to affect how you feel relies solely on your own choices, not the choices of others. Most of your emotions are a result of what you do. As you make better choices, maintain rational direction, and train your perception of yourself and the world, you will vastly improve your emotions.

As long as you let life control you, you will be miserable. Any happiness you feel will be fleeting, or it will be robbed from you later, and you'll end up worse off.

As long as you are alive, you have the ability to choose. Your mind is unassailably sovereign. You probably also have a lot more power over what happens to you than you would like to admit.

You can’t always choose what happens to you, but you always have the choice of what you will do about it. For example, if someone else hits you on the finger with a hammer, you will feel pain whether you like it or not. However, you have full control over how you respond to that signal. You get to choose whether to shout, shake your hand, dance around, retaliate, or laugh. As holds true in many cases, most of these options will share similar outcomes, but one has an outsized effect, for better or worse. In this case, retaliation could land you in jail and severely curtail your remaining opportunities in life.

What you get out of life will not be determined by your environment, but by what you do in spite of your environment. What you get out of life will not be determined by what happens to you, but by what you do in spite of what happens to you.

You are not an automaton. You should not act like one, you shouldn’t talk about yourself as if you were, and you shouldn’t allow others to, either. Every time someone does something that bothers you, ask: “What am I going to do about it?” If you have options, go with the best. If you can’t think of a way to improve the situation, let it go.

When you encounter a positive feeling, you will tend toward seeking to preserve it. You will undertake behaviors that sustain the present good feeling instead of investing the present good feeling for the greatest good feeling in the future. This is why it is so difficult to start the next task after finishing a goal, or to get down to work when you feel euphoric.

This pattern of behavior is not too different from how people react to sudden windfalls of cash. Those who win lotteries are much more likely to spend their newfound wealth on short term pleasure instead of using it to preserve or grow their assets.

In each moment, we receive the dividends of our past actions. While you don’t have a choice to avoid suffering, you do have the choice of how much you use it to improve yourself and others. Good choices tend to frontload suffering, and always pay a return on the investment. Poor choices do not escape suffering; they only delay it, and at a very high price. For example, the pain of regret never goes away without paying the price of the honesty you refused to initially exercise, plus all the interest you have accrued in delaying it.

Just as there is a difference between building a dividend and paying it out, there is a difference between creating positive outcomes and enjoying them. Just as with good financial choices, with practice and intent, you can learn to merge the good feelings of the result with how you feel in the actions that produce it. Those who are successful tend to associate positive feelings with what generates them instead of a separate phenomenon. For them, the reward is less separable from what generated it.

Doing what it takes to feel good does not feel good until you’ve amounted so much experience that you’ve conditioned yourself into a deep expectation of relatively constant good feelings through tenaciously consistent best action in spite of unrelenting bad feelings.

When you repeat an action over time, the feelings of the effects will merge to become experienced during the cause. The stronger and more correct your beliefs, and the more continuously you live up to them, the more you will come to associate good feelings with the actions that generate them. Consider, for example, what happens to a person who establishes a habit of health. When they first begin eating healthy foods, exercising, and getting sufficient sleep, they will see all of these things as a sacrifice. Within a short time, they will see so many benefits and tie them so strongly to the inputs that generate them that they will feel the endorphins of a workout as they workout, see sleep as much more valuable than anything else they might otherwise do, and healthy foods as being more satisfying than alternatives.

Each day this modern world presents to us a constant immersion into limitless demands for our attention. It seems to require a neverending effort to remember from moment to moment that we remain the arbiters of our attention, even while it is necessarily focused on whatever we are attending to in the moment. We retain the choice of what to attend, in spite of how powerfully anything draws us in.

In whatever fashion they may come, and whether they be prolonged or momentary, occasional breaks from the intensity of the demands of life provide opportunities to exercise our choice and remind us that we have it.

In moments of unstructured time, our subconscious desires will guide our actions. It is no secret that when outward pressure to attend something specific is alleviated, most people revert to seeking short term pleasure. The automatic guidance system of human beings is toward feeling as good as they can right now. There is an alternative guidance system—that of feeling as good as you can all the time — but that requires the intentional exercise of reason.

Through reason, a person can exert the moment-to-moment effort required to remember the value of each moment. Our lives are composed of nothing but moments, and it is in each moment that we realize or miss the only chance we have to make the most of our lives.

While most people regard most moments as having little meaning, a rational outlook shows that every single moment is connected to the greatest possible meaning. In the default emotional outlook, the only thing that matters is how you feel right now. In the rational outlook, anything that matters—no matter how long it takes—is maximized through what you decide right now. The rational view suggests that every moment has the greatest value that will only be attained through using it in the best possible way.

Every moment is a choice from an ever-changing set of options. When you make present choices well, you gain power and wisdom to make future choices better. When you ignore the choices before you, they will be made for you in ways that will most assuredly make your life harder than it already is.

Most modern people are so busy that their lives seem like a neverending conveyor belt of factors beyond their control than a wellmanaged series of decisions. Life will keep feeling out of your control until you begin to take control. Your life will only become more manageable as you recognize and take responsibility for the things you can control.

Perhaps the most important time to take extra care in what you choose to attend is in the early morning. By waking up earlier, you create a buffer zone before the demands of life place you on a more rigid track for the duration of the day. The early morning, after some acclimation, is the time of day that provides the ideal resources to marshal for the greatest daily impact. Early in the morning, you will have the freshest mind and the greatest hope, and these combine to form the ideal setting for contemplating the deep things in life or making consistent contributions to some meaningful long-term project.

In the rational view, time is worth whatever you make of it. There is no such thing as free time, only wasted time.

Any system that requires perfect motivation is going to fail. The fact is that everyone has to deal with energy and mood variations, and while there are many tricks to reduce their frequency and occurrence, they will persist.

What you get done is going to depend to a large degree on what you do when you don’t feel optimal. What we do when we feel the worst tends to matter the most.

The best time to set goals, make plans, and execute tasks is when you feel good. But you won’t always feel good. Most people will feel at their best only a small fraction of the time. One of the benefits of planning is what it enables you to do, even when you feel bad.

The worse you feel, the more intentionally you will have to be to impart forward motion to your goals. Many would call this willpower, but doing so diminishes the clarity of what is happening, ascribing too much of it to some magical inherent force rather than empowering you with an actionable mechanism to do more and better than you otherwise would.

When you feel unmotivated, switch over your fuel from short-term pleasure to long-term purpose. This is akin to your body switching from aerobic to anaerobic respiration: it’s much less easy, but it can keep you going for a lot longer. It takes a different approach, but that approach works, and it is fully within your control.

The beauty of the life plan system is that it gives you everything you need to make the most of the times when you aren’t at your best. Continuously focus on the highest priority item you have the resources to handle, and you will keep moving forward. This is much more than a mere matter of productivity—the more you continue to work through bad moods, the faster you will get over them!

When your mood is low, the secret is to just keep moving forward, no matter how slow your crawl becomes. Don’t act based on how you feel right now. Instead, become robotic in rational consideration of what you are doing. When you aren’t feeling great, you need to apply laser-like and even robotic focus on execution. Just stick to your to do list, and keep going. Turn off your senses. Ignore them.

Most accomplishments are the culmination of many small actions, not the result of one sudden act. You will be amazed at how much your willingness to plod forward in suboptimal situations will culminate in exceptional productivity in the long-term. You will be amazed at what you can achieve even under the greatest opposition by simply focusing on and accomplishing the tiniest next step.

The life plan provides you the option to remain in the highest possible productivity even when conditions require flexibility. No matter your internal or external conditions, you can scroll down your priority list and find the highest impact item that you can handle at present. And you will keep moving forward.

In times of less than perfect mood, you are going to have to shift your priorities, and that’s ok. If your highest priority task requires hitting a boulder with a heavy hammer as hard as you can until it is broken into small pieces, you will not be able to uniquely work on that task while it remains incomplete. You will have to repeatedly whack it when you have strength and the skin on your hands remains intact, go do something else when that is not true, and come back after you recover. The boulder might remain the highest priority, but while you lack the resources to address it and are doing what can be done to get them, you will need to shift to the next highest priority.

Every gloomy moment is a gift to increase your near-term and long-term joy through exercising the faith to mentally recognize that your present feelings do not define inescapable reality, and that better feelings are most likely to come after better works.

When you aren’t pursuing goals at all, or when the goals you set are not actually something you want very much, you’ll find yourself filtering your actions by what feels good right now. Worthwhile goals will almost always require you push through short-term negative feelings.

Well-constructed, purpose-based goals will provide a source of value that exceeds the temptation to soothe your feelings. For example, if you really want to get into or remain in shape, your desire to do so will exceed your desire to stay up late, eat poorly, and cut workouts short.

Each person will constantly be assaulted by waves of feelings that will impede their ability to plan audacious, purpose-focused goals and execute the highest priority tasks toward those ends.

As you conduct your planning sessions early in the morning, at the end of a day, or whenever else you are best disposed to have the greatest optimism and hope, you will always have a daily to do list that places you on the firmest possible foundation to fight the emotional battles of each day.

As you work through each day, use the granularity of your to do list as an asset in the battle against unhelpful emotions. It will be much easier to convince yourself to keep moving with a specific task at hand, consisting of a particularly focused action for a limited amount of time, than it would be to pursue some open-ended generic work.

Sources of and Solutions to Mental and Emotional Anguish

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

You are in the process of getting it. You aren’t willing to do what it takes. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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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