A Framework For a Virtuous Life - Call with Tales

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Summary

We Need a Framework for a Virtuous Life

Humans are fuzzy: there is no root cause of why we do things, only factors that increase the probability of doing things.
cfr. The Raft Model of Reality

1000 Factor Model: Your environment is filled with factors, "arrows" that either point in the direction of your desired action, or away from it. The point is to make as much arrows align as possible. There's not really anything else than friction.
cfr. Mise en place

Decide and Remember. Making sure we do what's important to us has two phases:

  1. Decide. You need a system that derives the most important actions now from your values.
  2. Remember. You need a system that reminds you of these actions.

The Framework

Values

Figure out your virtues and values. Use Stoicism, Lifebook and other philosophy for inspiration. Rank them but don't be perfect—be less wrong.

Categories / Areas

Define these in multiple levels of details: one paragraph, one page, all the details. This turns into your Areas of Life (cfr. PARA Area, GTD Area of Responsibility, Tony Robbins' Category of Improvement, Lifebook's Categories).

Goals

You don't track what you care about—you care about what you track.

Make a crappy guess.

Pick:

Execution

Only execute after prioritizing.
If it's not working, you just lack enough checked checkboxes.

Remembering

Morning Journal with:

Reminders everywhere in all forms. Wallpaper, necklace, etc. Always take immediate action on reminders or they fade away.

Advancing

Ascension Attention: Keep a list of things you did that align with your values, so you know you're doing what matters.

Have only one most important task for any day.

Prepare how to tackle challenges: create notes by challenge.
(cfr. The Neuroscience of Achieving Your Goals)

Your problems are "another one of those."

Describe the week idea: sweet, salty, sour.

Introduction

Prepare two things:

  1. Mindpeak Notion

Why? Challenge: implementing all the stuff we're learning here.

Trust the proces. What process? So the past weeks building this process.

Story from Srikumar Rao: what are you doing? Laying a brick, building a wall, building a cathedral. If I ask you today, what are you doing? What would be your answer?

How can I have this feeling of building a cathedral every day?

Some Insights

Causes of Behavior

Humans are terribly bad at finding the real causes of why they're doing what they're doing.

People sharing advice tell you what to do and often they're wrong. They answer with their ego.

MW: He speaks so engaging, and all the stories all the time!

Every behavior has two sides: what you tell yourself why you did it, and why you did it.

Rhizome: horizontally growing things in the ground, that have no beginning and no end. "Let's go to the root cause of the problem" doesn't work—our causes don't have a tree structure.

MW: Reminds me of The Raft Model of Reality.

Solution: a 1000 factor model, and try to get as much arrows as possible pointing in the right direction.

Everything making you do something is in reducing friction.

Lukas: Friction/Resistance is also the identified enemy in The War of Art and the creative process

Capturing Insight from Books

Every book is the following. Japanese/Chinese symbol for reading: information + persuasion.

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Use speed reading to find the best books. Then read the best books slowly from cover to cover. When you master speed reading, you spend less time speed reading.

Do you want to have better results? Align more factors. Check more checkboxes of what it takes.

MW: Humans are fuzzy.

Memory Problem

All we're trying to do is fire the right chemicals at the right time in our brains.

Three essential answers to solve everything in life. Solve one and you fix everything:

  1. Memory
  2. (Another Day)
  3. (Another Day)

Becoming Indestructible - Mindvalley Quest

Acrasia (?) Greek word: aligning against your best interest.

Why do vision boards work? Affirmations. They remind you. They put it in your short-term memory.

MW: Idea for "the perfect reminder" application / tool.

Brains are great as storage but bad at retrieval at the right time.

Stoicism & Values

Ryan Holiday: A Stoic doesn't believe they can control the world, but only themselves. Only put fulfillment in things you can control.

Lukas: That's why you make a hierarchy.
Tatyana: Whey change based on the situation / environment.

Don't be right. Be less wrong.

Cassidy: The most successful people plan for the future but are open to being fluid to whatever happens.

Trick for comparing values: make it (a) without (b) and (b) without (a), which world do you want to live in?

MW: But half of philosophy is finding the best values, right?

The Most Important Thing in the Day

The most important things in a day. If there would be only one thing to do in a day, what would it be?

Make your main priority every day expressing this effort. But the only thing.

You can set an intention and it's nice. But you need to find evidence.

But you basically make someone happier without even trying. So that's not even what we want.

Lifebook

Structure:

  1. One-Paragraph Plan
  2. One-Page Plan
  3. More detailed

You need both the detailed and the high-level view.

MW: All I need to do is X. Y is the most important in my life, Z is what I'm focusing on right now in this order. Each or ABC in each timeline.

Exercise: One-page summary.

🌌 Character — Joyful captain.

💪🏼 Health — Infinite energy and looking amazing naked.

🫂 Relationships — Play, laugh, dance, do as if we're little children and change the world.

🧠 Knowledge & Skills — Integrated knowledge and deep connections between an insanely wide array of points. Non-stop learning.

🧠 Emotions — Winning.

🪙 Career & Serving — Learning more so I can solve bigger problems. The largest impact I can have.

Tatyana: They say the devil is in detail. It's actually the magic is in the detail.

Lion as symbol for Influence.

High-level Notion structure:

Tracking Zone

Because we don't know how to track what we care about, we don't end up doing it.

AI Mentality: It's beautiful how quickly an AI can get better so so fast. How? It goes through iteration process faster and better. What pisses me off is that people expect to learn by accident.

There's also a Life Skills section with an inspiring friend per skill.

Exercise: What is missing in this category of life, for each category? MII = Most Important Improvement. Then a new table view that shows it.

Energy: muscle building, endurance training.

Connection: start conversations and teaching each other.

Adventure: track and have goals.

Creation: scheduled.

...

Exercise: Choose one of these categories to improve in. Would be career for me. Creatorpeneurship.

Achieve financial freedom as a creatorpeneur.

MW: Tales Alves Build a digital marketing system that gives me financial freedom.

Make a crappy guess.

Next: Highest Leverage Move + Highest Leverage Book + Highest Leverage Course connected to it.

Convert Life Categories into Goal Outcomes, that you can track. Connect Goals with Categories that matter, and the other way around.

Track progress bar. If you don't know, make a crappy guess.

Problem with project management: I either did things now, or never. Solution: Tasks + Urgency per life category.

Add an urgency to every action. New actions first get an urgency, and only then get executed. Then, to plan a day, just pick from these things. And since they're so linked you can see that immediately.

Stop seeing your problems as something new, but as "one of those."

Everything is one of those.

His Notion has a Problems You Might Face list. Start with success and failure in mind.

"If I'm not having enough deep work sessions, I just didn't check enough boxes in this list."

About the system, what I have currently for Alignment is:

And what makes the system work is:

Summary

Problems: stop seeing them as a tree with a cause. Instead, see rhizomes. You lack the checkboxes checked. Systems problem, not a person problem.

Virtuous life. We care about what we measure. A crappy guess is good. Track the #1 priority of every day.

Alignment system. Categories, related goals, most important goals.

Problems are "one of those." Start with failure in mind.

Questions

Once you have a system to copy, the rest is easy.

Hector: Do you have a framework or a list of factors that influence every decision or behavior?
If I had to pick 2 parts of this entire system:

  1. At the end of every day, reflect on what went well but what could have gone better. Ability to look back and be happy about what you did. It doesn't feel like a blur.
    • Reflection Page
    • Three words per month
    • Three words per week

All of this is a memory problem.

Active Recall: forcing yourself to come up with questions instead of just seeing it. Morning journal forces writing down: