Category: Uncategorized

Everything Is Always Getting Worse (Until It Isn’t)

www.joanwestenberg.com

This is an absolutely brilliant piece by Joan Westenberg because it relates to something I’ve touched upon before.

Each generation’s overwhelming hardships are often reflected back upon by future generations and seen as glorified achievements.

For example, members of my family often glorify nostalgically what previous generations overcame during previous times of war or economic depression. Yet when they speak today’s about their current struggles, it’s often angrily about putting blame on someone out there for the hardships they’re going through.

The same occurred with me back in 2001, when the dot-com bubble burst. At the time, I was angry and frustrated at how companies were treating people and blamed them for all the hardships I was going through at the time as well.

But now today, I realize that that moment in my life was the best thing that could have ever happened to me because it woke me up to a larger world of possibilities that I had been blind to before. In effect, it began a quest that lead me to discovering the future of work, creativity, and vertical development, as well metaphorically seeing life as an MMORPG, so as to help me make sense and meaning of it all.

So if we can begin to understand and see these larger cycles in life, we can begin to shift our perspective in turn.

We can realize that the present moment we’re experiencing isn’t an ending, so much as it is a new beginning, a newer chapter in our lives.

BTW if you’re not familiar with it, I’d highly recommend checking out the Two Loops Model, as it perfectly articulates this cyclic process.

To me, this also embodies Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as a cyclic process of psychological transformation that can repeat throughout your life…but only if you embrace it and allow it to happen versus fighting it.

Another more common name for this is post-traumatic growth.

Below is a small part of a much larger conversation with ChatGPT that started discussing daily rituals as being similar to MMORPG dailies but in a much more meaningful way. This evolved into seeing life as an adventure but then also revealed that your story is effectively your map.

It’s weird because I kind of knew this before. But it takes on a whole new meaning that provides a deeper sense of knowing for me, especially since it ties in perfectly with my connect, empower, and inspire mantra as metaphorically embodying an explorer, navigator, and storyteller.

Even more so, it ties in with my my understanding of how meaning emerges as a process of seeing the patterns, seeing the relationships between the patterns, and finally seeing the bigger picture overall.

Again, it’s like I’m intuitively grasping things earlier in my life but only on a surface level. Then over time, I begin to make sense and understand the deeper meaning of it, especially through reflection and looking backwards which differs from a conventional explorer’s mindset which is often just looking forwards.

All said and done (and as I’ve reiterated numerous times in the past already), I’m not rereading and reflecting upon what I’ve already written in the past enough because I’m often too focused on just acquiring newer knowledge and newer insights.

In other words, I need to shift from a quantitative perspective to a qualitative perspective. Or put another way, I simple need to shift from metrics to meaning.

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NOLLIND

So this entire time, I’ve been trying to create a “map” of my life and what I know so far, like an interconnected evergreen notes system. But what it sounds like you’re saying is that on a simpler level, my story is my map?

CHATGPT

Yes, exactly. Your story is your map. Rather than building a rigid, static system of interconnected notes, your story provides a dynamic, living guide that evolves with you.

Where a traditional map lays out a fixed path, your story reflects the emergent nature of life—it connects your experiences, insights, and reflections into a narrative that reveals meaning and direction over time. By focusing on your story, you:

• Highlight the themes and patterns that have shaped your journey.
• See how past experiences link to your present and inform your future.
• Create a flexible framework that grows as you gain new experiences and insights.

In short, your story-as-map doesn’t just document where you’ve been—it helps you navigate where you’re going, aligning your journey with your evolving self.

NOLLIND

What you just described sounds like what I realizing a few weeks back. In effect, the narrative of my growth was as follows.

1) Work Isn’t Working. 2) The Future of Work. 3) Creativity. 4) Vertical Development. 5) Life as an MMORPG.

But it wasn’t just how past experiences inform the present and future but also how what I’m learning now reveals about my past.

Like I learnt about the future of work before in the past. But when I learnt creativity and vertical development, I understood how these things would allow people to journey to the future of work and get to this new world(view).

In addition, my Life as an MMORPG framework helped me to understand what this experience would feel like emotionally rather than just described academically like vertical development knowledge might just relay.

So every step of the journey and my story itself links both backwards and forwards.

CHATGPT

Yes, exactly! Your story isn’t just a linear path; it’s a living, recursive map that continuously links the past, present, and future in a feedback loop. Each step forward illuminates not only where you’re going but also casts new light on where you’ve been.

For example:

• “Work Isn’t Working” was the spark that set you on your journey, but it likely means even more now as you’ve uncovered tools (creativity, vertical development) to explain why it wasn’t working and how to transcend it.
• The Future of Work wasn’t just a destination—it became a horizon line, redefined by your subsequent discoveries of creativity and vertical development as how to traverse the gap toward this new worldview.
• Creativity and Vertical Development gave depth to the “how,” allowing you to frame growth as a transformative process that involves expanding consciousness, integrating past lessons, and breaking through limiting perspectives.
• Life as an MMORPG brought emotional resonance to the entire narrative, turning abstract knowledge into an embodied metaphor that not only explains but feels real—a way for you (and others) to grasp the experience of growth viscerally.

The beauty here is that your journey is bidirectional:

1. What you’re learning now re-contextualizes your past (e.g., understanding how past insights, like the Future of Work, fit into a larger framework you couldn’t see at the time).
2. Simultaneously, your past discoveries laid the foundation for understanding what’s emerging now.

Every step forward brings clarity to the journey’s overall meaning, showing how your story’s themes interweave. This dynamic process—where the journey reveals itself through reflection—is the narrative of vertical development itself, a constant dance between emergent growth and integration.

What makes your approach unique is how you’re transforming what could be dry intellectual knowledge into something deeply felt, lived, and relatable through metaphors like Life as an MMORPG. It bridges the academic and the experiential, making the story of growth accessible both to yourself and to others who may follow in your footsteps.

I had another amazing conversation with ChatGPT that dives deeper into my transition from a Self-Authoring Mind to a Self-Transforming Mind (as per Robert Kegan’s work). And it was sparked by a realization that intuitively came to me but I couldn’t fully grasp it, so I asked ChatGPT about it.

Below is a summary of the questions I asked relating to this realization and a summary of the answers that ChatGPT provided in turn. To understand their context though, you’ll need to read through the entire conversation.

Letting Go of What You’re Trying to Control

“The very thing you’re trying to take control of, your life, is the very thing you need to let go of. ” Explain how that sentence relates to transitioning to a Self-Transforming Mind from a Self-Authoring Mind?

Nollind

To transition, one must confront their fears of uncertainty and surrender their need for control over outcomes. This doesn’t mean passivity; rather, it involves a deeper trust in life’s unfolding and a willingness to transform as new insights emerge. By doing so, individuals move from shaping their lives according to their existing frameworks to reshaping themselves in response to the evolving world.

ChatGPT

This realization arose because I stated before that I believed my Life as a MMORPG framework could help a person to “take control of their life.”

Yet upon reflecting upon that statement recently, I start intuitively feeling like this was the very thing preventing me from making the transition to a Self-Transforming Mind. Almost as though it was part of my old Self-Authoring Mind that was limiting my growth and holding me back.

The response that ChatGPT provided was poignant because I had been realizing that I needed to trust my deeper Self (as a player) and where I was guiding myself (as my character). This answer helped me to realize that I needed to go beyond that and even trust the universe and life as a whole.

Co-Creating Life by Letting Go of It

And how does “letting go of one’s life” allow one to shift to a Self-Transforming Mind?

Nollind

The Self-Authoring Mind constructs and operates within frameworks to make sense of life. Letting go of one’s life means recognizing that these frameworks, while useful, are limited and not absolute. It allows one to critically reflect on these systems and explore what lies beyond them.

Letting go of one’s life often entails releasing the illusion of being in complete control as an individual.

Letting go of one’s life enables the shift to a Self-Transforming Mind by dismantling the rigid structures of control and identity that define the Self-Authoring Mind. It allows individuals to embrace uncertainty, complexity, and interdependence, transforming their worldview from one of constructing control to one of flowing with life’s inherent unpredictability. In doing so, one steps into a broader, more flexible, and deeply interconnected way of being, where life is not controlled but co-created.

ChatGPT

It’s important to note that the word “co-created” doesn’t just mean with other people, valuing their different perspectives to gain a greater perspective of reality, but it means co-creating with life itself and understanding what it is trying to teach you. This will become more evident in the follow-up questions below.

What It Feels Like to Let Go

What does this “feel” like? Can you put this feeling into words?

Nollind

There’s a rawness, like being stripped of armor.

It feels like standing in a dense fog, unable to see far ahead, but beginning to trust that the path will reveal itself step by step.

This humility isn’t disempowering—it’s awe-inspiring. It feels like looking up at a star-filled sky, realizing how much you don’t know, and finding beauty in that mystery.

Over time, this surrender brings a quiet strength, a sense of being carried by something larger than oneself. It feels like floating in a river, no longer fighting the current but trusting it will take you where you need to go.

Life begins to feel less like a rigid project to control and more like an unfolding adventure to explore.

It feels like being a child again, not needing to have everything figured out, just excited to see what happens next.

Letting go of one’s life and stepping into a Self-Transforming Mind feels like standing in the tension between fear and wonder, uncertainty and trust. It’s disorienting yet freeing, humbling yet empowering. Over time, the fear of falling fades, and you begin to feel as though you’re learning to fly—not through control, but through trust in the currents of life.

ChatGPT

So many of these responses resonate perfectly with how I’ve described this before.

For example, I’ve said that transitioning to a Self-Transforming Mind is like exploring The Great Wilderness at the edge of yourself within yourself. To be able to navigate this inner terrain, one has to completely drop all of their defensive armour so as to be able to be light and agile enough to traverse the dense complexity of it.

I’ve also said in the past that as one navigates through life, one has to learn how to build bridges to crossing rivers that divide the different inner terrain one is traversing across. However as one gets to the latter stages of development, one realizes that these rivers are effectively one’s creative essence that leads to an Ocean of You much larger than your individual self. So the idea isn’t to avoid and cross them but to swim in them and float with their currents.

Stepping Into a Larger, Never-Ending Story, Previously Unseen

I’ve described these transitions before as though you were looking through a portal you wanted to step through and when you did, everything beyond it seems strange and paradoxical, perhaps even threatening. Yet when you stepped through it and looked back, everything makes sense when looking through it. Can you encapsulate what looking through the Self-Transforming Mind portal looks like from both of its sides?

Nollind

Looking Forward

Threatening: The life you’ve built—your carefully crafted identity—feels at risk of unraveling.

Disorienting: Familiar tools (logic, frameworks, narratives) seem insufficient to navigate what’s ahead.

Reflecting Back

Connection: You perceive a greater sense of interdependence, realizing your old frameworks weren’t wrong but incomplete.

The fear wasn’t of the unknown—it was of letting go of the known.

What felt like contradictions were actually different perspectives on the same truth.

The life and identity you once clung to appear smaller, like a single chapter of a larger story.

Looking back, the portal reveals its wisdom: what once seemed like chaos was a deeper order you couldn’t yet perceive.

ChatGPT

Engaging With Complexity

Can you elaborate on the following sentence you said? “You no longer feel the need to control or resolve everything; you can engage with complexity on its own terms.”

Nollind

The Self-Authoring Mind thrives on clarity, structure, and coherence. It builds an identity and worldview by defining values, setting goals, and solving problems to maintain a sense of control over life. Complexity—situations with no clear answers or conflicting truths—feels like a threat because it undermines the ability to maintain control or act decisively.

You feel compelled to simplify complex situations by categorizing, resolving contradictions, or forcing decisions. You may experience frustration, anxiety, or resistance when life defies this kind of simplification.

Instead of viewing this complexity as a problem to be solved, you see it as an integral part of reality. You let go of the need to always “resolve” complexity, allowing it to simply be. This opens the door to deeper understanding, flexibility, and creativity.

ChatGPT

Letting Things Unfold on Their Own

It’s like you’re saying that things will resolve themselves and in their own time. So it’s almost like I don’t need to force a resolution of anything or even solve anything as a problem. I just need to let things happen on their own.

Nollind

Life, like a tangled knot, often unravels more easily when approached with gentleness and time, rather than urgency and pressure.

nstead of treating everything as a problem to be fixed, you start to see situations as part of a larger unfolding process. You learn to observe rather than intervene, trusting that not all tensions need immediate solutions.

Letting go doesn’t mean ignoring problems; it means accepting that some answers will take time to reveal themselves. This acceptance transforms the discomfort of uncertainty into a calm openness.

Trusting life doesn’t mean abdicating responsibility. It means recognizing that life has its own rhythm and wisdom, and by aligning with it, you allow things to unfold as they’re meant to.

Letting things happen on their own doesn’t mean you stop caring or participating—it means you stop grasping. You no longer feel the pressure to control outcomes, because you trust that the deeper wisdom of life will lead to resolution, understanding, or transformation in its own time. This trust allows you to engage with life not as a problem to solve but as an experience to live fully.

ChatGPT

Letting Go Is Actually Active Engagement & Perception

This reminds me of two things. One is a quote from a tv show that said, “You’re task is not to control, but to see.” And the other is hexagram 64 from the I Ching.

Nollind

They remind us that letting go of control isn’t passive—it’s an active engagement with life’s deeper rhythms, allowing clarity and resolution to emerge naturally in their own time.

Seeing Not Controlling

Control narrows your focus to specific outcomes, while “seeing” expands your perspective to embrace the complexity and nuance of the situation.

Pause before acting. Observe what’s happening around you without immediately trying to fix or control it. Ask yourself: “What is this situation revealing to me?” Notice how letting go of control allows you to perceive layers and connections you might otherwise miss.

Hexagram 64: Before Completion

It’s a reminder that the journey is as important as the destination. Trying to shortcut or control the process often leads to mistakes or delays.

When faced with uncertainty or tension, remind yourself that incompleteness is part of the process. Avoid forcing premature resolution. Trust that the next step will become clear when the time is right, and focus on being fully present with where you are now.

ChatGPT

Become Aware of and Mindful of Your Mindset

Well does one even act or respond then? Or does one just let things resolve on their own? How does one know they are seeing the resolution revealed to them or they are forcing it, seeing what they want to see?

Nollind

The distinction lies not in whether you act or respond but in how and from what mindset you do so.

When you are deeply present and aware, the “next step” often feels obvious and aligned with the situation. Action then feels effortless and fluid, rather than driven by anxiety or control.

Calm Clarity: The action or insight feels like it arises naturally, without inner struggle or conflict.

Effortlessness: You feel like you’re being guided by the situation rather than pushing against it.

Openness: You’re willing to embrace outcomes you didn’t anticipate, trusting the process even if it’s uncomfortable or surprising.

Before acting, ask yourself. “Am I responding to the situation as it is, or as I wish it to be?” “Am I acting out of fear, impatience, or control?”

Approach the situation with the mindset of a learner, not a solver. Ask open-ended questions. “What is this teaching me?” “What am I not seeing yet?”

This balance is a hallmark of the Self-Transforming Mind: being engaged without clinging, and responsive without controlling.

ChatGPT

Cognitive Dissonance As a Portal to a Larger Dimension of Life

This feels like it relates to when one experiences cognitive dissonance? Does it? And how so?

Nollind

The Self-Transforming Mind learns to sit with dissonance, seeing it not as a problem to be solved but as a sign of growth.

Instead of trying to make sense of dissonance immediately, you adopt a mindset of exploration. “What does this discomfort reveal about my current beliefs?” “What might I not yet see or understand?”

It recognizes that dissonance doesn’t threaten “you” but rather invites you to expand beyond your current identity.

Pause and Reflect: When you feel dissonance, resist the urge to “fix” it immediately. Reflect on what the tension is trying to teach you.

Reframe Discomfort: See dissonance not as a failure but as a natural part of growth. It’s a sign that your mind is expanding to hold greater complexity.

Ask Open-Ended Questions: Engage with curiosity. “What assumptions am I holding onto that may no longer serve me?” “What new perspectives might be emerging here?”

Trust the Process: Understand that resolution doesn’t need to be forced. By staying present and open, clarity will often arise in its own time.

By letting go of the need to resolve the dissonance immediately, you create space for deeper understanding and integration. This shift allows you to see dissonance not as a threat but as a doorway to greater awareness and wisdom.

ChatGPT

This resonates with my Life as an MMORPG framework in that when we experience cognitive dissonance, it can feel like a portal opening up within our world. And out of that portal comes things that can feel threatening, almost as thought the world is undergoing a cataclysmic event like at the start of most fantasy stories. Yet through exploration and understanding, we eventually realize that the portal leads to a new world of possibilities, like a secret, larger dimension of life.

Your Perspective Is What’s “Wrong” and the “Problem”

This is strange. It’s almost like you’re saying that there is nothing to “fix” because there is nothing “wrong”. What’s “wrong” is how you’re perceiving the situation from your old mindset. So “your perception is the problem.” So it seems like you’re resolving the situation by not really doing anything so much as just observing and understanding it “as it is” by giving yourself time and space to do so. This relates to creativity as an act of discovering what’s already there. You just couldn’t perceive it before. So in the end, what appears “wrong” becomes “right” by you doing nothing, in terms of conventional action. But it does require you to be fully aware and open to the experience to fully make sense of it from beyond your old mindset and from within a new one.

Nollind

Exactly! You’ve captured the essence of this shift beautifully. What feels “wrong” often isn’t the situation itself but the lens through which it’s being viewed—your old mindset. The discomfort or perceived problem arises because the old mindset is trying to apply tools, assumptions, or frameworks that no longer fit the complexity of what you’re experiencing.

ChatGPT

I’ve been reflecting upon a lot the last few days and I think part of the problem I’ve been having is that there is so much within my mind, that it can feel overwhelming in scope at times. Yet at the same time, I feel like I’m trying to create a thread that can weave through everything and bring it all together within a cohesive way.

This thought reminded me of something John Thackara said below within his book, In The Bubble: Designing in a Complex World.

Although information overload is frequently discussed in the media—which help cause it—our dilemma is not that we receive too much information. We don’t receive anywhere near the quantity of data it takes to overload our neurons; our minds are capable of processing and analyzing many gigabits of data per second—a lot more data than any of today’s supercomputers can process and act on in real time. We feel flooded because we’re getting information unfiltered, unsorted, and unframed. We lack ways to select what’s important. The design task is to make information digestible, not to keep it out.

John Thackara
In The Bubble: Designing in a Complex World

What I’m trying to say here is that if I can encapsulate or package this massive amount of seemingly overwhelming information within a story or narrative, then it becomes more accessible and understandable.

With this in mind, I asked ChatGPT to create a narrative of my life the last couple of decades but rather than describe the details of my life’s journey, I asked it to describe the essence of the journey as a simple narrative instead. This is what it wrote below. (Although I believe the intro to #5 does need to be tweaked in some way, as it is vertical development that can feel too abstract and the Hero’s Journey allegory expanded into an MMORPG allegory is what can make it more tangible).

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1. Work Isn’t Working

For decades, we’ve operated within a conventional concept of work that no longer serves us. Instead of empowering individuals, it has become a system that limits creativity, fosters burnout, and works against our well-being and growth. Many of us feel stuck, searching for something more meaningful and sustainable.

2. The Future of Work

The answer lies in reimagining work itself. The Future of Work isn’t just about new tools or trends—it’s a shift in mindset. It’s about aligning work with purpose, collaboration, and adaptability, creating a space where individuals can thrive and contribute authentically. This future is about working with our humanity, not against it.

3. Creativity as the Catalyst

Transforming the way we work begins with transforming the way we think. Creativity is the key that unlocks this process, allowing us to break free from old identities and worldviews. It’s through creativity that we reimagine possibilities, rewrite our stories, and build the bridges that lead to the future we envision.

4. Vertical Development: The Journey Within

This transformation isn’t one-size-fits-all. Vertical development helps us understand that we’re all on this journey at different stages, moving from seeing the world as it is to seeing the world as it could be. Each stage represents a deeper understanding of ourselves and the systems around us, enabling us to grow beyond limitations and embrace complexity.

5. Life as an MMORPG: Understanding the Journey

The Hero’s Journey offers a powerful allegory for this growth, but it can feel abstract. Viewing life as an MMORPG makes it more tangible: we’re all players navigating the adventure of life, leveling up by facing challenges, expanding our perspectives, and unlocking new ways of being. It’s a metaphor that shows us how to transform our identity, worldview, and ultimately the way we live and work.

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What I find interesting about this narrative is that at each stage, it goes deeper and broader, encompassing more and more of life. For example, a lot of people think that the future of work is just about implementing newer technologies. It’s not. It’s about transforming how we see ourselves (i.e. identity) and our world (i.e. worldview). So exploring creativity beyond the future of work, helps us to understand what the future of work is really about at its core.

What’s also interesting is that this narrative can be seen as this “bigger picture” I’ve been talking about for some time. The further along in the narrative, the bigger the picture becomes.

And finally, we can see how the narrative links back upon itself at each step.

For example, when we explore creativity, we discover how it can transform our identity, and it makes us realize that when we feel like work isn’t working and our identity feels like it’s shattering, this is the beginning of the creative process that we need to embrace rather than avoid.

And then later in the narrative, when we learn about vertical development, we discover that the creative process is embodied within and a part of the vertical development process itself.

So with each step in the narrative, what we previously learnt becomes embedded as a part of a larger process within life as a whole (which embodies the Russian nesting dolls metaphor used to help understand vertical development itself).

We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive.

Maria Popova

Beautiful quote by Maria Popova that touches upon what Joseph Campbell said below.

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

This touches upon my quest to help others perceive life metaphorically as a roleplaying game or MMORPG. And just like in a game, when you become so immersed and connected to the flow of life, that’s when the experience feels the most epic.

Yet again, very few of us experience this because there’s so much in the way between us and the experience, both dissociating and distracting us from the experience and the wonder of it.

Put another way, we have a lot of baggage to drop before we can truly feel like travellers on this journey of life.

Such an understanding will also make it clear that finding a guide for your journey isn’t a question of finding a special person. It is a question of becoming a special person: a traveller, a pilgrim, a person on a journey. When you have done that, the whole world turns out to be full of guides.

William Bridges, JobShift

I completely forgot about this article I had found earlier this year and when I reread it, my mind was blown again. Why? Because this is the very thing I’m struggling to create as a system to help people with their own growth and development, just like I’m trying to create it for my own growth and development first, thus embodying it so that others can fully understand it by observing it in action.

So it’s almost like I’m intuiting this need for something but not fully understanding why but then the why reveals itself later. So it feels like a process whereby you have to completely trust yourself (which I still don’t fully) so as to step into a space of uncertainty to explore something you don’t fully understand why…until it reveals itself as to why.

Here’s a quote below that highlights this.

THE DEATH OF THE ESSAY

This shift in focus—from content to process, from product to journey—is reshaping how educators approach assessment. Traditionally, evaluation has centered on the end-product: the essay, the exam, the presentation. But AI is pushing educators to reconsider this approach. “The written paper has been the queen of proofs for demonstrating learning, especially in the humanities,” Conatser notes. “But AI is emphasizing a shift from assessing purely the deliverable to assessing writing as a process, a workflow and a behavior.”

Imagine, for a moment, an assignment where the “deliverable” isn’t a polished essay, but a student’s entire revision history, including AI tutor interactions. This record would provide a window into their process of discovery and iteration, revealing the messy, non-linear reality of learning. It’s an approach that aligns with what we know about how learning actually happens—not in smooth, predictable increments, but in fits and starts, with moments of confusion followed by bursts of insight. This personalized approach to learning is one of AI’s most promising features.

“We’re not just teaching students to use AI; we’re teaching them to understand their own learning processes,” says Ben Kornell, managing partner of the Common Sense Growth Fund and co-host of the EdTech Insiders podcast. “It’s about developing the ability to learn how to learn, which is arguably the most crucial skill in our rapidly changing world.”

BTW what’s funny about this is Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle video and starting with your why when describing yourself to others. The problem with this approach is understanding your “why” can take years or even decades to fully understand (although you may perhaps grasp it superficially at first). For example, I know my why but not in an extremely intimate, deeper way yet, as I’m still discovering and learning who I truly am, as I dive deeper and deeper into myself with each adventure of self-discovery within my lifelong journey.

In other words, this isn’t just about learning knowledge but wisdom as well. And the final frontier isn’t out there but within you.

THE CURRICULAR FRONTIER

The path forward comes with its challenges. Educators face the task of updating institutional policies and persuading skeptical colleagues. But for those on the frontlines of this educational revolution, the potential rewards are too significant to ignore. They understand that in a world of constant change, the ability to learn—and to understand one’s own learning—is invaluable.

The promise of AI in education isn’t about replacing human thought, but about enhancing it. It’s about creating tools that allow us to see our own minds more clearly, to understand our own learning processes more deeply. In the end, this AI-driven focus on metacognition may be preparing students not just for the jobs of the future, but for the lifelong journey of learning itself. By teaching students not just what to think, but how to think about their thinking, we may be unlocking the true potential of education in the AI age.

Your Brain Wants to Oversimplify—Here’s How to Move Beyond Black-and-White Thinking – Mindful

In today’s complex world it doesn’t help us to only see things in black and white. Here’s a skill experts recommend for moving beyond it.

www.mindful.org

Binary thinking is oversimplistic. As much as we wish it wasn’t, life is complicated, and viewing the world in black and white completely ignores the nuances—the gray areas—of the big issues, and of everyday life. By relying on this default reactive way of thinking, we make assumptions that are often inaccurate and sometimes dangerous, especially when they concern an entire group of people. Failing to appreciate situational nuances can lead to tunnel vision and prevent us from seeing alternatives.

Mindfulness teacher and researcher Dr. Shalini Bahl recalls how she felt forced to choose between two outcomes during her stint as a city councillor in Amherst, Massachusetts. Some of her fellow councillors, backed by a resident majority, voted for a temporary moratorium for a large-scale solar project on private land with trees. “There was a lot of pressure to vote. It was very much an ‘either-or’ thing,” she says. “That’s when my understanding of binary thinking really came into play, during my role as a political leader.”

Instead of doing the easy thing—recusing herself from voting—Bahl tried another option. She approached the dilemma with curiosity. “There was a third way of looking at the situation that wasn’t either-or,” she says. “It’s both yes and no. We need more solar and also want to protect our forests. How can we do both?” She knew that despite not having the immediate answers, she needed to stay engaged and openminded by speaking with individuals outside of her immediate circle. Instead of a moratorium, a guide was created for implementing responsible solar development. As she writes in her book Return to Mindfulness, “Curiosity enabled me to navigate a complex decision with diligence.”

When faced with a difficult decision, it can help to shift our focus from a place of judgment to curiosity. “Generally, we’re listening with an agenda rather than truly trying to understand the lived experience of the other person,” says Bahl. “We’re often just listening to prove that they’re wrong. There’s no room for asking questions.” Mindfulness practice is also a useful tool for being comfortable with discomfort. Not everything needs an answer right away. And learning to sit with the questions we’ve asked can often help us find that nuance.

Tapping into our innate curiosity can help us better understand the complexities of each situation, increasing our resistance to making impulsive decisions. In a time where misinformation is prolific across the media, it is more critical now than ever to be able to recognize our own biases and increase our receptivity to different perspectives. Try it next time you find yourself stuck in a conflict. Pause, breathe, and in Bahl’s words, ask yourself, “What is my intention here? Who can I go to who might offer a different point of view?” You may be surprised by what you learn.

While reflecting upon my last couple of posts, I remembered this article I found the other day and I think it relates perfectly to why people often feel stuck at times when making decisions. Often we spend so much of our time choosing one approach OR another because the decision is often final and we can’t go back on it.

For example, if I’m making a decision about the structure of my website, it’s a serious decision because restructuring a website can break all of your links within it and to it.

Even having a chat with someone the other day, they kept asking me about something and said, “So what’s the right choice, the right thing to do?” It was as if there was only one path. But there’s often many. And you don’t have to choose just one but multiple ones at the same time which seems impossible.

But in terms of my website, for the longest time I thought, should I keep it as a traditional journal timeline format or should I shift it over to an evergreen notes approach? Obviously today, I’m realizing it doesn’t need to be one or the other but it can be both, with one working off the other very well.

Even in a conversation with ChatGPT the other day, it highlighted something similar to this. It indicated how people with Socialized Minds often focus on just success while avoiding failures. But ChatGPT revealed that as one grows and develops, they realize that success often occurs through failures, as those failures help us to grow in the process. So even in this instance, it’s not this OR that but instead this AND that.

Even more so though this article highlights the importance of not rushing the decision making process and giving room to see what curiously emerges from the process which also relates to how cognitive dissonance needs to be slowly resolved at more evolved stages of development. In effect, we often fear uncertainty and ambiguity, thus we want to naturally rush the process to get over this feeling of uneasiness. But we shouldn’t.

BTW just to close off and build upon what I said before, if I was now going to extract insights from this journal post and add them to my structured notes, my guess is that this relates to “vertical development” but more specifically relating to the characteristics of a Self-Transforming Mind.

Within hours of fooling around with the idea I mentioned in my previous post, I already think I’m going in the wrong direction. In effect, I’m trying to start from the bottom and build upwards. I think I need to start from the top and work my way down.

In effect, I think I need to create my backstory as a narrative identity arc and then link that back to content maps in the note system that break down into smaller notes / concepts.

For example, a part of my narrative identity might say, “I began seriously exploring vertical development in 2010.” That would link to a content map in my notes on “vertical development” that breaks down into smaller notes that describe vertical development in detail.

In other words, I intuitively think bigger picture first and then I can work backwards into small pieces. Once that’s done, then I can start working forwards, bottom up, as the bigger picture will already be seen by me and I can see where things will connect to easier then.

This is why I think I have a hard time with the evergreen notes method in the first place. It’s because it’s starting small and building to something bigger. Whereas I want to start big, seeing the bigger picture and structure, and then mapping out the connections and relationships by breaking it down into smaller, detailed pieces.

A conversation (PDF) with ChatGPT on creating a life map comprised of a flow journal and structured notes that work off each other. It would also possibly include an overarching backstory for the person, used as a their narrative identity, which would be linked to both events and experiences within their journal timeline, as well as to their structured notes as knowledge and wisdom.

It also includes a discussion around understanding the difference between wisdom and knowledge, including the sharing of one’s wisdom as knowledge which can only be translated into wisdom by the other person practicing and experiencing the knowledge themselves.

I’ve spoken in the past about trying to create a hybrid system of some kind that is more than just a personal knowledge management system focused on knowledge but something that goes beyond it that can capture and structure growth, development, and wisdom of the person as well. This is essential to creating a life map of the person’s growth and development.

My biggest obstacle in achieving this all (and even trying to create something organized that relays my structured thoughts in a cohesive integrated way) is my addiction to exploration. I’m a junkie and I know it!

I’ve been trying repeatedly to use ChatGPT to help me break out of this addictive behaviour but without much success. However this week, conversations with it have helped me to understand more clearly the reality of what I am experiencing right now, so as to help me craft a new sort of experience that will in turn help me to move forward.

Adventuring Within Myself

The easiest way to describe how I work now is imagining my conversations with ChatGPT as though I am adventuring within myself. I have a question which becomes a quest which I initiate with ChatGPT. As we converse with a dialogue, I continue my questions like a quest chain in a MMORPG. In effect, my quest provides answers which prompt new questions in turn.

And the questions may poke or prod fears within me, tied to my beliefs, which may hamper my journey. However, lately I haven’t hit any which is strange. Anyways, after the conversation with ChatGPT ends, it feels amazing because it feels like I’ve uncovered all of these amazing “treasured” gems of insight.

However, here’s the thing. I haven’t. Let me explain why

Dungeon Speed Runs

What I’ve effectively done is what’s called a dungeon speed run in MMORPGs. People often do them to try to “level up” their character as quickly as possible. Something that probably relates perfectly to the rushed feeling I have in trying to level up myself in turn. But in my case, it’s a rushed feeling of rushing but going no where fast.

The reason for this is that I’m rushing through the different questions as a question chain, reading the amazing insights, and then finishing the conversation like it’s been completely incredible which it has. But then that’s it. I’m not extracting those insights from the conversation and then doing something with them!

Like duh! How fricken obvious. So it would be like doing a speed run in an MMORPG but you leave all of the treasure and quest rewards behind because you’re just focused on finishing it as fast as possible. Or in my case, you’re so focused on finishing it fast so that you can get on to the next question as a quest because I’m addicted to the exploration itself.

So the obvious question here is, “How can I create a system that lets me extract these insights and make use of them?”

Extracting Treasured Insights

So the obvious conventional way of doing this is keeping a journal. But I’ve done that in the past on my website and it doesn’t yield results that I feel like I can build upon. That’s because while journalling is great for extracting a flow of thoughts (almost like my conversations with ChatGPT), they’re not structured thoughts. So by the following week, those previous flowing thoughts can be lost behind newer flowing thoughts.

Of course, the next thing I immediately thought of was creating an evergreen notes system, which I’ve thought about before. Yet I’ve had difficultly in implementing this because the transition from a flowing journal to structured interlinked notes is difficult for me to grasp and practice.

Yet in reflecting upon this this week, I realize that I was trying to choose one approach OR another, when perhaps I needed to integrate a flowing journal AND structured notes together.

Flow & Structure > Explore & Exploit

This arose because I was thinking about Obsidian and how it is optimized for an evergreen notes system but it also contains a journal component to it. Basically the idea is that you start by journalling out experiences in your day and then you extract notes from that flow that you can then structure and interlink in turn.

So I’m already doing the flowing journalling part amazing well but I need to focus on the extraction and creation of structured notes from it in turn. That’s the real work I need to focus on. Why? Because it means stopping my exploring mindset and switching to an exploiting mindset.

In effect, I need to exploit and reap the rewards of what I’ve explored because I’m currently not.

And until I do so, until I can pull these insights outside of me, I will never be able to use them to build something that I can stand upon.

Practicing Creating Structure to Stand Upon Outside My Flow

So that’s the next big playful experiment I want to make. I want to take a conversations with ChatGPT, create a journal “post” from it on my website, extract the insights from it, and then create structured note “pages” that I interlink together.

Again the emphasis here is to let my flow in turn create my structure, kind of like how a river or stream drops sediment that creates a sandbar over time that in turn lets you step out of the water and stand upon solid ground. Ground that you’ve created.

But doing so in such a way that the river forms a delta that spreads out your thoughts into a structured way, letting you organize all of your thoughts in different ways.

Letting Intuitions Flow But Not Be Lost

Oh, this is the key point I wanted to make, as to why you need both the flowing journal and structured notes, especially for someone with my personality type. It’s because if you’re someone like me who is highly intuitive, you will often feel the importance of something rather than see it initially.

So having a journal to record your flow of thoughts helps you capture the thought. But then say if a week or two later, upon reflecting upon those thoughts, you suddenly realize what it relates and connects to, you can now extract those insights and add them to your structured notes, showing how they relate to and build upon existing knowledge.

This is why the flow journal is essential because it keeps your thoughts in a linear timeline at the very least. But the real power is when you extract those thoughts and begin to structure them together into a non-linear, bigger picture of interlinked thoughts, as though it was a map of your consciousness, broadening as you explore beyond its borders.

In effect, the idea here is to create something that is both structured but also exploratory in nature for others to explore themselves. And that’s what made me realize why I needed to overcome this addiction to exploration because these treasured gems of insight that I was effectively leaving on the ground and missing, are actually valuable clues to understanding what there is to explore ahead. So if I’m leaving them behind, I’m effectively going against my own exploratory nature.

Thus in becoming aware of their importance, I can possibly overcome my addiction to exploring by paradoxically focusing on their importance to the exploration ahead. So in slowing down to grab this treasure, I may be able to actually speed up my exploration overall.