Alrighty folks here we go again.
So far on this sight I’ve payed a lot of lip-service to practicality. Pragmatism this, pragmatism that, blah blah blah so on and so forth. Well, today I want to write something actually practical. While the theory and mindsets are practical in a very ultimate way, it is necessary to pair this worldview with a steady stream of real-world actions over a long period of time. As I’ve stated before, true enlightenment consists of both self-realization, which is to say seeing yourself as one with all of reality, Love, the embodied realization of universal consciousness, but equally important is self-actualization. This is the set of habits of mind, emotion, and action that comprise the basis of one’s personality and one’s lived impact on the world. As you can imagine, these practical habits are pretty darn important. That’s why I’m writing an article about them. So here goes.
As human beings, we are composed of millions of habits and micro-habits. Every tiny firing of any little circuit of neurons in your brain, and any accompanying experience, emotion, thought, or physical movement, no matter how miniscule and unnoticed, can, if repeated enough, become a habit. The vast majority of these habits are unconscious and unimportant. The way you tie your shoes, the way you tilt your head when thinking, etc. They are habits that just don’t really make that big of a difference.
But, as with everything in life, there are a few habits that are very important and central. These habits are fundamental ways of being and thinking that determine how you relate to reality as a whole, and often indirectly create and influence many other habits. I often call them exponential habits, though they could also be called central habits. They are at the center of your being, and everything else rotates around them. But more importantly, mastering them at a high level and doing so early in life creates exponential results for you, much like the old trick of how investing your money very early in life, because of compound interest, gives you an exponential advantage over someone who would have to invest much more money later in life to achieve similar wealth.
So if you don’t have good habits, the message is, start now!
While investing money early is a great thing to do, I say it is not actually that wise. Much more wise is to invest in yourself early on, in your very personality, skills, and way of being. Investing in people is almost always more powerful than investing in money or physical assets, because people have nearly infinite potential. This is why I’m so passionate about education and parenting, and growing our children in the most important ways starting as early as possible. Not only are children more easy to influence than adults, doing so results in exponential gains for these children, as the earlier in life they are loved and nurtured, the more fundamental these effects will be in them and the longer they will have to be built on throughout their lives.
So I will focus here on ways of developing people, as people are the most fundamental unit. Be advised, however, that these same principles apply to virtually anything that builds on itself over time, whether that be a set of information and knowledge, an organization, a social institution, a nation, or anything that grows and develops. It is how I am attempting to build this website. It is also how I attempt to build my life, starting with the most core parts of myself, going outwards to the outer layers of myself, then focusing on the things that are close to me in life, and finally out to the outer layers of changing the world.
So what we want to do is start as early as possible, with the most important, most fundamental, most exponentially growing, most central skills, and then move onto more tertiary, less central skills. Keep in mind that this is a very general and vague principle, that while very important, it must nonetheless take into account the real world. In the real world all different areas must be developed simultaneously to some extent, and furthermore, you often can’t help but develop more than one area at once. This principle is more of a guideline than a hard-rule, and should be seen as something that while important, has nearly infinite exceptions and caveats (as is true of basically everything in the real world. Nonetheless, here I am, trying to write it out. That’s the way it goes.)
Part of this is simply developmental obviousness. We need to start by teaching kids to walk and talk. Then basic math and reading. Etc. etc. up into adulthood. That’s well accepted and seems pretty obvious. What I’m going to argue here though, is that certain skills that are as important, in some ways even more important than basic math and reading skills, also ought be taught, learned, and practiced throughout life.
Many of these are psychological skills. Some are metaphysical skills (meta meaning meta in the sense that they are fundamental ways of relating to reality, hence they are the skill behind doing many other complex and tertiary skills more effectively.) Some are relational skills. The thing that brings them all together is that they are all skills that help us to be good and effective people, in the most fundamental sense. They help effectively achieve our own happiness, and they help us to be effective in helping those around us be happy, and at the highest level can even help us create a happy world.
I have created a short list of a few of the exponential skills that I have discovered that help me to be happy and effective. They are listed very roughly in order from most central to least central. This list, however, is by no means meant to be exhaustive, or even thorough. I won’t describe these skills in depth here, may write deeper on these things at some point, but this is just meant to give a cursory sampling to give you sort-of the flavor of what I’m talking about. Here goes:
Priorities
Prioritizing seems so meta as to be almost silly. This whole piece is basically about prioritizing, it is the very concept I am trying to emphasize here as a whole. Which, of course, is why I am writing about it first, as a specific skill. It’s really important.
Having priorities that we refer to often, in order to make decisions, is something we all do. The problem is, we mostly do this unconsciously or sub-consciously at best, and kinda suck at it. Furthermore, we are often on autopilot, meaning our highest priority becomes comfort, habit, and convenience. While these aren’t bad priorities in themselves, they really shouldn’t be at the top of the list. But when we fail to reflect on ourselves and really think about what we want to do and who we want to be, good priorities fall by the wayside. Having good priorities arises from a highly conscious, deliberate process, and keeping true to these priorities takes sustained effort over time. Referring to priorities may become habitual, but it always take energy and effort. Since this energy and effort produces exponential results, I’d say it’s very worth it.
So to have good priorities you want to sit yourself down, ask yourself what your worldview is, what’s important to you, what are your values and, well, priorities.
This isn’t so much a one-time event as an ongoing process throughout life. Every time you take an action in life you make new discoveries, learn new things. Your priorities are constantly in flux, and understanding which priorities should be focused on in any given moment is as much an art as it is a science. Perhaps Love, for example is more important to you than food. But when you’re about to starve to death and you have to choose between a hug and a cheeseburger, I hope you pick the cheeseburger. Even if you’re a vegan. You can’t do the exponential skill of harassing other people into becoming vegans if you’re dead, so sometimes priorities connected to living momentarily trump other priorities. Although I suppose you could then just say living is a meta-priority. You get the point. It can be complicated and messy in the real world.
By having good priorities, when you think about, do I wanna go smoke meth, or spend some time with my family? Hopefully, family outweighs meth. If methheads had a little better grasp on priorities and deliberately consulted their priorities, they would realize that family is more important than meth, and so in the long-run they would achieve better results for all involved. Hooray! Everyone wins.
Basically this whole list I’m writing here could be an example of high-priority principles.
Understanding/Critical Thinking
Okay so it’s pretty important to understand what the fuck is going on. Like, if you think a pink-elephant in the sky rules over us with lazerbeam eyes and will vaporize anyone who thinks the number “13,” that’s not a very accurate, good, or useful understanding of the world. But be warned, there are a lot of people out there who have thoughts not that far off from this. It’s called religion.
It’s really important to understand the world. Most people, for the most part, have an agreed upon understanding of some basic facts about the world which help us to live together as a functional society. This is good and dandy, but only a small portion of what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about what does it mean to live a good life. What does it mean to be a good human being. What are the principles of the universe that are most fundamental to how good things arise and are sustained.
Again, I’m being pretty meta with this principle. You can expect that for the first few principles on the list, as they are what allow you to organize and apply all the other principles effectively. This principle is the principle of understanding all the principles that govern the universe, seeing their interplay and interpenetration, seeing how certain kinds of good build on other kinds of good. This principle is the principle of looking at the universe, seeing how it functions, and being able to then make interventions to make it function better. These all fall under the purview of understanding.
Good understanding, again, comes from conscious, deliberate reflection. Most of our understanding is based on things we were taught in childhood, as well as early childhood experiences that taught us the world works in certain ways. We learned things about authority, knowledge, god, ethics, principles, society, relationships, and etc. that have largely stayed with us, unquestioned and unaltered throughout our lives. These explicit and implicit understandings influence our priorities, and influence how we live our lives. You might say these understandings are our core beliefs about ourselves and about reality. They’re damn important.
We can change these assumptions we have by thinking critically. We ask ourselves questions like, “what do I ultimately want?” “who/what am I, really?” “what is the nature of the universe?” “is there a God, what is it?” “is there an afterlife?” “what is happiness?” “what does it mean to live a good life?” etc.
We may also want to study religion, philosophy, wisdom traditions, psychology, self-development, physics, evolution, history, sociology, social change, business, technology, art/pleasure/sexuality/aesthetics, government, economics, and other things that are fundamental to how human life operates. Studying these things deeply, with an end in mind of really understanding the universe and how to live in it positively and effectively, can then give you a roadmap that helps you do everything else better.
By first learning at least a basic understanding of how all this fits together, especially as it relates to YOU, one is then able to figure out what areas it is important to focus on more deeply, which parts are most central, and which are less so. I.e., to prioritize. But it should be noted here, prioritization IS more important. So you should always/generally gain understanding in the areas of highest priority first, then understand areas of less significance. And you should always be gaining understanding with the attitude that it is largely for the purpose of helping you better prioritize what’s important, so that as you are gaining understanding, you also have your understanding better and better organized in relation to what is primary.
I will add one more point, which is that when seeking understanding, it is sometimes useful to focus on what the collective deems important, and sometimes it is not. Let me explain. The collective of humanity deserves pretty weighty consideration, as it contains the collective wisdom of all previous people amalgamated and given a particular gestalt to each person through their interaction with society. So I experience humankind through my interaction with the people around me, the books, the schools, my parents, pop-culture, religion, and the news. All these inform me of what the collective of humanity has collectively decided is important. It is good to look at these things and give them due-weight, because: A. there is a lot of collective intelligence gathered in the deep stores of everyone put together, and B. you’re kinda stuck with humanity as it is, so you better learn to deal with it.
So by looking critically at all of human knowledge and human systems and human thought, and what they have made primary, it is possible to gain a basic understanding of some things that are pretty basic and important for us all. But here’s the problem: Sometimes humans are blithering idiots. Sometimes we have mindsets, practices, and ideas that are basically species-wide cognitive distortions, group-think, bad habits, mal-adaptive survival mechanisms, evolutionary shortcomings. We’re imperfect. And just because Christianity is the most popular religion, and Islam is close behind, doesn’t mean they’re surely right. It definitely means there is something worth looking at in them, and they definitely need to be taken into consideration when deciding how to interact with the world, but just because an idea or practice or institutional structure is prevalent, doesn’t mean it’s good or right. To prove this just look at humanity 100,000 years ago. We probably all believed the same things about how some magical God in the sky must be peeing on us and that’s what rain is, but just because we all believed it doesn’t mean it was right. I’d venture so far as to say that the peeing-rain-god theory is incorrect. What do you think people in 100,000 years will think of us and our ideas?
Hence, I will pair with this principle another separate, though equally important, complementary principle, that of CRITICAL THINKING.
Yeah, basically that just means consciously and deliberately stepping back from things and asking yourself the big questions about what is true and what is important. Then thinking it all through with clear, logical thinking processes, that determine truth on first principles and deep thinking, rather than what is just socially popular and accepted, or what feels good and comfortable to believe emotionally, or what you were taught in childhood. So applied critical thinking about all aspects of your understanding is another super important skill.
Growth Mindset
I’ll let Carole Dweck take this one. Growth mindset simply means believing you are capable of growth, and taking action to grow yourself. It can also be applied to others, and the world at large. It means seeing the future as being full of infinite possibilities, based on the actions you take now to move it in that direction. It means growing and expanding, learning new things, new skills, and believing you can and will become your best self, and create a good world. You might say a sub-skill of this skill is learning to love learning, learning to enjoy growth and expansion, and see them as valuable, pleasurable, fun, exciting. While this is partly a matter of developing your self-efficacy and self-confidence by achieving gratifying, rewarding, real-world accomplishments, I believe the motivation and energy for growth mindset comes largely from your visioning of the future, which I will discuss presently. See Carole Dweck for more on this principle. Or maybe I’ll talk more about it later. Anyways.
Teleology
This principle is extremely important, and sadly not one that most people really get or really practice on a deep level. As a basic definition, it means letting the potential future effects of your actions determine what actions you take. It is being future-focused, and making decisions based on their long-term effects. That’s what teleology is. Seems simple right?
That’s what I thought. But people don’t really do this one very often. Or at least not often enough. That’s probably because we never evolved to think crazy long-term. Our brains developed the prefrontal cortices which allow us to have schemas which make it so we can think relatively long-term only the blink-of-an-eye ago on an evolutionary time-scale. So this one is something we’re still getting the hang of. I guess you could say that with all these skills, but this one seems particularly so, perhaps because it is based on accurately modeling and attempting to skillfully influence the entirety of reality projected out through time. A somewhat cognitively advanced function you might say.
In a way this is even more important than prioritizing, understanding reality, and having a growth mindset. Perhaps the reason I saved it until now, is that it is dependent on having a relatively good grasp on all three of those skills in order to work.
So yeah. This skill simply means looking at the future, thinking “what could it be?” as in “what do I want it to be that seems feasibly achievable?” and then figuring out what actions to take to move you toward that future. It means, as far as your actions and choices are concerned, shifting your automatic reference point to the future, and having the future be what is most real to you, your actual reality, and doing what is best to create the very best future possible for yourself and everyone else. In its ultimate form, this means taking ultimate responsibility for the universe; as with ultimate responsibility, comes ultimate power.
This is also a fundamental principle behind “Love is God,” which means we make Love our God, and take actions based on what will do the most good for the future of humanity, hence Loving all of humanity – the widest net of teleology we can possibly cast.
This practice/habit/principle or whatever I’m calling these things, is related to a similar concept which I will also discuss more deeply later, called opportunity cost ethics.
Opportunity cost ethics, simply put, is an ethical view that takes opportunity costs of our actions as being just as important as positive effects of our actions. So if I give you my candy bar it means Johnny doesn’t get my candy bar, and that’s just as valid and worthy of consideration as the effect of you getting it. But the further you go into the future, the more pronounced this effect becomes and the more difficult it is to comprehend and calculate. Again that’s kind-of the point of this whole thing. The earlier you do something, meaning NOW, the more it will affect the rest of the universe from this point on exponentially.
And this is especially important for things we don’t do. This can be understood as the reverse side of entropy and disorder, their shadow or converse if you will. Because there are an infinite number of things you could do, choosing the very best thing is infinitely more powerful than all the other things which are non-optimal.
So, I could walk into the yard in front of me, pick from a billion pieces of grass, and eat it. I could do nearly an infinite number of meaningless actions like that, or some less meaningless actions like going into my house, picking out one of the hundreds of songs I have, then playing it. Or I could pick the very best song that I most want to play, and most want to learn for some future reason like playing at a concert or wooing a potential lover, and I could play that specific song, rather than a random one. Or I could think “What are my priorities right now? What’s most important? What will have the greatest positive exponential effect on myself and the future of all humanity?” So you see, in a way, the very fact that there are so many choices, is what causes choosing the ultimate choice to be so powerful and charged with consciousness and meaning. We usually do things that are very much in the middling range of actual importance and teleological value, and I would say we are nearly constantly missing 99.999999999999% of all good and all happiness we could be achieving, when considering the entire billions of years of human posterity that may stretch on after us. Which, by the way, is precisely why I am writing down these ideas. I think writing them down is one of the most important things I could be doing, because people learning and living by these principles, even just a little bit of the time, would be a really good thing, and so that’s why I chose to do it. Living what I preach yaknow. Tryna be that change. Brutha. Livin it up. Keepin it real. It’s just how I roll. Not joints muthfucka. Talkin action. Talking reality. Talkin We’re REALLLLL MORTY. WE’RE REAL. That’s the best episode. But I digress. Oh btw, playing and having fun is also important. I’ll get to that.
There is a limit to what we can calculate and how effective we can be in this habit of teleology, but our effectiveness in this is increased by increasing our abilities in all of the habits listed here. This one’s kinda the big cheese though.
Oh to finish what I was saying, that’s opportunity-cost ethics. Thinking not just what am I doing now and what are the immediate effects of that, but by doing this action, what actions am I missing out on, and what could be the potential effects of those actions on everyone throughout all time, stretching on to everyone for infinity. Jeesh. It’s no wonder I’m so bad at making decisions. When trying to decide do I want the soup or the salad and you have to take that into account, the pressure is ON. Seriously tho, I take like 10 minutes to make simple unimportant decisions. Probably more just cuz me more than because I actually do this with every decision tho. You create heuristics that broadly categorize and make habitual “types” of decisions based on your identity and core beliefs. This applies more to more central exponential decisions that have larger effects because of potential good divided by energy and psychological energy drain to complete the actions the decision requires. Sorry. I like math.
Yeah a looot more to say about this, important stuff, but I’ll do that later.
Influence Selectivity
This one sounds way too technical. I did that on purpose, because I hate the name, which will serve as a reminder for me to change it later, cuz I’m not really sure what it’s called but that’s basically it. Being picky about things that are in your life and influence you.
So if you’re going to read a book, it’s worth it to look up the rating of the book, ask friends, think about your priorities, etc. to find good books to read. Since books have a huge influence on your thinking and who you are, it’s worth doing solid research to pick the books that you want to influence who you are.
This principle simply says it makes sense to put seemingly inordinate consideration into decisions that will put something in your life that will have an exponential effect over time. In other words, things that affect you inordinately deserve inordinate care and consideration. Duh. Most people also really don’t do this one enough. They spend relatively little time thinking about what religion they should believe, what they want in friends or in a mate, teachers or guides, careers, books, media consumed, etc. Anything that comes into your life, and then consumes vast quantities of your time, and then becomes a part of you and influences who you are and what you do from here on out (basically, anything that produces words, which means ideas that you consume, or creates habits that control a lot of your time and energy.)
So, again, these things happen on autopilot to one degree or another for most people, and what we wanna do is take a time-out, maybe an hour every day or idk whatever man you do you not tryna live your life for you just givin some ideas ok? Sit ourselves down, and really think through, “What do I want to be like? What’s the best future version of me? How do I get there? Do I like and admire and look up to the kind of person who would let this kind of influencer be in their life? Or are there better people, tv shows, podcasts, books, ideologies, etc. that I would rather have making me into who I am going to be? Again, looking at my priorities, really carefully, critically, over a longggg period of time, til it becomes habitual, and coming back repeatedly to refine my postulates as I try them out, what most aligns to who I want to be, what I value, my goals and priorities in life, and what influences will help me move towards that thing.
This can be difficult sometimes. Like when you know what kind of friend you want, and then a month into the friendship you realize the person isn’t that kind of person. Dumping friends sucks. So does dumping romantic partners. And changing religions. And trying to rip yourself from a tv show, social media, or other drugs. Basically, with every one of these, the earlier you make the right decision, and move yourself on track in the direction you really want to go, the easier it will be in the long-run. So you want to get good at looking at things, making quick judgements in alignment with your values, maybe trying them out, trying out different alternatives, and being very cautious and careful to really make the best decision, then being completely steadfast to your decision indefinitely, unless or until you realize or are given evidence that perhaps there is a better influence you could have in your life. It is an on-going process, but it gets easier and easier the more you assume the identity, beliefs, and habits of the kind of person you want to be. It becomes an upward spiral, rather than a downward one. You experience the joy, the power, the Love, the ease—of always being your Best Self, A.K.A. ENLGITHENMENT MUTHAFUCKAAA.
Mindfulness & Sensitivism
Okeydoke, so here are two ideas, one not very original, the other slightly more original (at least I made up the name of it.)
Mindfulness is basically being aware of what’s going on in your brain and in your environment. It is deliberate, I think, though perhaps it can also become habitual if you practice it long and diligently enough. Though that takes quite a lot of practice. It’s hard when you didn’t learn to start doing it til u were 18!
Perhaps the most fundamental two aspects of mindfulness are mindfulness of you body and of your thoughts. Your body includes all your senses, interoceptive and exteroceptive, and is important because, for one thing it is how we experience our emotions and all forms of pleasure, happiness, and enjoyment inf life, and for another thing, it is where we get all of our information. It has its own intelligence, and is the apparatus we use to influence the world. So being mindful, being consciously and deliberately aware of your body and its experience is pretty darn important.
Perhaps being aware of your mind, of your thoughts and other types of mental processes and manipulations is just as important. This is where all our ideas are, it’s where we perform the deliberate part of our mental gyrations, it’s where we have the most freedom, control, influence, and ability to influence ourselves and our life. So it’s nice to be aware of it, so that your thoughts, decision-making, and hence your actions and your life aren’t on autopilot. Cuz that’s just a shame. A darn shame. A darn tootin shame. I can’t overemphasize what a shame it is when you have zero power and influence on your life. That’s what happens when you have very low mindfulness.
While some people are somewhat naturally mindful of their thoughts and their bodies and their environments, I would say most people need practice being mindful to have awareness of these things. Meditation is one way of developing this skill of mindfulness. The ultimate achievement of it is the realization that everything that you come into contact with is essentially a formation of your consciousness. In other words, we never actually interact with the world directly. There’s a bunch of atoms flying around in quantum semi-existence and numbers and formulas and math and physics and chemicals and laws and it would be weird. No. We experience our own consiousness’s qualia, its representation of things. In other words, everything we experience is essentially consciousness. So when you realize that on a deep level, everything you experience, including your own body and internal thoughts are all experienced as representations of consciousness itself. You are conscious of everything as consciousness, you have a meta-consciousness of it of sorts. And so that’s like being mindful of it.
Or from a more practical, less theoretical and metaphysical neo-advaitan angle, you could practice meditation every day, being mindful of your experience, and learning to be more and more mindful in your daily life, until you are continually mindful, aware that you are aware, all the time. This is kind-of the same thing, though perhaps different. It is more skill-based than viewpoint based, and while it is less fundamental from a metaphysical standpoint, it is perhaps simpler and easier to teach, and less corruptible. It’s as simple as, “here are the instructions of how to do mindfulness meditation. Okay. Now practice until you can do that all the time, throughout your whole life.”
So anyways, when you have developed a lot of mindfulness, you have a spacious feel to your experience, and feel like you are able to hold each alternative, each thought, each experience in your awareness, and consciously and deliberately choose how you will relate to things and what you will do. This (as all the skills,) though perhaps especially this, is a skill I have not mastered, though I have spent hundreds, probably thousands of hours trying to practice it. It is very difficult, and it is quite easy and natural at this stage in human evolution for most people to almost never be deliberately mindful. Mostly, they’re pretty unmindful, and often their consciousness is stuck in the default-mode-network, DMN for short, one of the most low energy, draining, and destructive energy circuits known to humanity. This will probably shock future readers who will all have mastered mindfulness universally from a young age and may no longer be aware that they are doing it.
Embodiment, another word for being mindful of the body, though it is sometimes a term that is more closely associated with “being the body” rather than observing it, is an important concept here. It is basically experiencing yourself AS your body, fully in the moment and experiencing your experience. Again, this is really important for enjoying life and experiencing pleasure. It is mindfulness without distance, experiencing yourself directly as the qualia of reality, rather than as the consciousness of qualia. While mindfulness implies a witness, embodiment is more of a feel of “I am my body” directly, rather than being some floating space entity who is witnessing and indirectly experiencing the body.
This concept of embodiment also applies to all mindfulness, not just body mindfulness, so you can directly be your thoughts, be space, be other people, be your environment, etc. While it is different than mindfulness, I can’t say it is better or worse, just that it is different, and worth noting as something that is also valuable and worth exploring.
Finally, sensitivism. Being sensitive to your experience, being as consciously sensitive to reality in every moment as you can, which includes all aspects of mindfulness I have described, and infinitely more. This is the deepest levels of mindfulness and embodiment. It is becoming so exquisitely sensitive to everything that every sound, every feeling, every thought, every iota of being, every mote of consciousness is vibrating and alive with flailing energetic arms and beams shooting out in every direction. Okay I’m exaggerating a little bit. But if you take enough ecstasy it would probably feel something like that.
Sensitivism is the a theory I have invented with hypothesizes that we miss out on approximately 99.9% of pleasure simply because we are numb. We are not attentive and intimate with our experience. We just haven’t been trained to. Even mindfulness teachers often miss this fact and don’t have a deep understanding of it. I’m not even sure who to point you to that teaches this. Which is why I invented it. I’m sure someone else already thought of it and teaches it, so if you know of any such teachers/teachings/philosophies etc. please let me know at (my first and last name) 1111 at g m a i l (dot) com, email heading “Sensitivism for Jordan Arel,” but here’s some of my thoughts on it. For what it’s worth.
Yeah I mean I kind-of already said it. Basically we can embody something so deeply, with many thousands of hours of practice, that we learn to experience the radiant pleasure of being more deeply than most anybody can fathom. Every single experience has an energetic feel to it, a subtle emotional quality of sorts, an aesthetic wabi-sabi musical luscious sensuous beauty to it. You know the difference between when you’re kind-of having drunk sex on like autopilot with someone you don’t really care about, versus you haven’t ever had sex before and you just married the love of your life and you’re making love for the first time ever and you did 5 points of molly beforehand and just got off a 100-day intensive pleasurable sensation-focused meditation retreat? Yeah, well it’s kind-of like that, except like the difference is even a million times more, and it’s not situational dependent, because it’s an actual skill you have learned to generate through changing the brain-waves and ways of functioning of your own brain, and so you are continually, automatically, relating to all of reality in this way, in a way that energizes and motivates you and self-perpetuates the upward spiral of everything else I’ve been speaking of. So yeah. That’s basically sensitivism.
These ideas are based on things I’ve experienced and heard of others experiencing, so while they’re somewhat original, they are fully based on reality. Like all my ideas, they will need to be measured and empirically tested to see if they pass the test of experience, and if not then throw it out, but I know that at least to some degree, the more sensitive you are to your experience, the more you enjoy it, and the more happiness you get out of life. So there.
Oh, another thing on this. If you develop continuous sensitivism and/or mindfulness in life, I would also say this is an experience of being in continual flow. Flow is a state of optimal experience and functioning. It is a state of selflessness, timelessness, extreme efficiency and extreme pleasure. Professional performers, athletes, meditators, and anyone who does an activity for enough time will learn to go into a state of flow when doing it. By being continually sensitive to every moment of your life, you have created a state of continual flow in regards to your experiencing of reality itself. So I believe another way of framing and understanding this type or aspect of enlightenment is simply being in continual flow.
Enjoyment
Which brings me to the next point! Again enjoyment is a dry awful word I don’t want to use, so that’s why I’m using it, but also I just really don’t know what to call it. Fun is too specific, its broader than that, so is play, aesthetics is to vague and esoteric sounding, pleasure sounds too profane, poetic-ness is too poetic, enjoyment is fine for now.
This one comes straight outta the rule-book of habits itself, so it’s scientific and proven. Having fun works folks. Feel good. You knew that you would now. Feel good. So good. You got pleasure. Bum bum bum bum.
I’m also adding this one now, though I’m tempted to put it farther down (I actually hadn’t listed it at all but just thought of it so I’m doing it,) because it’s one of my worst traits. I also want to do so much good and am so future-focused that I often forget to relax, enjoy, play, find pleasure in the moment. But it’s important. Let me tell ya why. Oh by the way, it’s why I’m writing the way I’m writing. I could write this whole thing in a very academic tone, and organize it better, and write better, but that would be a lot of work, and ultimately be an energy-drain on me and make the whole process much less fun. So I’m writing in a very banter-y conversational fun sort of way because it makes the process more fun for me. Albeit probably annoying to read 😛
So the reason why fun, pleasure, enjoyment, play are important is that they are inherently energizing. I don’t know the full science and psychology/neuroscience/physics/metaphysics behind this, though would be interesting to explore, but basically doing things that feel good meets some primal evolutionary (and perhaps metaphysical, also social) needs in the body, and hence makes us do those things more.
So, no matter what you’re doing, making it fun, making it playful, and finding some way to make it rewarding, even if it’s not inherently rewarding, is cool. It helps us be energized and get done the things we want to do.
So for example, you could have the most efficient, optimal, teleological, prioritized, highest possible good, perfect schedule in the world that puts down to a T exactly the directions and rules for how to live every moment of your life so as to be basically perfect. That’d suck right? Where’s the fun in the rigid, dry, robotic, dusty and dead philosophy of optimal efficiency when there’s no room for pleasure, messiness, silliness, play, affection, sensuality, joy, kindness, and even the aesthetic quality of the so-called negative emotions?
These things give life its flavor. Its punch. It’s the fire breathed into the equations. It’s delightful wabi-sabi, perfect imperfection, poetry, asymmetry, wobbly overflowing ecstatic blissful radiant vibrating pleasure spilling over in every direction.
So one type of enjoyment, as I already mentioned, is using sensitivism to get into the inherent pleasure already potential in every experience. This is probably the most essential and important form of pleasure.
Next is meaning. I kinda dissed doing what is meaningful a few seconds ago and calling it dry and boring and shitty. I’m sorry meaning. I apologize. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean to make you cry. Please come back!
Meaning is perhaps the highest form of pleasure. It is the feeling you get when you just blew up the death star and everyone is jumping for joy and crying tears of joy. It’s when you just saved kids across the world dying of starvation and you got the little thing in the mail that shows the picture of little Jimmy happy and healthy and look at that, good job you, you literally saved Jimmy’s life. Good feeling eh?
It’s saving kids from genital mutilation, animals from lives of torture, saving the world from climate change, and being a good parent—loving your child into the best possible person they can be. Essentially, it is anything that has a high leverage of doing a lot of good, so it is doing literally anything on this list of priority-habit-principles when you connect them back to the ultimate effect they are having, and realize that ya dun good, buddy. It’s literally the best feeling in the world.
Perhaps the next best feeling of pleasure is relationships. Connecting with people. It’s really nice. I’m running out of steam so gonna move on.
Next is pleasures of self-development. Doing things that grow and expand you in different ways.
It also feels good to take care of your body and the species’ basic needs, like eating good food, sleeping, and having sex.
It also feels good to hurt and torture people and other sentient beings. To molest children and and rape women and torture and cause people pain and kill people you hate and do drugs and before I offend anyone else etc. These might be called sadistic and masochistic pleasures, sometimes fetishes. They feel good, but really they’re bad, and so you might call them negative pleasure. You can see how these are directly on the opposite side of the top pleasures of super meaningful stuff. So yeah. It kinda makes sense. If ya think about it.
Anyways, I’m getting distracted. The point is there are different orders and levels of pleasure, and not all are created equally. We tend to call the lower forms of pleasure pleasure, and the higher forms meaning, connection, bliss, enlightenment, etc. I argue that we should think of them all as simply different forms of pleasure, as they are all pleasurable, just some are better and more important than others. So yeah, basically my philosophy of pragmatic utilitarianism is exactly that. A philosophy that sees pleasure as the ultimate reason for the universe, but some kinds of pleasure are more pragmatic in supporting other pleasures, hence ultimately have higher pragmatic utility and should be regarded as higher forms of pleasure. But that could be its own article, so ENOUGH! On this one for now.
Oh! I almost forgot. Playfulness. Playfulness is an important part of this. Being playful goes somewhere on that list of pleasures. It’s kinda hard to define, but it has its own chakra I decided, the tongue chakra. That’s the playfulness chakra. It’s all about deviating from the norm, rhythmic, spontaneous, joyful ecstasy, always expressed and self-indulgent. It is done for its own sake, there’s a book on it called “Play” I’m in the middle of. Good book.
Humor is perhaps a specific aspect of playfulness. Also deserves a lot more focus, but I actually remembered this later and just came back and entered it in, tired now so not going to write more on this right now.
Also, aesthetics in general should also be on the pleasures list. Learning to see beauty in things, and some things you might argue have inherent beauty in them. Aesthetics can be extremely broad and virtually everything in the universe has some aesthetic quality to it or another. Wabi-Sabi is the Japanese ideal that we should appreciate the beauty in imperfection, and in a way imperfection is the most beautiful thing. Also why they fix stuff by putting gold in the cracks of it where it broke. You may have heard. Also somewhere in Asia they torture animals and practice foot-binding and other shit because they think the suffering makes the animals taste better and helplessness is beautiful and shit. You get the point. Imperfection, pain, self-abuse being seen as beautiful can be taken too far and perverted and institutionalized and this happens around the world. Don’t do that shit.
Oh yeah, and I already mentioned, one of the main points of pleasure is to even find pleasure in things that hurt. Learning to love sadness, anger, etc. and have unconditional love for yourself and your experience no matter what. Super hard to do, but extremely rewarding. Shadow-work or integrating and loving the shadow (your painful and hidden aspects) is its own topic.
Oh! One more thing on this. I sometimes say that Work should equal Play should equal Love should equal Life, like this:
Work=Play=Love=Life
What this means is that every moment of life you are working by choosing the right priority that will achieve the highest possible good. That’s your work. You can always work, even if you’re doing something enjoyable, you can still follow all of these principles to the best of your ability always no matter what. Work.
Play means your always make it fun. You always do it in a way that is energizing, that is sensitive, that is aesthetic, poetic, rewarding pleasurable in as high and as many ways as possible. Sometimes you may even do stuff just because it’s really enjoyable, and the energy you get from it boosts everything else you do.
Love means “Love is God” as I have said before. Everything you do is done in way that is loving and geared toward taking ultimate responsibility. You have love for yourself, and love for the world. This is both in the type of actions you take, that is, making good choices, but also in the quality of how you do it, as in in an energetically pleasant, enjoyable, energizing way, being Loving toward yourself in the moment and expressing that in the quality of how you do things (sensitivism) I realize this blurring the lines, but that’s the point, Work exactly equals play exactly equals love exactly equals life. They are all present, fully, all the time, and all co-supporting and connected.
Life is just life. So it just means your life. Like right now. You’re alive. Life is every moment. Of life. Like so, it’s the fact that work and play and love are your whole entire life. Every aspect of everything that exists is always work, always play, always love, every iota of your life. When life is this fun, you never retire, because you’re always committed to always working, you never “work,” because it’s always fun, and you’re always, always, always Love. Love is all. But that’s for another day.
Pragmatism
Pragmatism means that something works. It is scientific, proven, and has practical application in the real world that has been tested, confirmed, applied to life, and integrated with other principles and the whole.
So, I hope you’ve noticed, all these things I’ve been saying have very concrete real-world applications. It’s not heighty-flighty armchair theories pie-in-the-sky have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too that’s-just-how-the-cookie-crumbles easy as jello resces peantbudderkups
So, as I was trying to say before I had a small, very small play-seizure, still feelin the effects of that last section, these ideas are tried-and-true, tested, proven, they work. THEY’RE REALLLL MORTY!!! Right. So as important as it is to learn and study and understand and theorize and develop your mindset and etc., it is just as important, maybe even more important that what you do actually has real-world, measurable, quantitative, objective, provable, concrete effects and substance.
So basically, this principle just says test your damn ideas. And do so quickly. Rapid-prototyping and small batch-size are close cousins, which mean you don’t just test your ideas but test them as soon and as quickly as possible, then continue building on them, then test the next step-up, etc.
Though I will say, another aspect of testing your ideas is learning to observe and critically look at the real-world as it happens to other people. So always be on the lookout, and when someone does one thing, and it doesn’t turn out well, be warned, that’s probably a good indication that it is pragmatically, really, not a good thing.
Again this also goes back to looking at your influences, whose biographies or other media you read and consume, who your friends are, etc. You want to find influences who you can observe the real pragmatic effects of the things they do, and then you can mimic and copy those things that work, making sure, of course, that they also work for you in your setting, in your real world.
So yeah. You have an idea of something you think is good. Always make sure to test it and make sure it’s really right. And if you’re just hoarding ideas and trying to figure everything out but doing very little to actually apply things to the real world and have a real-world effect, you also get stuffy and annoying and people tend to blow you off as an intellectual who has no grounding in reality. And who’s to say they’re wrong? Ideas that aren’t applied are highly susceptible to corruption because they sound really good, but actually have disastrous effects because they’re lopsided, unintegrated, and have many ill-effects that are missed. This is also why channeled spiritual teachings sometimes fail, channeled entities are a huge amount of information, with little feedback or interaction with the real world. Marxism came from an intellectual who thought he had it all figured out and was pretty clever. Not great results. Maybe he should have tested his ideas on a smaller scale before unleashing them on humanity to swallow whole. We got some mad indigestion from that shit, brrrrutha.
So yeah. Test and apply your ideas. Hoarding ideas without testing and applying them can make them useless at worst (e.g., string theory,) which means they do suck up resources and hence actually do cause a lot of harm in terms of opportunity cost, so by no means harmless, but catastrophic at worst (see, Communism.)
BTW, this is another one I kinda suck at sometimes. Good to have self-awareness. I’m working on it. Oh yeah, self-awareness is another things that’s important, btw. But it’s kind-of implied in some of the others like priorities and mindfulness. But yeah. That’s important too. Being aware of yourself, moment-to-moment, as well as across time, knowing your faults and strengths, maximizing your strengths, and fortifying your weaknesses. This also happens to be why I have tried to stress “The Stupidity of Knowing” and my emphasis on agnosticism as a core principle. And like, really really, I really can’t stress that principle too strongly.
Oh! Also btw, this one is closely linked to the fact that everything in the universe could be a math equation. As in, everything truly is really scientific, everything could be expressed in terms of math, physics, and metaphysics, which is a deeper form of informational logic, just as mathematics are a physical, geometrical logic. So everything I’ve written here could be expressed in zeros and ones, put into a formula, and applied in the real world. That’s a very basic and important idea with all of these things. None of them are theories that are untestable, at least if we had basically infinite intelligence and Godly level technology and Artificial Intelligence and ability to measure every particle of matter, energy, and consciousness—If we could measure everything, then we could put all of these ideas and principles into equations, and all of it, even the so-called soft stuff like pleasure and art, could be put into equation which is essentially the mind of God. But I digress. Point is it’s measurable, mathematical, logical in the truest sense, that it’s meant to be precise and true and measurable, at least in principle (save some quantum stuff that makes measurement inherently imprecise, though I do, valiantly I might say, attempt to include that, more on quantum consciousness another day)
Agnosticism
It is really important to admit you never know anything for sure. To always question yourself for the deeper truth, and always know you may be wrong, or at least not totally correct. You can only increase your understanding and learn more if you admit you don’t know everything. You may estimate certain probabilities that certain things you think may be true, but it is wise to always leave some space of humility, admitting that you are not God, and there may be space to grow and learn. I have whole nother article on this already, and will say more in the future, so that’s all I’ll say for now.
Humility
I was thinking about adding this to agnosticism, then decided to just do it separately.
Humility means admitting that the universe is a lot bigger, and probably a lot smarter than you. It is appreciating that every person you meet is better than you at something, and being open to what you may be able to learn from every person. It means acknowledging that there is great wisdom and dignity in every moment you find yourself in, and respecting the sacredness of the universe you are a part of as something much, much, much greater than yourself.
You grow much more when you allow yourself to expand to accommodate others and the moment. Another related skill is the skill of allowing yourself to be underestimated. In many ways you can gain great advantage by appearing small and being underestimated. People also really appreciate humility as a social quality. It’s just real nice.
I will finish by saying humility must be tempered by taking infinite responsibility for the universe, and assuming you have nearly infinite power. It is a balance of submitting yourself to whatever the moment brings, but ultimately also always considering the ultimate fate of everything in relation to the moment and taking that into account.
Humility and being behind the scenes also increases safety and makes you less of a target for potential enemies. Versus, say, somewhat at the leading edge who is a clear charismatic leader who (at least seems) to be driving, leading, even creating a movement. Best to acknowledge and submit to the fact that the principles you are living exist in every person, and get behind those principles as they exist in institutions, or if needed create those institutions and allow those most skilled to lead them to lead them.
Practice
You can get good at literally anything. You simply need to practice it. A lot. Like around 10,000 hours. Sometimes more, depending on what and how good you want to get. This is closely tied to growth mindset, the belief that you can and will grow, but it is more on the practical side of it. This is about the skill of actually practicing something.
It is perhaps most exemplified in the idea of “deliberate practice.” This is goal-directed practice so it is teleological based on a vision of some skill you want to master. It is also pragmatic, as it is based on getting some form of feedback about how your practice is going, constantly adjusting and re-adjusting, monitoring yourself throughout to make sure you are continually getting better. These are some of the most basic aspects of practice, but there are many more aspects I will briefly touch on.
First, it needs to be a lot of hours. Meaning practicing something to get truly good at it will take years. And over those years you will need to practice for hours a day, most days. Around 15 hours a day for 2 years, 6 hours a day for 5 years, 3 hours a day for 10 years are good approximations to reach 10,000 hours of practice, which is an approximation of mastery. Basically, multiply the average number of hours a day by the number of years, and if you get 30, that means that is about 10,000 hours of practice.
So you need to learn to enjoy practicing, or at least not hate it. This may mean starting very slowly, just doing the stuff that interests you, the fun stuff. You must not over-exert yourself and get sick of the thing, so only do the amount that excites you and is fun. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
E.g., when I was learning to run, I HATED running, and was somewhat out of shape. So I started by walking a bunch. This started getting me healthier, and I would either think or listen to music or spiritual talks and actually enjoy it. Then gradually I started walking faster, which I didn’t mind. Then I started a very slow jog for like 1/10 of the time I was walking. Then gradually increased this, never ever letting myself feel unpleasant. Eventually I could run six miles and enjoyed the whole thing, I finally actually even learned to enjoy running. You can apply this to anything. Just do the easy stuff and find a way to make it fun. Do it in a fun, non-painful, easy way, even if that means 5 minutes a day for the first month, then 6 minutes a day the second month. After a few years of that, you’ll be doing hours of practice a day and start to get really good at what you’re doing, which makes it inherently fun as you start to get in flow.
You also want a good teacher, or good instruction whether that be videos online, books, an AI coach (yes, I’m talking to you future person,) etc. whatever. It helps to have the advice, encouragement, influence of someone who is good at the craft, and a good coach. Though there is also merit in learning some things for yourself, at least to some degree, developing your own style, and learning to learn and develop even in the absence of any instruction.
There are many other things to be said about the meta skill of effective practice. For now, suffice it to say you have to enjoy it, do it well, oh, and also keep doing it once you’ve mastered something, if you want to not gradually get worse at it. Maintenance is key. It is nice if you are developing skills that you will be using in your daily life and the real world, such as business knowledge, psychological knowledge, people skills, mindfulness, or some other skill that you will probably use every day for your whole life. Mastering skills that make your everyday life better is also just fun cuz it makes ur life better. Hoorah. I’m getting tired. Just donated plasma and now 12 hours later the caffeine is finally wearing off. Fuck I feel like shit. Anyways.
Could write a whole book on practice, in fact plan to at some point, practice is important and the essence of developing all of these habits and skills, but for now, let’s move on to next thing.
Relationships
Because this paper is getting long, and because I’m shitty at relationships, and because I try not to speak too much on things I don’t really know anything about, I’m going to condense all of the relationships skills into this one broad category. Just know that this set of skills is extremely, extremely important, it probably should be higher up on the list, but I was tempted to put it much lower, because like enjoyment, pragmatism, and moderation, I don’t do a good job so I feel it should be lower.
I’ll add on that point, I’m very much enneagram 5, the personality type that is basically the crazy genius type that sits in his closet all day thinking up amazing ideas. Like Einstein. Super obsessive, not great at relationships, goes overboard on stuff, neglects “leisure” for mastery of certain knowledge, and at times fails to really apply the knowledge in favor of just developing it theoretically crazily thoroughly. Classic five stuff. So there’s that. But hey, all these things I am working on very deliberately. So again, good self-awareness Jordan. You da man.
Anyways, relationships, they’re important because people are social creatures. We are infinitely stronger together than we ever could be apart. The greatest pleasures in life largely have to do with communing with others. People are important. I have always kept three categories of notes: spiritual, social, and other. So it has its own whole category. That’s how important it is to me. And I still suck at it lol. Getting better, but kinda suck.
Anyways, there are a number of people skills that are really important. Here’s a very brief overview of a few important ones. I’ll go into much more later.
First of all parenting and education are the most important social relationships, far above all others, for obvious reasons. They deal with children. And by getting good at parenting and being a teacher to kids, you will have a far greater impact than you will with almost any other social skills, because these social skills influence future humans on a massive, fundamental, exponential level.
Perhaps chief among parenting and educational skills is the skill of unconditional love. This is love in the deepest senses of that word, meaning you see the best in that child and all they can be. You desire deeply that they become the best version of themselves, flourish, and are happy. You see them as if they were a part of you, and so care for them as deeply as if they were your own self. You love them no matter what, and you are attuned and validate whatever they are experiencing while also helping them navigate toward their own greatest happiness and integration into the wider world.
Closely related to unconditional love is the skill of seeing the best in people. I always assume people are fundamentally good. Everybody wants the same things, wants to survive and thrive, experience love and happiness, have meaning and fulfillment in their lives. The only problem is the world is complicated and imperfect, and so these fundamental wishes can become very distorted and hard to see. Nonetheless, I always assume people are fundamentally good, and perhaps just haven’t totally figured out how to express that and integrate that in their environment. In this way I can see what I know and believe to be people’s true potential, their deepest and highest self, and see in what ways they are deviating from that. What misconceptions do they have? What traumas or experiences are prevent them from actualizing their deeper desires? What situational things are limiting them in ways the hide their essence and make them less than who they really are? By holding out for people’s best selves, and believing in them when even they may not believe in themselves, they become much more likely to manifest those traits that you see as the truest version of who they are. You talk to, listen for, and provide support for their deeper motives and higher wishes, and surely as the sun is orange that self begins to emerge.
Good communication is another important one. You want to express what you have to say clearly, with energy, and in a non-threatening agnostic sort-of way that acknowledges what you say is your own experience or your own opinion. By being precise in communicating yourself, thought thoughts, your feelings, both verbally and non-verbally, you show who you are clearly and your words become a powerful form of action and influence on others and the world. Communication can be exquisitely pleasurable, help bridge people together, create understanding and shared vision, purpose, values. There are many sub-aspects of good communication, but suffice it to say for now, communicating effectively is really important. Oh, and this also includes writing which is another form of communication.
Okay another thing in relationships is to be other focused. It is natural for humans to be self-focused, and so that is why I am stressing being other focused. It is also important to be self-focused, meaning standing up for yourself and being confident, looking our for yourself and expressing yourself fully, being true to your values, setting good boundaries, and that kinda stuff, so that’s super important too. But right now I’m focusing on being other-focused.
Because so many other people are overly self-focused, the relationship may only happen and be successful if you take the burden of providing them more value than they provide to you. The relationship can still be huge net positive for both parties even if it is lopsided with you giving more. So, for example, you want to really pay close attention and be attuned to the other person’s experience. You should seek first to hear them, then to be heard. Be sure to validate their experience and be empathetic to their views, so that you can communicate yourself to them in way that they will understand, and which will match their frames. The writing I have been doing in the entirety of this piece and most of this website so far is a TERRIBLE example of this. I am writing almost 100% for myself, meaning that it is probably jarring and unpleasant for others, both aesthetically in that it is simply the style that is most pleasurable for me, and idealistically, as it is largely me just trying to get the ideas out, even if it is very narcissistic in that they are really written in a way that I will understand and accept them even if they are not explained thoroughly or clearly at all for people who aren’t me. I am accepting that as this is a sort-of rough draft, but ideally the end product should be highly edited so as to be pleasant and clear to as wide of an audience as possible, taking great care to really be empathic to their views and experience and put it in a way that will make sense and be helpful and pleasant to them.
Being other-focused also means you should learn to ask great questions. Develop your insight, and ability to picture what’s going on with them, then ask things that may be enjoyable and rewarding for them to express, or that may help them see and clarify things that they don’t see. Or just helps you fill out your picture of them so that you have a clear shared map of reality and their experience.
One more thing on this point is to pay such close, alive, warm, curious attention to them that they always feel like the most loved, important, interesting, deserving of respect person in the whole world. No matter who you’re talking to. This (as many of these things) has a lot to do with changing your own beliefs about people and relationships, and then practicing skills of attention, emotional warmth, and etc. By developing yourself, and learning to relate with extreme intimacy, you can, again, bring out the best in people and make just about anyone fall instantly in love with you. This is also a big part of what gives someone charisma.
Oh, another thing in being other-focused, learn the skill of remembering people’s names, and put inordinate attention into doing this. But always forgive people for forgetting your name, as if it doesn’t matter at all. This is a pretty universal thing too, give people your best, always, but if they are not their best, give them the benefit of the doubt (though again you don’t want to be a pushover and have a lot of relationships with people who walk all over you either.)
Finally, learning to coach and help other people with their problems, in a deeply loving way. It is a fine balance here, and much skill is involved. Sometimes people really don’t want help, and all they need is empathy and someone to listen to them. It is well worth learning to be sensitive to people’s needs, what they want, and what will really be most helpful to them, and to balance and consider all these factors in order to be a good coach. If you can always be making people around you better, both by being and inspiration to them (another skill,) and by being a coach to them, this is perhaps the greatest relational skill of all. By making everyone around you better, you can be a shining beacon of light, and rather than you just being great, you can create a whole tribe of super-human awesomeness with much greater effect than one person alone could ever dream to have. Oh, and when people around you are thriving, they are also more likely to be helpful to you back. So it’s kind-of a win-win.
Ultimate Responsibility & Love stuff
Okay, so in my articles, “With Great Responsibility Comes Great Power,” and “Love is God,” I already outlined some of this stuff, so I just want to state it briefly again here because it’s like the most important stuff I know. So here it is.
Taking responsibility is important. It is the essence of power. If I say I am responsible for something, then I can potentially try to see how I can influence it, so taking responsibility is good because it allows me to have power to make positive changes.
Next, the ultimate part. Ultimate just means as big as possible. Ultimately you always want as big of goals as possible, because then you can see how to achieve them. You may need to have many interim small goals to ultimately reach your big goals, but by starting with the biggest goal possible, you have the biggest vision and can mobilize the greatest amount of energy, because big goals are exciting and motivating, and they help you see all the potential resources that are available and necessary to achieve them.
Additionally, teleology. I already talked about that one. In some sense seeing the future as the most important thing because it can potentially be much bigger and better than the present.
Also, I’ll mention law of attraction a bit here, which was in the article, but anyways it is a huge principle you should get in the habit of using. It means whet you focus on will grow. And so you should focus on the future you want, and use whatever means you can to bring as much energy, emotion, people, imagery, and experience of the things you want into your life. It is very closely related to vision and desire. Know what you truly, deeply want, on the deepest level, then put everything you’ve got into that. The pearl of great price as Jesus called it. Or something like that.
Another closely related point to law of attraction is “focusing on the bright spots.” In this technique, you find the one place where things are working, even if 99% of whatever you’re looking at is not working. Then you see what is going right, rather than focusing on everything that is going wrong. You can analyze and scale that, so that every bit of what you’re dealing with then utilizes that solution. Or if it’s system that is producing various behaviors, like a person only very rarely does a certain behavior, reward that behavior and put all your focus on it, on the bright-spot, laser focus your spot-light on it, and make it happen more. Can be applied in relationship, business, personal-development or basically anything else where there’s an uneven distribution of outcomes and you want to bring everyone up to a potential par.
Oh, and love. See all consciousness as one consciousness, and really think in terms of how to serve humanity in as profound a way as possible at all times. This must be balanced with proximity, meaning focusing on yourself and the things that are closest to you, taking really good care of yourself and developing yourself so you can actually have an effect on humanity at large. But nonetheless, ultimately, you should always, always, always, focus first and foremost on how can you best serve the entirety of humanity and all conscious beings—universal love, making Love your God. I’m starting to realize this article is kind-of scatter-brained and disorganized in spots, but that’s okay. Just tryin to get it all out. This should basically be the first thing on the list, though in another way it’s almost too fundamental and idealistic that it isn’t a habit so much as a view, but since I already wrote articles on this stuff I kind-of just excluded it but then was like “yeah maybe I should include it” so I did. But anyways. Whatever man lol.
Efficiency/Optimizing
I’m going to delve and indulge now, briefly, in a field that I haven’t thought about deeply in some time but that I cherish muchly. It is the field of efficiency.
Efficiency may sound cold and dry, perhaps one of the reasons I don’t use it too much, but it really means the same as highest or deepest, as in the highest, deepest, best possible good for everyone, Love, happiness, etc. Only efficiency we usually think of as applying to mechanical processes, and our analytical understanding of them, rather than as something human and messy and energizing. So there is good reason to use more energizing terminology, but sometimes using words like efficiency and optimal really is the most clear and best way to express what I’m trying to talk about, so I use it. In this case, I want to talk specifically about some things that fall much more squarely under the purview of efficiency, but I want to again stress, I see efficiency, in truth, as being simply another word for the way the universe operates at a deep level, as in God is perfectly efficient Love, achieving maximum happiness for the net effect of all consciousness throughout all time in the most efficient way possible. Efficient Love (also can be understood as the greatest happiness to unhappiness ratio) is the shape of the universe, and so by optimizing ourselves and our lives, we truly are achieving a divine goal and aligning more deeply to the true purpose and meaning of life. Or as I like to say, “Efficiency is Godliness.”
So again because this article is getting long, and noting all of the principles of efficiency in various areas will surely be covered another time, I will simply go here into a few of the most important principles around this topic which skitter across my mind.
Okay, first of all, what is efficiency? So efficiency is always in reference to some goal. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say efficiency in achieving our principles, whose goal, of course, is to achieve happiness for ourselves and others (Love.) So it is ultimately efficiency in achieving happiness. So now, you can have very poor efficiency, even negative efficiency in achieving that goal, for example taking a chainsaw and running around murdering people. This would achieve negative efficiency in terms of moving towards that goal of happiness, because you’d be creating suffering, the opposite of happiness, for others and probably ultimately yourself as well. It is not a very optimal, efficient strategy for achieving your goal. Optimal, by the way, is one of my favorite words. Optimal means the most efficient way possible.
Now in achieving happiness, another strategy might be watching TV. This would be much more neutral. It might make you a tiny bit happy, but it might also numb you out and drain your lifeforce, so perhaps overall it is approximately neutral, perhaps slightly negative or slightly positive depending on context and what show you watch. But its efficiency toward achieving maximum happiness for yourself and others is approximately zero, since there is probably about as much happiness gained as lost.
Now a final thing you could do is do pretty much anything on this list. Think about priorities. Read a book and learn about something important to you. Do something social with friends or family that’s meaningful and deeply enjoyable. Etc. These things move you clearly and positively in the direction of happiness for all involved, and broadly and clumsily speaking, the higher up on the list, the more efficiently you are achieving your happiness goal. Yayyyyyy.
So that’s what efficiency is. From negative, to zero, to positive, to exponential with the highest level things that make you more and more efficient over time.
Now efficiency can mean big picture decisions like this, what are you doing with your time, but it can also mean how you do those things. Are you doing them in a way that uses the least time, space, energy, pain, and other resources of yourself and others for the greatest possible gains? There are many facets of this in many areas. By doing anything more efficiently in your life, you have that much more resources to put into other areas of your life, and up your total efficiency. So even if you just mow the lawn more efficiently, that could give you more time to read a book. If ur really smart you might even learn to read an audiobook while mowing the lawn. Indeed, multi-tasking, as long as it’s not stressing you out, can be a great way to increase efficiency.
They say if you teach a man to fish, it’s better than giving him a fish. That may be right, but according to Bill Drayton, best of all is to revolutionize the whole fishing industry. I agree. Whenever trying to address any problem, think, “What is the most efficient, the optimal solution to this problem for myself and all those throughout all time?” Now, this is a very, very, very complicated question, which is partly why I’ve created this list of principles. What may seem efficient on one level, in one way, may totally invalidate some other aspect of efficiency. For example, it’s easier to give someone a fish than it is to teach them to fish, and easier to do that than to revolutionize the industry. But maybe revolutionizing the industry will cause the fish to go extinct. Or maybe you should just teach the guy to revolutionize the fishing industry for you so he can then go out and revolutionize other industries while you’re teaching other guys to revolutionize still other industries. Or maybe people should go vegan instead. Like, there’s a lot of options here. So think about it.
Whenever you think about efficiency, you need to also think about opportunity cost. What’s your ultimate goal, and by doing what you’re doing, what other opportunities are you missing, and would any of those opportunities more efficiently achieve your goal? Also, what’s the cost to efficiency of calculating opportunity cost. If you spend too much time trying to calculate efficiency, you may actually become less efficient, so you want to be sure to achieve the optimal degree of meta-efficiency.
Also, having fun and being energized are important, and that often means doing things that seem extremely, extremely inefficient. Remember, I am postulating that efficiency is essentially God here, and that God is also Perfect Love. That means that all suffering in the universe is the perfectly efficient way of achieving the most happiness. Try to wrap your head around that one. All things have their place, and while we should always try to achieve the optimal efficiency of happiness and Loving effectiveness in the most skilled way we understand it, we must also understand that the human messiness of life seems to exist the way it does, in all its glorious imperfection for a reason. At least believing that is what helps me sleep at night.
On that note, being sloppy is sometimes the most efficient solution. Certainly loving imperfection, or “imperfectionism” as I call it, has its own merits. It’s the wabi-sabi of appreciating every cracked moment of your broken dreams. But beyond that, sometimes things just need to get done quickly, and time is so valuable that doing it haphazardly is actually more efficient than any other solution. This is extremely important for perfectionists who feel the need to waste inordinate amounts of time on unimportant details, who must constantly remind themselves of this. The more time and energy you waste stressing over perfection, the less time and energy you have for everything that really matters. Now that’s just inefficient.
But hey now, don’t take that one too fast and far. On the other hand, it is often best to slow down, plan, and do things right the first time, with quality and care. Like if it’s something that matters, and if doing it wrong will cause a lot of struggle and strife down the line for yourself and others, than slowwww down. Don’t be in such a rush. It might take you 50% longer to do it right right away, but if that saves you 10x as much time later, or having to completely re-do it all over the right way anyways, then it was well worth it. So whenever you’re doing something important or where there is high leverage to affect many things down the line or something will be in place for a long time, slow down, and get it right.
Also, getting in the habit of knowing when to do things right and when to do them with imperfectionism is a great skill in itself.
Sometimes it is better to learn a skill rather than to hire out for a quick fix. Sometimes it’s not. Think about money, time, social utility, enjoyment, and learning in your calculations.
Another fun tidbit is always keep one extra of stuff you need so it won’t interrupt your flow if it breaks or gets lost or you use up the old stash.
Yeah. That’s it for now. You want to always consider time, money, energy, developing re-usable skills, building relationships, and etc. all the principles listed here in calculations in decisions, habits, ways of doing all things in all aspects of your life. Remember, even a little efficiency tweek or life-hack contributes to your overall efficiency, and your overall efficiency IS your overall happiness.
Self Development
Self-development, again, includes almost everything on this list. But here I’m using it to refer to practices you use to target certain areas of yourself that you want to improve. I’m not gonna go deep into this one, as my wrists are starting to hurt, and I’ll talk more about it also later.
Self-development is important because you are your instrument. You are the primary tool you use to do everything else you do. If you aren’t yourself strong and powerful, how can you achieve anything? So developing yourself in all ways and all aspects, physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, intellectually, socially, leisurely, aesthetically, musically etc. is all important. Here are like a very few aspects of development that are important.
Routines. Like for example, stuff you do every morning. Get up, meditate, brush your teeth, eat a certain healthy thing for breakfast, say some affirmations, journal, go to the gym, whatever. Night and morning routines are great. Having a routine (could also just call this a habit) when preparing for certain activities to make yourself better at them is a good plan. Like anything that’s important to you, have a way to get yourself in the mode and state you want to be in to do that thing. Like meditations, affirmations, visualizations etc. That’s one reason having a morning or night routine is great. You’re basically preparing yourself for your life that day, and I don’t know about you, but I think life is pretty important.
Yeah, like I said, meditation is important for me. It helps me develop mindfulness, see my own psychology, deal effectively with reality, and other stuff. Sometimes meditation is used in a wide sense to mean a huge number of different things. An important point is that you can use meditations or other practices to develop virtually any skill. So like, if you want go get better at saying hello, do a hello practice where you just practice saying hello. Or if you want to get better at being energized, just try to feel energized for a minute every day, then gradually increase that. Or focus. Or being empathic. Or literally anything. You can create meditations and practices for anything you want in your life. So go do it.
Also affirmations. Affirmations are great for re-programming your beliefs. So is The Work of Byron Katie. So basically anything you want to bring into your life, say that things as if it’s happening, giving yourself the feeling and experience of it happening, and you can attract the energy of that thing into your life. Works best if you are taking action towards that thing also, or if it is something that is purely psychological, like affirming the belief “I Love Myself” is one of my favorites.
Contemplation is another personal favorite. Just contemplating whatever you want to understand, using your curiosity to explore it. Super powerful for gaining insight and better grasp of reality.
Finally I’ll add free-form practices as one of my favorite things. It’s any practice where you just let yourself do whatever comes to you, whatever you want, spontaneously in the moment. So I’ve done a lot of a free-form movement practice, just letting my body do whatever it wants. But you could do a free-form music practice, or free-form meditation, or free-form speech practice (stream of consciousness, also journaling,) or literally any kind of free-form practice you want. These are really great because they help you develop spontaneity, get in touch with the moment and your own aliveness, and really manifest whatever wants to come through you.
Another thing I’ll add here is eclecticism and trying new things. This is the art of doing a little bit of everything so that you can relate to almost anyone about anything on a basic level, but even more importantly, you find and tap into all of your great passions, which can be many and varied, and the synergy of each one strengthens the other. You can think in analogies and see across barriers, and do things that most people can’t. Most people are too focused on one thing. I say try everything, and develop all different aspects of yourself. Don’t just like 1 or 2 kinds of music, like at least 18, and have given hundreds a fair chance. And same for everything else. Try stuff just to try it and make this a habit. It’s a great self-development rule that makes you better and once you get over the initial childish fearful, grossed-out, and snobbish portions of yourself, it’s super fun and opens up lots a doors and possibilities.
Healing work
Okay, so healing work could also be considered self-development, but it also couldn’t. I’ll explain why I’ve separated them.
When I talk about self-development, I mainly focused on positive stuff. Habits and practices and good things you want to build. Healing work focuses on the negative stuff. On your shadow, the parts of yourself and your past you want to run, fight, and hide from. It is just as important as positive self-developmental work though often more painful. Yet in some ways it’s even more rewarding.
Some say pain and difficulty are our greatest assets because they are what make us strong and help us develop grit. As well as humble and appreciative for the good stuff. And empathic and compassionate to others in pain. There’s some truth and great wisdom in that.
Post-traumatic growth is real, and many of the greatest teachers, poets, philosophers, and leaders of all kind have had great suffering in their life. Often, it is in facing their own suffering, in fact, that they achieve their greatest victories.
So healing work means facing your pain and dealing with it. It means making everything happen for a reason, whether or not there was actually one there. You become the reason. There’s little in life that’s more rewarding than working through your pain.
So, healing work is basically working through past traumas. Often it’s stuff from childhood, but not always. It means facing mental illnesses and dealing with them the holistic, hard way (as well as whatever way you need to. This stuff ain’t always pretty folks.) Much of my own healing work has been just sitting with my depression, my despair, my trauma, validating that it is normal and okay to feel what I feel given my circumstances, and giving myself complete, and total love. And lots of time. Working with a therapist or healer, if ya got the cash for it, can sometimes be very helpful, even necessary. Using a basic meditation technique that allows you to just sit with and be aware of what’s going on, but not suppressing anything, can be helpful. Again, it’s also important to meet yourself with deep love and compassion, listening to and allowing the parts of yourself that want to speak, feel, come forth to do so. Seeing and being a loving space for it all is often all that is needed, though sometimes helpful insights may also arise. It is also very important that you get into your body and allow yourself to feel your body during the process, as the body is where emotions, defenses, trauma, reactions etc. are really stored. For deep trauma a therapist is definitely helpful, if you feel the pain may overwhelm you. Deep healing can take months, or years. But worth every minute. And the deeper the pain, the greater the reward that comes from healing it.
One other thing, shadow work or healing work is sometimes not a single deep trauma, but a million little things. Many of these principles apply just on a smaller scale, and you can use it many times throughout the day for any negative emotion or darkness you experience. A helpful way of thinking about it is to see the pain as an indication light, like the check-engine light. When that happens you don’t unplug the light, you go to a mechanic. In this case, that means opening up to the pain, feeling it, allowing yourself to be with it and figure out what’s really wrong. Often that pain comes from a deeper unconscious pattern that is draining your life force. When you realize it is your reactions that cause most of your suffering, not life itself, you have complete power and responsibility for creating your own happiness, investigating your pain and reactions and yeah it’s really good. A lotta fuckin work though. We’re talking decades people. Sorry ☹
Also, addictions are another form of pain. They feel good but hurt you, and they are often an escape from a life that is less than totally perfect and pleasant. These include anything that hurts you and you can’t stop, could even include things like tv, social media, shopping, fast-food, compulsive thinking, and lots of other stuff besides just drugs. And healing work around all these addictions, and ultimately replacing them with good things is super important.
Self-Care
Okay this probably should have come before self-development, but I felt like doing self-development, so too bad.
Self-care means meeting all of your own needs abundantly. It is taking care of yourself at all times, as you are your most important asset. It means loving yourself, being kind to yourself, sticking up for yourself and your needs, and doing what is right for yourself.
Much of this is basic survival things. Like eating good food, getting plenty of sleep, resting when you need it, protecting yourself from harm. But it also includes softer, more psychological needs, such as emotional needs, social needs, leisure needs. It is making sure you do things that energize you, that satisfy you, and that gel with who you are. It is keeping things clean and living in an aesthetically pleasing environment, feng shui, Kon-Mari and all.
While this topic can include a lot, I’ll just say one more thing on it. For myself mainly
Moderation.
That’s that last thing. I need to hear it. Cuz it’s important for myself. I get carried away with stuff, get obsessed, like with this article, and before you know it I have 15,000 words. That’s a lot. I’m tired. I needa do other stuff. There’s no reason I’m still writing this lol. I could have ended it pages ago and it would be just fine. So moderation is important, meaning see when you are getting carried away with something, and slow down. Take a step back. Breathe. Get some perspective and see that taking care of yourself and meeting all of your soft, fuzzy, human needs is just as important as anything. Everything in its own time at its own pace.
Okay just took about a five day break or so from writing this article. My wrists were seriously getting pretty bad so it’s a good thing I did. That’s moderation at work people. Moderation is the ability to step back, get a sense of perspective, and see that that everything gets done in its own time. It is not doing too much of something, even if it is a very high priority, when doing so is out of alignment with the whole. So it’s a holistic view of all principles and other situational factors. It’s sensitivity to the moment and all that’s happening. It’s an incredibly important skill, and one of my worst, but one I am trying to master now. From here on out this article is going to get much more brief. I have a few final points I want to cover, but this can be revised later if needed.
Simplicity/Elegance/Brevity/Briefness/Occam’s Razor/Parsimony
In spite of the ironic name of this principle, it is quite simple and easy to understand. The more clearly and concisely your principles and the application of them, generally the better. There is some exception in that sometimes extravagance is fun, or great complexity is necessary. But in general, having things be super simple and easy is a good thing. If you must be complex, or just want to for fun, having a very simple version or representation as a short-hand can do the trick, for example having this article summed up in a table of contents or in a few brief paragraphs, or even better, at multiple level of simplification for progressive ability to condense and visualize how the information is condensed through the levels.
Trust
This is a set of principles that should probably be higher up, but because I have not written about them yet elsewhere recently, and I have not clearly established either their metaphysical or practical formulations fully, I have decided to wait til now and I will just briefly cover them here. Again, suffice it to say they are very important, may need a different name, and require deeper experimentation, exploration, and elaboration at a later date.
This overall principle is simply about trusting the universe. It is the grandest assumption of humility, the assumption that God, or the collective of humanity, or Universal Intelligence/Love, or evolutionary principles, or somethin big out there has got our backs, and we don’t have to do it all on our own.
Trust is all about alignment. It could also be called organicism, because it is the assumption that the universe is ultimately friendly, and it is best to get to know it and synergize with it as intimately and enthusiastically as possible, for the greatest good of all.
There is a deep, non-dual and evolutionary assumption here. If we can ultimately trust the universe, then that means God must ultimately be behind everything in the universe. It also means that when we encounter the myriad things we see as “bad,” indeed, those things may be bad, but on some deeper level, we can trust that they are here for our good. To identify more deeply with God, therefore, our task is to see how even the seemingly “bad” can ultimately be utilized for our evolution.
Furthermore, we also trust ourselves, as we are also manifestations of the universe. So every thought, every emotion, even judgements of things that are contradictory and very dualistic are part of this non-dual field, and are perfect and valid from a certain vantage-point or context. So this trust view is ultimately a view of relaxing. It is letting your consciousness sink back, and back, and back from what is, until you can see every little event as a manifestation of the whole universe. Everything is part of one unified whole, and this, ultimately is trustworthy.
Another way of saying this, you are not separate from the whole. While your actions may be in themselves imperfect, when seen in relationship to the totality, I am simply suggesting that maybe they are exactly what they should optimally be. You are a part of the universe, of God’s creation, and if it’s all perfect and trustworthy, you’re a part of that—so so are you.
Now, we can be various amounts aligned to this universe. While faith and ultimate trust are nice, and are perhaps achieved in deep non-dual enlightenment in a lasting way as a subtle mode of consciousness, my focus here is on the more pragmatic everyday ways of accessing trust, and aligning to the universe in our actions and thoughts.
So aligning to the universe means seeing the greater purpose and connectedness of everything, having a glimmer of the direction the universe is moving in, and then aligning yourself to that direction and making your own thoughts and actions as aligned to it as possible. Aligned to the organic direction the principles of the universe are ultimately trying to move us in. This is the purpose of all these principles, ultimately, but many of the other principles do not actually assume a friendly universe, they simply assume we have the capacity to create one. Both may be true, but this set of sub-principles are ones that will be most powerful if, indeed, we are right that the universe/God is really on our side. (what is our side anyways?)
Make Space
In this skill, you simply open up a space. It could be a physical space in your life, a space of time, a space of thought or emotion, a space in your schedule, whatever. It’s simply an empty spot. In that space can you can be totally relaxed, open, resting, receptive, or whatever the hell else you wanna do. To be genuinely spacious, however, at least some of the time you don’t want to fill this space with just a different kind of object than the one that you otherwise would have, but to really have no plan, totally empty nothingness.
By doing this, you allow the universe to make small interpolations where good things can happen. Spontaneous synchronicities or flashes of insight. A re-direction of attention to what’s really important. And, if indeed the universe has intelligence we know not fully of, then this is a place where it can show us that. It is a time when we can also fall back into our deepest selves and trust that our highest self knows what we need and will speak to us. It can also be a time of listening to your (deep) heart, listening to yourself, getting in touch with your needs and principles, but not just in a mechanical or analytical way based on your past. The whole point here is to open to something new. Be fully in the moment. Get in touch with your intuition and allow yourself to become one with that space which sees the relationship of the whole to everything, and hence can re-organize and interpolate good things into it.
Oh, also, interpolations could be quantum, and there could be a lot more nuance how to align yourself to these interpolations. For now I’ll just leave it at that I think that deliberate, conscious space, is almost certainly one good perennial way to re-align.
Everything Happens For A Reason—Including When It Doesn’t
As I said, you can assume everything happens for a reason and this can be great. It makes you relax, let’s you get in flow, let’s you be happier and less depressed, and feel a great sense of unity and purpose. Except sometimes it’s a total lie. Even worse, we know it, and we lie to ourselves about this.
Messiah’s get crucified, burned, etc. for these reasons. Everything’s good the way they are, supposedly, as things become increasingly worse and unfair and certain powers and evils take over the universe, or destroy the Earth and cause mass suffering for all sentient creatures.
But it all happens for a reason! So it’s all good. Just watch a funny movie and forget about it. So you can see my cynicism here, and the reason that I say, everything happens for a reason. But not really. I’m here to tell you, that part of the reason everything happens is so that we can use our loving free-will to take responsibility for changing it. Even if that’s an unpleasant message for comfort’s sake.
And so you can trust that, yes, everything in the universe happens for a reason. But that includes your own conscience, and the gnawing feeling you have inside that things need to change. That’s a wake up call people. And so is this message. And so you can trust it as well. As well as your own reaction to it. And the reaction to that. Well, you can trust everything really. It’s kinda mind-bending really. Alas the problem with non-duality is that it ultimately says nothing and obliterates itself in a deep sense. But the universe is still here. And you have to trust something. Ultimately, I say trust it all, but that includes the sense when something is off, and includes your own hero’s journey responsibility to take the muthafuckin bull by the horns muthfucka.
So everything is here for a reason, but sometimes we need to push aside distractions to what is important, as pushing aside distractions is also here for a reason, and sometimes the reason something is here is so that we can see that we don’t want it here and truly appreciate something else. Etc.
Uniqueness
Now, every moment is unique, like a snowflake. And sometimes you got a schedule to keep, but often, in human interactions or in creative work or in other fertile environments, even just your own solitude, it can be highly advantageous to take fully advantage of the uniqueness of the moment.
Much of the best humor, for example, happens in the moment, commenting on something unexpected in a funny way. Much creativity comes in spontaneous spurts, and often the greatest insights seem very idiosyncratic, even though they are deep principles. It is a great practice to always assume every moment is absolutely new, a beginner’s mind and profound agnosticism about even certain deep structures of reality in every moment. This way you are infinitely pliable, and able to meet whatever interesting people and experiences come your way, fully, and make good use of all of their quirky strange beauty.
Seeing Opportunity
Finally, be becoming acquainted with all these principles, you can start to see certain critical juncture points, certain points in time, space, and circumstances of unusually high leverage. For example, in places of extreme suffering. Or spotting people with unusual abilities, especially as relates to any of these principles. Or seeing that something that has been happening for a very, very long time is finally coming to a head and inflection point, NOW is your time to jump in the fray and ACT.
So by seeing the whole, trusting the universe, trusting yourself, aligning your principles to the principles of the universe, then keeping an eye out for the uniqueness of circumstances, you can “control luck” in a very real sense, by understanding what the right place and the right time looks like. You may have studied famous historical figures or very happy people or people who have done a lot of good, for instance, and then because you see how they achieved those things, you can be on the lookout and try to attract those same types of situations. Then when the time is ripe… POUNCE! The prey is yours, maybe. But you still have to be exceptionally well prepared, and even then, it may be a learning experience for you rather than a peak one.
Meta-Effort
Meta-effort is the effort of always being more effortful. It is a funny little concept I came up with that I haven’t clearly defined or looked at, but I will briefly consider it here.
Basically, if you are always putting in a little more effort, every day, you will keep getting better and better, by just a lil bit, every day.
But not just at what you’re doing. You’ll get better at being effortful itself.
Basically, this principle is simply saying, if you always push yourself a bit beyond your previous limits, slightly uncomfortably, and make doing that in every are with everything a habit, then you will always be getting better at everything. And, more importantly, you will always be getting better at getting better at everything. This is, truly, an exponential habit.
Closely related are two other concepts I’ll touch on, perpetual hungriness and universal delayed gratification.
Perpetual Dissatisfaction/Hungriness
Okay, so the idea here is to always be dissatisfied and want more. Sounds lame right? Well it’s not. By always being slightly pessimistic about the current state of things, in your life and the world, and always wanting more, you will thus always get better. So no matter how good things get, you automatically, without even thinking or seeing how things are, say they’re still not good enough. I’ve noticed this with Jeff Bezos and many other leading business people in the world. Perpetual dissatisfaction is a powerful habit. (Of course mix and balance this with deep satisfaction and appreciation when it comes to non-action oriented experience, as a matter of self-care, law of attraction, etc.)
Habitual Delayed Gratification/Delayed Gratification FETISH
Much like being underestimated, delayed gratification for me almost reaches the point of fetish. Or obsessive compulsion. Like. I can’t ever have the good part first. I always save the best for last, in like everything. Including life as a whole. I’m SO pumped for my 80s. They’re gonna be the highlight of my life. Though my 90s will be even better. Still will be going strong in my 100s, a really party animal though starting to get a bit tired, my 110s are gonna be a little rough I think, but I’ll make a real sagely comeback in my 120s. Like seriously. I’m so excited.
Cuz I always save my best for last. In literally everything. Delayed gratification is an important principle of motivation, because if we do the good thing first, then we lose all our energy. When we always, in all things, save the best for last, the action potential and tension between present and future pulls us along like electricity. So make it a habit to always, always, always, save the best for last. Both short-run and long-run, though if you over-do this, like any habit, it becomes destructive. Gotta make the journey enjoyable too. Moderation is key.
Aiighty gonna finish this real quick cuz I wanna go do other stuff
Safety
Always stay on the safe side when doing anything that carries significant risk. Make automatic, ingrained habits of all safety precautions. By doing this you prevent a world of pain and damage for yourself and others. It’s very efficient. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Favoring Experimentation
Maybe half the time or something, you should figure things out for yourself. We usually seek a guide or mentor. This is bullshit. At least if you have a decently high IQ. Develop the meta-skill of figuring shit out for yourself. Because it’s incredibly powerful for the parts of life where you’re forging new territory, and mentors can’t really help you. It’s good to listen to advice and learn as much as you can from others, but equally important to learn to listen to yourself, analyze and de-construct your own learning process, and always be becoming the best version of yourself whether or not you have external guidance and feedback.
Truthfulness
Another one that should be wayyy up. This one I’ve always had trouble with, because if you can create your own reality and manipulate things to be better by lying, shouldn’t you? Well, sometimes yes, but (far) more often no.
I learned this one the hard way. Cheating on your girlfriend isn’t okay, even if you think she won’t figure it out (which she probably will, at least on some level,) because lying, itself, is destructive and evil.
Again, are there exceptions? I suppose. But mostly only in survival situations, or very dire circumstances, where you are virtually forced to lie for a deeply incongruent good. The more close in proximity, also, the more important truth is. So being truthful with yourself is the biggest one. We lie to ourselves quite a lot. Hide certain truths and realities from ourselves, factual and informational, and pretend that we believe or desire one thing when we really believe or want the opposite. Etc. Lying is always a temporary distortion, and will eventually be obliterated or integrated into a higher truth. But if you would rather not be obliterated, I would suggest, just always be as truthful as possible. Honest, open, assertive, real, facing the facts, be who you are, and you will eventually find ya way. That’s it for now homies. Peace.
Jordan Arel 