Personal Manifesto #

I aspire to be a vigorous, wise, and curious person that feels empowered to both help myself and others become more vigorous and wise.

Personal Characteristics #

Vigor #

Energy to achieve goals in my experience comes from two main sources:

Physical Health: Exercise, sleep, food, cronic stress, circadian rhythm, and other environmental influences all effect personal vigor in complex and inter-dependant ways. Spending time untangling this web of interactions for oneself is a worthy endeavor that has personally helped me feel more consistently energetic. Also a deeper understanding of these interactions will probably make you live longer!

Vision: Vision is a clear path for how to achieve the goal in question, or at least for how to get closer to achieving said goal. Acquiring vision can be tricky and fickle. For me, it helps to:

Somewhat aimlessly learn about the area of knowledge the goal is in by reading what other people have written/said about it. Sometimes reading about even completely unrelated topics can spark ideas about the original goal. Audiobooks and podcasts are great for getting this exposure.
Plant “seeds” in my head relating to the goal. These usually manifest as questions I’m curious to know the answers to, or very rough theories that I can’t even put into words for how the goals might be achieved.
Sleep on my knowledge to find new connections and/or grow the seeds (see Hammock Driven Development).
Do cardiovascular exercise like hiking or running to find new connections and/or help grow the seeds. Not sure how this helps (more blood flow to the brain?), but it usually does for me.
Take a long break from the goal and work on another goal. Having multiple in-flight projects at once makes this more natural.
Set up my environment and habits so that I am consistently exposed to the goal, making it more likely my thoughts will wander to it and make progress decoding it.
Spend time writing about how I might achive the goal, or make a more concrete plan on paper as I know more. This will help keep me on track once I get started doing tasks, and helps avoid the problem of finishing something then not knowing what to do next.
See also creativity (maybe I should merge these sections).

Wisdom #

Wisdom to me means a relative lack of surprise with the behavior of the world around oneself. By this definition, to become wise is to build an effective model of the world in one’s head that can predict what will happen consistently, thus avoiding surprise. Because the world is often unpredictable, wisdom also means not expecting things of the world that cannot be expected. For example, there are many catastrophes that could happen at any moment, causing severe damage to one’s life - handling these with grace as opposed to feeling the negative emotions that come with unmet expectations is perhaps wise.

This is discussed in a lot more detail by Stoic philosophers. My reading of this work is that the universe behaves logically and the better one understands this universal reason (logos), the more in harmony with the universe one will be.

Wisdom also means recognizing that attaining accurate knowledge is often painstaking work, and therefore to be wise is to be patient with learning and not try to take shortcuts when understanding the truth is important. See What to believe for discussion of this.

Wisdom may be related to a well developed “System 1” as described in Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

One danger with chasing wisdom is believing that all the time you’ve spend “getting wiser” by thinking justifies confident snap-opinions on new issues. Building models to understand the world requires abstraction, and abstract models never perfectly fit new concrete situations. In my opinion recognizing this limitation, and being willing to put in the work of describing and modelling the new situation is itself wise. This is highly related to the concept of Beginner’s Mind, which IMO it is wise to cultivate, as opposed to an “expert’s mind”.

Realizing that human knowledge is fallible, but also objectively meaningful and the accumulation of it makes one objectively wiser is discussed in detail in The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

In practice, wisdom naturally leads to well-roundedness:

Well-Roundedness #

Being well rounded to me means having a wide range of capabilities. This has several strong benefits:

It reduces single points of failure in life (e.g. injuries or big life changes leaving one without a purpose/focus).
It makes moments where the world is negatively effecting one in a way which they are powerless to stop rarer, since it is more likely one will have the skills necessary to redirect or counter the negative effect.
It makes you more socially interesting to a wider range of different people. People find capability in specific areas interesting, so more capability in more areas should make you more interesting to more people.
It allows one to notice and act on more opportunities in life, since most require some knowledge in their area to detect and exploit. I think it’s reasonable to say that ones ability to discover and make the most of opportunities has massive impact on the trajectory of ones life.
It hastens learning of new skills and concepts, which often have similarities to other skills/concepts. The more you have command of, the more likely it is that there will be commonalities between the new skill/concept and one you already know. Also, it can help build abstract mental concepts by consciously identifying these commonalities and storing them as a new abstract concept.
It enables formation of novel ideas, which are often just ideas from one discipline applied to another.

One way to describe this value is as an aspiration to being a “Renaissance man” (See ERE for more discussion of this.

Becoming more well rounded is mostly achieved (in my experience) by seeing roadblocks in life as personal opportunities for growth. Energetically owning and tackling these roadblocks will lead to learning the best ways to get around them, improving one’s breath of knowledge and making similar issues one might encounter later easier to navigate.

The “I can do this” or “I can learn how to do this” sentiment when faced with any issue should lead to an increase in well-roundedness over time.

Some areas of knowledge to consider personally deeply understanding to become more well rounded + tasks to try:

Repair/construction of objects you depend on - try fixing your computer/cloths/furniture/bike/car/house.
Investing savings - try researching, creating, and executing a personal investment plan yourself.
Food production - try growing/cooking your own food.

See a barbell life for some related thoughts.

Curiosity #

The desire to explore novelty.

In Why Greatness Cannot be Planned, the authors discuss how large human advancements necessarily come from people exploring the unknown. I want to be the kind of person that makes doing this a habit. This has the side benefit of making life seem richer, as novelty leads to stronger memory formation.

Empowerment #

To me, personal empowerment is about leveraging vigor and wisdom to achieve goals. Empowerment and motivation are near synonyms to me. Good environment and expectations dramatically help keep up motivation/empowerment.

TODO: Merge this with motivation.

Environment #

A large chuck of my brain does things in response to environmental stimuli. If I see tasty food, part of my brain will want to eat it. If I am too hot or cold, part of my brain will make a fuss. If I’m with other people, part of my brain will want to impress or entertain them.

Because of this, crafting an environment that encourages healthy behaviors that help you achieve personal goals is really important. I agree with James Clear that it is foolish to think your conscious mind can muscle its way past all the other parts that manage environmental stimuli to reach its goals.

It’s easy to get swept up in life and let your behavior be dictated by your environment (e.g. what others around you are doing).

It’s dangerous to do this since your environment is not a sentient being and therefore does not care about anything, let alone your personal happiness/satisfaction/fulfillment.

It’s worth taking a step back and consciously running through whether you agree with your environment’s influence or not frequently. Otherwise you might end up less happy/satisfied/fulfilled than you might otherwise be.

Doing this takes time and energy. Therefore, if you want to live more intentionally, it is important to give yourself that space/energy and not fill it with other things.

One common and strong environmental force is momentum. It is easier to continue doing something you are already doing than to switch tasks. This can be used to help complete less pleasurable tasks (finishing homework or a workout), but also can make you continue doing an activity past the point of it’s benefit to you. Examples of this for me include: eating after already full, playing a game to the point of frustration, and continuing to browse Reddit or YouTube without feeling inspired about what I find. Stopping and checking yourself in these situations with this idea in mind can help you switch tasks to something that will be a better overall use of time. I have a pet theory that your brain gets specifically tired with particular tasks after a couple hours of doing them, and switching at this point to another task often uses enough different parts of your brain to make you feel very fresh in the new context.

Expectations #

TODO: fill this in (potentially from the “motivation” doc)

Categories: Me

Backlinks: Circadian Rhythm, What To Believe, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Food, Chronic Stress, Creativity, Sleep, Motivation, Exercise,