The Education of Axel Heyst

[Henry]

Yes, when I was a young adult, I used to meet my frugal father (6W5) for coffee, conversation,

I think someone was taping you and sold the conversations to the people who create the SAT English Comprehension exam.

[Biscuits and Gravy]

My child free status is part design and part bullets dodged, but insofar as it was by design, a major factor was the sense that “but if I have kids I won’t have time or energy to think borderline unhinged thoughts about the far future that will make people edge away from me at the parties I don’t go to. Hell with that! I’d bust at the seams!”

Oh, you don't bust at the seams. Seams cease to exist. You ooze into the world and into the ground and into a new understanding (or two).

[chenda]

Yes, when I was a young adult, I used to meet my frugal father (6W5) for coffee,

Out of interest, what is the story of your name 7 ?

[7Wannabe5]

Towards Type 5 is supposed to be the direction of growth for a Type 7. However, I've kind of retired this goal, because I'm already pretty close to iNTP, and iNTP isn't any more likely to be motivated to earn money than eNTP , actually might be less likely, and going for INTJ is just too much of a stretch. It all started when this financially successful lawyer in my marriage therapy group suggested that if I displayed the same sort of agency towards increasing my net worth that I exhibited in improving my sex life, I would likely do very well. Anyways, I've now determined that my shortest path would be eNTP to eNfP to eNfJ, but even that is too much of a dig down the potential human values/motivated-behaviors stack for somebody my age. Also, I actually care less about FIRE now then when I first joined this forum. OTOH, I care more about ecological resource conservation and the meta-crisis than when I first joined this forum. I think one of the reasons I was focused on money when I joined this forum was that I was living with my second "husband" who was waaaaaay wealthier than me and we were experiencing some boundary issues, but somehow something else has happened that fixed that trigger or strengthened that boundary. For example, I am still committed to being frugal for environmental and preferred lifestyle reasons, but my mother's spendy ways don't bother me anymore. I mean, I am doing what I can to put some more frugal systems into place for her while I am here, but my psychological reactivity is gone. Type 1 (The Judge) is the direction of decay/stress for Type 7, so my frugal "judgey-ness" or "disgust/disdain" towards my mother was likely due to staying too "stuck" in taking my frugal father's side in their frequent marital conflicts, and that is a whole different can of worms than clarifying the flavor of frugality that is in alignment with my own core values which is actually pretty different than that of my Type 6 Silent Generation ergo-much-more-conventional/conservative-than-me father. So, my visceral-alliterative post up thread was mostly me spending a moment in pendulum swing defending my mother.


@Axel: Sorry! Done now. Feel free to post all sorts of mega Te pumping up T Groggin stuff on my journal thread

[AxelHeyst]

aaaaand the book is done, at long last. The best way to describe it to people reading my journal is "ERE, but rewritten for the kind of meta-crisis aware person for whom a book with the word "early retirement" in it would be a turn-off". As indeed it was for me, since ERE bounced off me in 2017 before snagging me on my second pass in early 2020.

It's written as a conversation between 2024Axel and 2012Axel (an early title idea was "We Need To Talk").

Conversations with *many* forumites went into the creation of the book, in person and here on the forum, and gratitude is due broadly and deeply.

I spent the entire last week holed up in @mathiverse's spare bedroom in the PNW banging out the final final for realsies draft and finalizing formatting etc - the final push across the finish line for the text manuscript. I really like that that's how the final chapter of the project unfolded. Thanks again @mathiverse.

[dustBowl]

Congrats on finishing the book!

Is there a way we can sign up to get notified when the print version is out? Or will you just post about it here and that's how we'll find out about it?

[AxelHeyst]

1) The print version is available on Amazon now

2) Non Amazon print version will be available probably in mid January.

3) Best way to get notified for other versions including audiobook etc is sign up for my email newsletter on my site (tylerjdisney.com) - I’ll post links when they come out. Trying to minimize selfpromo style posts here, although happy to answer questions.

Thanks!

[philipreal]

Trying to minimize selfpromo style posts here, although happy to answer questions.

The 100+ page journal has actually all been a long con to sell the book you didn't yet know you would make

[mathiverse]

You're very welcome! It was awesome to have you, AxelHeyst! You're a great guest and I really appreciated the cooking, the advice I received from you, and the discussions we had.

[mountainFrugal]

Trying to minimize selfpromo style posts here, although happy to answer questions.

Congratulations! I really enjoyed the book having not read it prior to it's release. I did some promotion for you viewtopic.php?t=13295.

[OutOfTheBlue]

Congratulations! And kudos also for your perseverance and giving this project the time, space, effort and stages/iterations needed to accomplish this.

There is a kind of "creative dissatisfaction", a "not settling for less" attitude [I guess the word is stoke, haha] with you that I find admirable and inspiring.

Look forward to reading this final version during the holiday break!

[AxelHeyst]

The 100+ page journal has actually all been a long con to sell the book you didn't yet know you would make

ha! You figured out my plan. In retrospect though, "sign up for my email newsletter" is certainly *not* less self-promotional than an update post on the forum. When the other editions come out I'll post in the thread mF made.

You're very welcome! It was awesome to have you, AxelHeyst! You're a great guest and I really appreciated the cooking, the advice I received from you, and the discussions we had.

It was like a flash- or micro-Patronage arrangement. Very Renaissance of us!

There is a kind of "creative dissatisfaction", a "not settling for less" attitude [I guess the word is stoke, haha] with you that I find admirable and inspiring.

Many thanks OOTB, and thanks for the phrasing of creative dissatisfaction. The process of writing the book has been one big Scratch of a particular creative-dissatisfaction Itch that it feels really gratifying to have finished... and it also has resulted in the clarification/identification of a fractal number of further itches I intend to scratch.

[AxelHeyst]

I'm curious, what did you think of The Deluge? I'm mostly burnt out on predicament-related books, fiction included, but I did enjoy that one. At the same time, it felt pretty dark (at least coming from The Ministry for the Future) so I'm not sure if I'll reach for it again lol

I finished the deluge. It certainly ran pretty dark but where it left things was, to my mind, the most optimistic *plausible* scenario possible. I doubt I’ll reread the whole thing but I could see studying some of the policy ideas he rolled into some of the fictional Acts/bills etc (and chasing down their real-world sources).

I liked how he wove together the full spectrum of activism /work. In a lot of ways I think the book was a story about the dynamic effects between all of the various approaches and how impossible it is to be able to tell if one’s individual sphere of work will have any impact, but that if things are to turn out as well as is plausible then it will require action at all scales. The work of influencing nondeterministic systems is…. A whole thing. I appreciated how he handled the complexity of the story.

[AxelHeyst]

### 2024 Review

This year's theme (in retrospect) was Serendipity + Stoke (or Orientation and Adaptation, or OODA-Looping FTW, or The Year of Executing Fast Transients...). The two biggest rocks of 2024:

>A business venture serendipitously landed in my lap, and I dropped my Skillathon Plan to pursue it. I'm now zooming towards FI doing work that I'm a) good at, b) enjoy, and c) is showing signs of intersecting with my values/mission, which I wasn't expecting even a couple months ago. I feel really fortunate to have gone through ~3 years of semiERE practice where I was very focused on connecting ERE theory to daily practice before ramping up into a w*rk situation again.

>A woman found me (thank you, internet) and we're now romantically entangled; I altered several Plans and projects to make this work, and the positive Effect Wave through my whole WoG or this reorientation is blowing my mind (@theanimals are now my neighbors, I discovered that Alaska is very much to my liking, it triggered a small adventure or two,...).

Other cool stuff and lessons learned:

• Bikepacked across Utah with @Bicycle7. The hardest thing I've done all year was that last day of our ride (which b7 sailed through unflappably). Topping it in 2025 is going to be a big lift!
• Finished my book.
• Planned and executed two months of Skillathon, and then dropped it to pursue business. Lesson learned: my plan for skillathon was WAY too ambitious and rigid, in particular the emphasis on documenting it in realtime. woof.
• Rode a moto to Ak and back. That was cool. However,
• Vehicle ownership is dumb. My main takeaway is that, for me, ICE vehicles do not have an attractive stoke/$ ratio, there are a lot of other standalone nodes that 'beat' them on an individual basis (reverse fishbone analysis), and turns out they don't fit in my WoG great (no space to work on them, difficult to sell because I'm so remote, and now I don't even live here barely so they mostly just sit around). Vehicle ownership is duuuuumb!
• Fest24! Proved it wasn't a one-hit wonder (h/t @theanimal). Going to see if I can't f it up for 2025 by changing the location and format.
• Habituated a fitness system that works well for me, just about got ashtanga habituated, just about got an eating system that works for me...

Money

| Year | Expenses | Notes |
| ----- | -------- | ---------------------------------------- |
| ~2019 | $70,000 | gf, Van, apts, moto |
| 2020 | $31,604 | gf, rent, fuel, shipping container |
| 2021 | $20,882 | Container, surgery, studio |
| 2022 | $10,810 | Europe, studio |
| 2023 | $9,758 | Japan, studio |
| 2024 | $13,310 | Motorcycle, moto trip, trains, planes... |

| 2024 Expenses | |
| -------------- | ------ |
| Food | $2,413 |
| Shelter | $1,834 |
| buildx | $1,008 |
| Health | $848 |
| Transportation | $5,363 |
| Education | $632 |
| Random | $1,034 |

Buying a moto, buying parts to fix my old moto, and associated expenses related to putting 8,000mi on a moto really blew my target COL out of the water this year. Lesson learned, no regrets (PS anyone want to buy a motorcycle or two?), and I've got a plausible Plan (heh) to hit my target COL of $7,500 in 2025.

Speaking of Plans...

Goals and Projects 2025:

• ttmCOL <=$7,500
• NW => 33xttmCOL (because internet)
• Passive Income from digital assets > $1,000/mo (because it's a round number)
• Build a reputation as The Guy to Call for people who need a badass mechanical Revit operator for the dopest bleeding-edge green projects (passivhaus/LBC/etc) when it absolutely positively must be awesome in a short amount of time; meet the people doing the best work in this space, learn from them, etc.
• By the end of the year ramp my hours/wk on Revit business to a much lower number, headed in the direction of seasonal flow.
• Come up with a repeatable pattern/system for my newsletter that works
• Write, focus on craft, put out a handful of articles of various lengths that I'm proud of both the content and the craft of them.
• Do another ~monthlong bikepack trip
• Make the next evolution of Fest a success.
• Get a fatbike rig in Ak.
• Ruggedize MH (food systems, water systems, freeze pro, quake response, security upgrades, ...)
• Continue iterating on a system with DRE (dear romantic entanglement) that works for us. (The lentil baby thing was eh, alright, but going to change that up next round. Thanks REDACTED for the advices re: that.)
• Deep dive on Actualization and Autonomy (this is my MMG project, I'll post notes on it...)
• 45min Weighted Murph!!

[mooretrees]

I would like to add another goal to 2025 if I could be so bold; more podcasts! As I’m trying to not spend money, your podcast has been a refuge for me. I’ve already listened to all of the episodes and they’re great the second or third time around. But, pretty please can you make more?

[sodatrain]

I would like to add another goal to 2025 if I could be so bold; more podcasts! As I’m trying to not spend money, your podcast has been a refuge for me. I’ve already listened to all of the episodes and they’re great the second or third time around. But, pretty please can you make more?

Yes! I also love basically every episode of your podcast and would love to hear more episodes. Hopefully book your book being published means there will be podcast episodes of a similar journey!

[AxelHeyst]

Making more podcast episodes is definitely in the hopper for 2025. Catching covid knocked me back a couple weeks, but once I'm able to record audio (my voice is f'd right now) I'm going to crank out a reading of Deep Response and then start making episodes again as part of my writing-and-making-content system.

[sodatrain]

Hey amigo -

Thanks for sharing your 2025 goals here and a few on your newsletter. Some are pretty loose/vague while others are more specific. I'm wondering if you'd be willing to talk about 1) your process of goal setting and 2) how your WoG relates. Do you just brainstorm what sounds fun and cool? What is needed/helpful? Do you start with a version of your WoG and iterate? Back into a WoG or are have you just internalized your WoG that this all just happens naturally at this point? (If that's the case, any advice for the lower WL of us that can think about goals over a period of time?

In the back of my mind, I keep wanting to build a hierarchy of... forms of capital - skills - goals - tasks. Or something like that.

[AxelHeyst]

Hey amigo -

Part 1: A somewhat direction response to your actual questions.

- If by 'brainstorm' you mean 'iteratively surface, evaluate, incorporate, discard, and modify goals and actions based on internalized systems thinking models and intuition', then yes, I brainstorm.

- Aside from basic logistics and adulting related goals, 'fun and cool' is a minimum requirement. Why would I do anything that isn't fun and cool?

- Needed/helpful - not sure if you mean needed/helpful for me personally or for others. The answer is yes, this is something I think about when evaluating behavior change.

- Do I start with a 'version' of my WOG? - understand that to me a WoG is more a verb than a noun. It's a little confusing because we talk about WoGs like nouns, like things that we either have or don't have, and I think this is a kind of misleading way of talking about it. The closest thing to a WoG that I 'have' is the network of neurons in my brain that I've trained to think in terms of systems (buffers, flows, coupling, feedback, effect waves...) and stores information about my specific life system. This network of neurons in my brain is an attempt to model the network of relationships between phenomenon in my life. Everyone HAS relationships between all the things in their life because everything is in reality connected, but most people haven't trained themselves to notice or think about these relationships. So, sometimes when I talk about a WoG I'm thinking of the web of relationships between the things in my life, and sometimes I'm thinking about my mental representation of the relationships between the things in my life. The representation in my brain is the map, and the actual relationships in my life are the territory. There are two categories of things I do with my brainWoG:

• I try to improve the accuracy and precision of my mental representation of my life system. I do this both by studying my specific life system (introspection, extrospection, studying my old journals, etc) and by studying system dynamics (reading everything Donella Meadows ever wrote, reading Boyd, talking to other people about systems thinking, studying permaculture, etc).
• I make decisions about my life system and take action. In other words, based on my mental model of my life system, I take a guess at what kinds of changes I can make in my behavior will result in overall improvement of my life system generally. When I make changes to my behavior I observe very carefully the effects across my entire life system, because I know that one small change way over here can have a surprisingly large change way over there in some 'unrelated' (lol! not a thing!) part of my life. If this sounds like ye old classic guess n check method, yes, it is. It is my experience and observation that the essence of good engagement with complex systems is based on making changes, observing the difference, and feeding the observation back into future decision. Anything else is hubris.

- This second thing is why WoGs are so powerful. Everyone's life IS a system that is complexly connected to everything else in the universe, but most people don't know it, and their mental model of their lives is linear or mechanistic. Therefore they make decisions about their lives based on a linear/mechanistic model, and hilarity (aka tragedy) ensues. They get frustrated when they 'get unlucky' and it seems like they did everything right and why is the world so unfair, when in reality they're playing checkers at a chess tournament.

"...or have you just internalized your WoG that this all just happens naturally at this point? (If that's the case, any advice for the lower WL of us that can think about goals over a period of time?

A goal of mine is to 'internalize systems thinking', which is approximately the same as saying it all just happens naturally. (Note what I just said! One of the goals within my WoG is to internalize systems thinking! It's explicit, I wrote it down, I literally think about what to do next Tuesday about moving forward my goal of internalizing systems thinking!)

But 'it happens naturally' and 'it happens without effort' are not the same thing, and also I continually am trying to become a better systems thinker by learning more about it and every piece of new systems-thinking-insight that I try to internalize takes effort. There is no destination, just an infinite fun journey of improving the efficacy of my mind. I consider myself a systems thinker right now. Some things I 'do' naturally and without much effort. Ideally in a year I'll be an even better systems thinker, but that'll only happen if I continue to exert conscious effort of will into the process.

Note that I find this process infinitely enjoyable. Become a better systems thinker is deeply intrinsically rewarding to me. It is its own reward. It would be so difficult to put this much effort in if I were trying to become a better systems thinker in order to have a cooler life, but the honest truth is I just fucking love it and a cooler life is a positive effect (did you notice the reverse fishbone there?). I get off so hard on studying a new systems-thinking insights and incorporating it into my behavior.

Anyways, my solicited advice:
Step 0: Reread chapter 5 of Jacob's book. Then read it again, one section at a time, slowly. When he references other parts of his book (e.g. the C6 model in ch4), go read that and then come back. Sketch fig 5.1 and 5.2, but for your own specific life. Write 'you can never do just one thing' on your forearm with a sharpie. Note: You don't have to agree with everything! Engage with it. Does he write something that rubs you the wrong way? Note that down, pose a critical question to the text and sit with it, etc. Draw figure 5.3 a bunch of times for different actions and goals in your life, and then draw it on your other forearm with a sharpie. Spend a day or four meditating on the implications of the insight that you can use the term 'goals' and 'effects' interchangeably. Then, we get to fig 5.4 and effect mapping, which takes us to step 1:

Step 1: Draw a LOT of reverse fishbone diagrams, for a while, until you automatically and intuitively (aka without much conscious effort) see/sense/feel/perceive the positive and negative effects of action/goal pairs. Don't stop sketching reverse fishbones until you catch yourself automatically mentally reverse fishboning the things other people say they are doing in casual conversation. It must become internalized. It must become impossible for you to not think in terms of positive and negative multiple-order effects of your actions.

Step 2: Draw a LOT of webs of goals, until you cannot possibly think of just one thing ever again for as long as you live. The aim is to train your brain to *know* that everything is connected to everything, and for it to always be looking for those connections and relationships. If you introduce a new goal/activity into your life, it WILL cause an effect-wave (or ripple) throughout your whole life, whether you realize it consciously or not. The aim is to become aware of these effect-waves, to expect them, and to train your brain to be able to see at least some of these connections ahead of time and increase your ability to evaluate the relationships between everything. Note: I've found the specific way that Jacob drew a WoG in fig 5.5 to be almost entirely impossible to work with. I draw WoGs in a variety of ways and they all look different than fig5.5.

The aim is to automatically think in terms of buffers/reserves, flow resilience, feedbacks, waste/muda/friction, homeo/heterotelicity, values alignment, needs fulfilment, skill sigmoid curves, etc.

To be very clear: the point of steps 1 and 2 is not to produce a bunch of sketches. Throw them all away, delete the files, use them as tinder, it doesn't matter. The aim is to change how you think, and the sketches help train your brain to do so. After every sketch, repeat to yourself out loud "The map is not the territory" and burn the thing or put it in your compost pile.

PS ch8 of my book is also a bit of a deep dive on this as well, including multiple examples of reverse fishbone diagrams and WoGs etc. I'll post a few here in a bit but I'm on a different computer at the moment...

PS:...

In the back of my mind, I keep wanting to build a hierarchy of... forms of capital - skills - goals - tasks. Or something like that.

Do it! See what happens. Maybe it'll be useful, maybe the usefulness will be in discovering aa way of thinking that is a dead end for you. The way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas and throw the bad ones away.

to be continued in part 2...

[AxelHeyst]

Part 2: Fragments of a longer form piece that I've just started working on that are related to your question.


In this post I’m going to use the word goals as shorthand umbrella term for

• specific measurable desirable outcomes (NW>=33xCoL, 45min Murph, bikepack 2025, fest25),
• processes, systems, habits, behaviors (do yoga 5x/wk, write every morning, newsletter 2x/mo, don’t drink alcohol),
• and state/mindset (autonomous; calm; satisfied with each day; seek to do hard things; etc).

They’re all important and relate to each other (habit of working out 5x/wk + seeking to do hard things —-> 45min Murph —-> Satisfaction + increased sense of self-efficacy —-> set slightly more ambitious goals…)

Visualization: If a WoG is a 3dimensional closed topological surface with internal geometry undulating through time (think like a big watery blob except it also has intricate internal structures), then a list of my goals is like a picture someone took of it at a particular time and from a particular angle. You can’t see what’s on the far side, nor what’s inside the folds of the WoG, nor the internal structure of it, nor what it looked like a month ago nor how fast sub sections of the shape is changing. A written down list of goals is like a handprint left on the hood of a dusty car. The handprint is not the hand, or the person. It is an n-1 (at least!) representation of a particular moment in time.

I hold a sense of my WoG in my head like I described in Section 1. I can’t see the whole thing at once in the same way you can’t see all sides of a cube at once. You have to walk around to the far side to see that. Similarly, if I want to think about the far side of my WoG, I have to “go there”, following a chain of relationships that at any one time I can explicitly see to 2-3 connections and maybe sense 3-6 connections deep. But I can also relax my ‘vision’ and back up and see the whole thing generally and sense the vibe of it, see pattern wise if it’s got a lot of friction or waste or if it’s gobbling resources or getting bloated or anemic. If I do sense any of these vibes I don't like, I can then zoom in on different portions of my WoG to investigate what's going on and generate an idea of what to try to do to improve the situation.

Keep this visual in mind.

I want to talk about Time, because everyone fucks this up but it’s the most important thing. Some thoughts I'm trying to cohere around the theme of time:

• I casually write down my goals all the time in one way or another. In any given year I’ll write them down 20-50 times.
  I don’t have a formal schedule for writing down goals. I almost always spend some time goal-setting around the new year and on my birthday. Otherwise it’s ad hoc per intuition. Sometimes once a week during my weekly reviews. Sometimes a few times a day during a particularly introspective period. Sometimes I go three months without writing down my goals.
• I don’t take any single set of written goals very seriously. They’re a snapshot in time. The goals I wrote down in February 2024 aren’t my goals, that Axel doesn’t know me, and I don’t owe him anything. Any single list of my goals is boring and not very useful.
• What is useful is observing the trends of my goals over time. It’s interesting that I’ve consistently wanted to get my spending down below the GEBR for over four years, that that goal has been exciting to me for that long. It’s interesting that I once wrote down that I wanted to brew biodiesel and overland a Mercedes to Baja and YouTube it, and then never thought about that goal again. It’s interesting to note the balance of negative vs positive goals, and which kind I find easy to attain vs difficult. It’s interesting that my stoke for motorcycles peaked in the context of questing across the content for a woman, and then faded. It’s interesting to note what goals coincided with my Pinterest addiction phase and which were unaffected.
• I am, in other words, interested in the evolving nature of my desire through time and as a result of unfolding environment.
• For instance, the goals I wrote down last February had nothing to do with E, because I didn’t know she existed yet. When E and I found each other, my goals changed rapidly.
• Lets get Boydian: my meta aim with my goal setting process is to have a fast tempo of decision/contemplation/action looping so that I can execute ‘fast transients’ - to rapidly adjust my goals with a minimum of energy expenditure or waste.
• I hope this section makes it very clear that what I am doing is not a command and control style strategy. It is an observe and adjust strategy. Moving from command and control to observe/appreciate and adjust represents one aspect of systems thinking.

I think what a lot of people think they want is a formal repeatable process that they can wrap their heads around and empower them to ‘command’ their lives. Like a function box that they feed inputs, pull a lever, and out pops goals. I think this is a bad idea because it is impossible and is based on a fallacious understanding of the universe.

You can’t wrap your head around a complex adaptive system unfolding through time entwined with whole-world environment, which is what your life is. You can’t wrap your head around a complex adaptive system unfolding through time entwined with whole-world environment, which is what your life is! Some people think their lives are deterministic and that the environment is predictable, and they try to hammer and crunch their lives into a “deterministic/predictable” box. They come up with a method for controlling their life that is based on the assumption that they understand it and the world. Insofar as you isolate yourself from the world and ignore the screeching of your dying soul, it’s possible to convince yourself that this is indeed how the world works until you die (possibly of boredom).

But that’s not what we’re up to round here, obviously. I bring this up to highlight the fact that you should be alert to methods of designing your life that have these fallacious assumptions baked in. Even the assumption that it’s possible to draw a complete and useful WoG hides these assumptions.

The clockwork orange dream is that you can invent some mechanistic process, like a checklist paired with a hierarchical categorization of desires (tasks goals projects initiatives roles vision mission purpose dharmma), and the output is all of your specific goals and all of your systems for achieving those goals, and then you just apply discipline and coffee and hey presto you have an amazing life. Sounds tempting, but is a shit plan if what you want is the profound joys and magical serendipities of a complex and adaptive life instead of a rigid (as in mortis) hyperstructure (as in cage) for your soul.

The flip side though is in throwing up your hands and surrendering even intent or will or desire in the name of a spineless interpretation of amor fati. This looks like not having your shit together even at all and making excuses because you’re a unique snowflake on the winds of chance or whatever. Maybe that works well for some people but it’s not for me. (I'm sure 7 has something interesting to say related to feminine/masculine inhabited energy here, which I'm looking forward to reading, but just a clarification that what I'm pointing out here is inclusive of the full feminine/masculine spectrum of energy/stances with respect to will and intent. I realize my word choice often comes out overtly masculine when I post stuff that's only been edited 1-3 times, so just want to clarify this isn't a perspective for masculine energy only.)

Anyway, yeah. I don’t care about my goals, I care about the area under the curve of my goals over long periods of time. Calculus mental model fun!

Okay but how do I actually do it, as in what’s the process that outputs these lists of goals I litter across cyberspace and my analog journals?

First I trained my mind to think in systems, per what I wrote in Part 1 about reverse fishbone diagrams and WoGs and etc. Some further thoughts on that:

Early on, I identified a lot of nodes that were unattractive when I RFd them and I got rid of them. This took a while. Now, I rarely let ‘bad’ goals into my WoG, so I’m mostly working with good components (although I’ve got a few legacy nodes I haven’t yet finished clearing out). RFing is a filter activity.

I spend most of my time now thinking about how to arrange the components with respect to each other. I’m also now putting a lot of effort into evaluating nodes against ‘authenticity’ or closing the congruence gap, aka trying to make the difference between who I could and want to be and who I am as small as possible. (One of my life goals is to leave it all on the field, to use a sportsball meme.)

The way to get a good system is the same way to have a good idea: have a lot of ideas and throw the bad ones out. Similarly, give up on the idea of shopping around till you find The Right system. Start making a system and then fall in love with the process of endlessly tweaking it, which looks like trying a lot of things and stopping the things that aren’t working.

It's useful to have a basic functional system for logistics and stuff, like how and where to capture stuff like "do taxes" and "send that thing to Bob" and 'clean the gutters'. This isn't a hustle productivity bro thing, it's just a common sense high-level adulting muda-reduction strategy.

But another reason to have a system for logistics and stuff is that you can connect your goals, your mental model of the complex adaptive system that is your unfolding life and that you want to be awesome, to what you’re going to do next Tuesday, or at 2pm today.

The things I put on my weekly/daily plan either are stuff like do taxes or they’ve got an invisible thread to my goals/WoG.

I also journal a lot. I journal analog, in my weekly reviews, in random notes, and here. A lot of insights about my WoG get fleshed out and articulated in my journaling activity. Also journaling helps me clear my RAM and make sense for the insight that will build on whatever I needed to write down to get out of my head.

I do get a lot of insights from conversation with friends. Quadalupe, b7, mF, theanimal, berrytwo, mooretrees, JnG, and others are all people I’ve had insights about my goals and the structure of the process of goalsetting with. (B7 got used to me suddenly stopping my bike and scribbling a thought down in the midst of a conversation out in the backend of Utah last year). Not to mention all the people who comment on my journal night here or the forum. But my most brain-zapped insights have come from irl conversations.

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If this all sounds terribly ad-hoc, idiosyncratic, and non-actionable, that's because it probably is. I've been doing this kind of thing for so long that it's all kind of a soup of intuitive self-guidance. Every once in a while I find a cool new structured methodology that I think I can learn things from and I'll do one of those *sweep everything off the desk onto the floor in one big motion* moves and set up the new structured system... and in a year or two it'll be very ad hoc and idiosynratic again. That's how it's supposed to go, imo. The 'system' is supposed to ooze down into the pores of your life and you just "have a good life". But doing structured approaches is essential for learning new things (for me anyway).

For example, I'm currently studying several of mF's posts on his approaches, and I'm going to do several of those exercises/restructurings as well as one or two syntheses of his ideas in the near future. References:

mFs thoughts on WOG creation: viewtopic.php?p=279690#p279690 and also viewtopic.php?p=277205#p277205

mF's thoughts on Randomization: viewtopic.php?p=242959#p242959

mF's thoughts on identity based goals: viewtopic.php?p=242903#p242903