Rule #2 – Change you first
Essayist Anaïs Nin said: “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”
If we want the world to change we first must change ourselves. That’s why people who have zero personal responsibility and act like victims should be avoided at all costs.
Until they do the inner work they’ll keep tripping over themselves and blaming an outside force like politics.
Rule #4 – Struggles are an opportunity
You want struggles or you don’t learn sh*t. You also don’t want to work with people online who will do anything to avoid struggles.
Rule #5 – The mind runs on code
Our mind is made up of information and lines of code just like a computer or piece of software. If you don’t write the code in your head then society will write it for you.It’s why the art of unlearning is more important for most people than new learning.
A lot of these points align with developmental psychology which can also go by the name of vertical development, ego development, or leadership development. People like William Torbert, Susan Cook-Greuter, and Richard Barrett are notable people in this field, all providing amazing perspectives on it. Basically as one progresses, their meaning of life increases in a broader and deeper way, providing a larger context to understand it by. Thus they can grasp more complexity and paradoxes.
I’ve found a lot of Tim’s articles align with this, in the sense that he relays a conventional myth relayed by society and then shows how an opposite, post-conventional approach is paradoxically better. In a nutshell though, it all comes down to understanding challenges in life are opportunities for growth, thus to be embraced rather than avoided or even feared.
The hero’s journey is effectively an allegory for this which can be expanded into a larger allegory of seeing life as a role-playing game. Here are the basic narrative mechanics of it.
When we face a major life challenge that we can’t navigate with our current worldview, we begin to question our assumptions and beliefs, thus leading us on a “quest”. Doing so though, causes us to face our “monstrous” fears tied to these limiting beliefs. In overcoming these fears, we discover “treasured” values and insights about ourselves and life as a whole, especially what it means to be a human being. And finally in doing so, we gain “experience” which helps us to “level up” our consciousness in turn, thus stepping into a much larger “role” to “play” within life (due to having a much larger context to perceive it by).