A Bit More Detail

The information on this page will give you just a bit more traction. But we encourage you to discuss them with a person you trust and, ideally, has more life experience than you so that you have a chance of getting an elevated perspective that you may not yet have the life experience to see properly.

Knowledge Priorities

In the ideal world we would all be raised by perfect parents, in perfect communities in circumstances that feel safe and fair. Well--- that didn't happen, right!?

It is impossible to live your best possible life without adequate understanding of and skill in the five categories listed on our landing page. Parents should consider being deliberate about assuring their children get adequate guidance in each of the five categories at appropriate times in their development. And, if you are an adult who is struggling to enjoy how your life is going, then you may want to review them and see if your intuitions suggest you need to find ways to plug gaps in knowledge or skills in one or more of the categories.

A perfect childhood occurs for few people. For one thing, even an objectively perfect parent can't be a perfect parent. No parent can really know enough details about how their children emotionally and intellectually interpret their experiences. And thus no parent can help a child as much as they may want to.

That's not all bad because never experiencing stress and learning to resolve it would leave any child completely incapable of developing emotional resilience; And emotional resilience is probably the single most important trait to learn for any human. This is true whether you are brilliant or not, physically robust or not, socially adept or not.

The four life categories on the homepage are four key knowledge and skill categories that you might consider a useful scaffolding for getting on, and staying on a path towards your best possible life.

Seek to grow your wisdom.

Being wise is the confluence of knowing useful information, understanding the choices they make available to you, recognizing the specific choice that is most constructive to your life goals, and mastering your own thoughts and behaviors enough to successfully implement that best available choice.

Know the truth about wisdoms.

They can only deliver their value to you if ALL conditions below are met:

Find them.
Understand them properly.
Agree with them.
Deliberately exert sufficient effort to integrate them into your behaviors when appropriate.

Be your own best friend.

Your body and the thoughts in your head are the only guarantees you have 24/7 until the moment you die. No amount of wealth, health, celebrity or accomplishment will provide reliable and enduring satisfaction if you can't love yourself unconditional exactly as you are.

This should be the highest priority skill you make a plan to succeed at.

Know the truth about suffering.

Pain is a real, physical and emotional phenomenon, but suffering and feelings of dissatisfaction (in any of their many forms) are emotional conditions. As such, the only way to suffer during or after an unpleasant experience in life is by choosing to suffer. You can and should learn how to stop choosing to suffer.

Life is not fair.

If you do not already fully accept this regrettable truth you will be stuck in some form of fantasy in your reactions to life events and in your responses to life events.

Strive to understand life as it truly IS and make your plans and choices accordingly.

Not suffering is not enough.

Learning the skills to not suffer your own thoughts and emotions is a fantastic accomplishment in life that many people around the world already do substantially achieve. You can too. However, it is not a sufficient goal. It would be silly to simply learn to accept anything that happens to you during your life.

Most of us wish to actually engage with life in a way that will maximize our ability to flourish as much as our unique circumstances will allow it. That means making choices about what unpleasant experiences and circumstances may be within your power to eliminate or improve... and then putting forth the appropriate effort to actually improve those things that you can.

Try your best.

By definition it is not possible for any of us to ever do more than our best. It is necessary to understand that "trying your best" is always a conditional statement. It depends on your available time, your current situational understanding, your available resources to help and a whole host of other parameters. Imperfect, or even terrible results, begin to lose their ability to emotionally devastate when you know and understand this wisdom: When you know that you really do always try your best... and always have.

You can--- you must re-evaluate everything about your life after your childhood.

The childhood development years of our lives is handed to us by fate. We have no control over how well our parents or guardians raised us. We have no control over how safe or unsafe, how under-pleasant or over-pleasant the circumstances were. For better or for worse the "attitude about life" that you develop in your childhood is hostage to all of this. But be clear, they are merely attitudes: They can be changed in any direction you want once you are handed the reigns of control over your own life choices.

Find ways to see everything freshly again once you are financially independent. This is the point when you not only can--- but you actually should use the wisdoms in this list (and others) to repaint any part of your life that doesn't feel wonderful to you. Find your own colors and textures. From this point on, stop blaming what may have been handed to you and start making the changes that are necessary to align with the life plans that you and you alone are now responsible for.

Know your life goals and priorities. Keep an up-to-date life plan.

It is not possible to actually succeed at trying your best unless you have criteria against which to measure better and worse choices!

"You can choose to sail a ship with no rudder; but no one can know where it's going to end up".

Be sure you are sailing through your lifetime with the best possible map and compass. Your life plan, however vague or detailed, is the map against which you can always compare your current situation--- and thus make your best possible choices for course-corrections if needed.

Know the insight of diversity.

Diversity is not just about race, sexual orientation and body morphology. Understanding diversity, with depth, is understanding in a deep way that everyone else in life is not a clone of you. Everyone has their own life history, intellectual inclinations, fears and priorities. Everybody else, NOT just you, is actually trying their best too; even if they are behaving in a ways that feel wrong-headed to you.

As much as it makes you "feel smart" when you try to judge others, the fact is that nobody else is actually "an idiot" for their viewpoints, behaviors or actions.

Understand the difference between wants and needs.

If you are prone to define too many things in life as "needs" you are truly dooming yourself to dissatisfaction. Use a sharp mental knife when deciding what you put in each of those two lists... and then perhaps further prioritize the "wants" list with equal mercilessness into lessor and greater wants.

This wisdom alone will reap huge emotional rewards. Combined with the others, it's difficult to not reach a much more pleasant place in your emotional life.

Understand the difference between information, knowledge and belief.

Understand the enormous difference between actual, bona fide facts--versus mere information versus beliefs. Understanding that you cannot actually know what you don't know is necessary to keep growing. It also creates more constructive family and social interactions as you will naturally "drop any pomp" once you understand this wisdom.

Make a personal commitment to deliberate and sustained effort towards self-evolution.

You can read all of the great texts on Earth and watch all of the best YouTube videos, but doing that will mostly just eat time in your life's hourglass unless you actually spend enough time to really understand the wisdoms--- and you successfully integrate the lessons into your default life choices and behaviors.

No world wisdom can be "achieved" in any way that is guaranteed to be permanent in your life. At best you can "achieve" them for your life as it has been.

Big life changes will often require you to achieve an even deeper understanding of a wisdom and/or exert renewed energy to re-achieve your ability to exercise the wisdom in very different and/or harsher conditions. This is normal.

Align your life with your goals and priorities.

The integration part of wisdoms is far easier when you aren't living a life and lifestyle that is resisting your own values and priorities at every moment.

We all have restrictions on what we feel we have the power to actually change. But the point is that you need to make it an on-going process to observe where there are frictions in your life behavior, relationships and physical circumstances and then choose to do what you can to eliminate them.

Live in Earth-time whenever possible or necessary.

Newtonian Earth-time is gentle, constant and inevitable. It's the smooth and gradual flow of the daily sunrise and sunset... and the smooth and gradual cycle of the seasons wherever you live. The industrial paradigm for consuming Earth-time, on the other hand, is rigid, numerical, physically and emotionally destructive and is not natural.

There are many benefits to living in a highly industrial society, but that society seduces us into believing that we must accomplish more and more and do it all as quickly as possible. Some people are better suited to this pressure than others. But in the end, none of us are machines. Our bodies and emotions evolved over millions of years to a usually gentle flow of time with only very rare instances of needing to feel hurried.

We must monitor and make adjustments to where we try to stay on this spectrum between Earth-time and industrial-time. Learning to reconnect to time as nature intended is not strictly available to everyone. Most of us really are still at places in our lives where we are inextricably stuck in a hurry. That said, simply being aware of the industrial pressure to "always be in a hurry" and always "achieve" can provide the impetus you need in order to reduce that pressure as much as possible whenever you sense that your mind and/or body need to recover for a while.

You must commit to learning how to create peace in your body when you need it.

On a path towards unconditional Love: The nearly inevitable result of living wisely.

If you have properly understood the first fifteen wisdoms--- and your life informs you to agree with them, then you are surely on the path that leads towards living in unconditional Love.

Living in unconditional Love does not suggest one should suspend anything at all about how you currently see the realities of the world and other people. It does not imply you must be irrationally friendly towards people that seem to you to be ill-motivated. It does mean that your responses to people and life events will be less-ignorant, less rigid and will be far less prone to self-centered and ego-protective motivations.

And, regardless of what happens external to you, your own mind and body will be much more pleasant as you get ever better at living in unconditional Love.