tiistai 17. toukokuuta 2022

TI 17.5.2022 Life Development Plan (Essay for the Thinking Tools Course in Aalto University)

 

Life Development Plan

As I am writing this essay, many things have happened in a positive way. Our professor Lauri Järvilehto has impressed my consciousness during this course a lot. Järvilehto has given me and to my fellow students an aspiring example of how to live your life following a path of interests. This is an ample example (good rhyme) according to Mihaly Csikszentmihályi too, where you draw bodily sensations out of daily tasks in a way best described as feeling flow. According to Järvilehto, you could also combine mundane tasks together and make them that way more challenging and even get your dose of flow (another great rhyme) from that. Can you believe that daily chores can make your life more enjoyable? Well, now I can.   

 

 

Good Life Tools and value exploration

 

How then, should I anchor my life based on my values, aka so-called deep beliefs and interests? Professor Jordan Peterson gives a great advice to orienteer or aim for the highest possible good. If you don’t know what is the highest possible good, you surely know what is evil. Thanks to horrible dictators Putin and his contemptuous peers like Hitler, we live in a time where there are plenty of examples to avoid. The satan lives among us, some might say, so let’s try and follow the other path and focus on meaningful living. Besides aiming for the highest good and to opposite direction of evil one has plenty of choices to feel enjoyable life.

 

In previous essay I mentioned that my first value was my personal health and energy which I haven’t paid enough attention. Wellbeing of my family comes side by side with my personal physical well-being. After these two comes learning. If one is talking about commonly known values, then freedom is probably the biggest value in that list although paradoxically I want to be free as possible but still be a slave of good habits. Giving to others is also one thing I appreciate in life.

 

Tony Robbins mentions six basic human needs. Some of these needs are coupled like the certainty and uncertainty or variety and should be balanced the best way you are personally wired. Other couple than the first two mentioned are significance and connection or love. The former is about being your unique self and the latter is about connection to others. Last of six needs are growth and contribution.

 

Mihaly Csikszentmihály mentions a good society as a place for individuals to grow and evolve their potential and complexity. The growth goes along in flow also, but contribution is giving to others and may well be a secret sauce to a better life. There are plenty of ways one can contribute. I will happily be a giver than taker. One must say that a complex life is totally different than living in chaos.

 

Aiming for the highest good today includes taking care of my family and people close to me. I will also continue to contemplate with my future so that I start doing daily activities that will increase the likelihood of people’s wellbeing. As a strength and conditioning coach, I have dreamed of having my own training facilities where I could cultivate living the fullest right now and spread positive feelings. As a dilettante of music, I will try and make my own music to inspire my offspring to follow their path of interest no matter what other people say. This is my heritage to plant a seed of real believers to live harmoniously with nature, accept our differences and accept the things unknown so far. Be a believer and good things will happen.

 

I want to be the driver of my own bus and invite people on board who wish to join my ride. Riding together to the same direction as an ambassadors of positive energy will help group geniuses to rise and thrive. Author of inspiring book called the Energy Bus Jon Gordon has some rules for driving your own energy bus and one is, No Energy Vampires Allowed! This rule goes a long way in life not to spend your energy on people who take away from you.

 

Freedom as a guiding value needs to be paired with responsibility. Nassim Taleb writes about having a skin in the game and Jocko Willink (a former Navy Seal -operator) says discipline equals freedom. The more freedom we have the more we need to be responsible of things. This is one guiding line I try to follow with being careful not to pollute myself of gaining too much hierarchical power, official on unofficial.

 

Humans need to be noticed. Sawu Bona, I see you and thanks to you I exist. As with being noticed we also need to be heard and believed. As I was thinking those needs that Robbins mentioned I could not fit the need to be noticed in there. Peter Senge has an excellent point of view about systems thinking for seeing things as a whole. We humans need to be seen as complete whole persons, not just titles and outfits. For me this is a norm to follow with always seeking self-knowledge. We are all connected together.

 

Professor Jonathan Haidt gives us moral foundations which are like our ability to taste or to have taste receptors. You have a sweet tooth, you taste saltiness, sour, bitter and umami. The six moral taste buds are care or harm, fairness or cheating, loyalty or betrayal, authority or subversion, sanctity or degradation and liberty or oppression. Being a moral human being, one needs to consider these moral dimensions widely not just the ones that you are inclined to.

 

 

We have more good in us than is seen outward – Esa Saarinen

 

 

Vocational Mapping aka the things that interest me and how much they play a part now.

 

You need a piece of music before you can improvise so that metaphorically there is an order of something before trying to be limitless. This value makes sense when you work or study to first gain insights on basics before breaking rules. You can’t improvise on nothing. Create and start doing something, you can always improve. One should do the things that interest.

 

I am still interested to study philosophy which is for having a better life. I want to live a better life and open possibilities to others to discover how they can succeed too. To have a good life with lots of good emotions, one must stay hungry. Stoic realization is that one must learn to desire those things that you already have in your life. I was surprised that old Stoic writings had a strong impact on me.

 

I used to find exciting to read about great organizational cultures and evolving civilizations and I still do. I love contacting with the top performers in their fields and keep those connections alive. I still don’t like bad bosses and lousy organizational cultures or the way our brains are being hooked on electronic devices. I would like to tinker with the practical devices that would bring our attention back to this moment. That interest has let me to apply to study Exercise Technology in university.

 

I love to play with my kids, to study and run some welfare organization. I think I have managed to spend more time with the darlings thanks to this course and study enough but my dream of having a welfare organization has not proceeded. I’m planning to launch that organization project next fall when my house enlargement will be ready. I will then teach kids or let them figure out themselves how great, fun and meaningful it is to learn as with doing things they are interested in and how meaningful it is to give to others.

 

 

The Stoic Trichotomy and the things I can or can’t influence and what I can control

 

Besides dreaming big, this course gave me great practical tools to use like the realization of Stoic Trichotomy and flow as a guide for ruling our consciousness and to evolve to a complex self. Stoic joy is not to care about influencing others but to live joyfully and colorfully in present moments with people you care for. Let our brains have flourishing gardens of thoughts and thrive together.

 

I used to have a morning routine in studying. I woke up at 5 a.m. and did the hardest tasks first. That tool is still useful. In morning time, I can control my thoughts better.  Thanks to Tony Robbins I keep a success journal, try to remember to feel grateful every day and have a sort of buffer fund just in case something surprising happens. Writing notes is also one tool I use almost daily.

 

My mistake for past years was contemplating on things that I couldn’t influence or maybe could in some sense, but it has taken its toll and I ended up nearly having a burnout. Legal disputes are a game that only lawyers benefit from. I think sometimes both parties can be right and wrong at the same time, but they lack the needed connection and the courthouse is not the best place to get one.

 

 

Mind Management, goal splitting, task management and prioritization.

 

What I can control depends on my free will, which is said being like the can of food. You have your amount of free will which is spend during the day. In the morning the can is full, so it’s a good time to make a magic happen. This is the time to make GTD-lists and plans. In the evening you can hope to be a slave of good habits and follow your well-build routines.

 

Sometimes I have this thing called basic structure backwards. Usually, one should know basics first and then build on that. Instead, I usually use  so called off-the-wall -logic and listen my intuition first and then correct my mistakes trying to add some structure. I apologize that. This is something related to mind management and something I will try to improve with many other things.

 

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) will be a system I continue to use. Many things are possible if you just write them down. Brian Tracy swears using handwriting since it builds neural paths into your nervous system. Eat That Frog is another Allen’s books and gives you a nice metaphor about eating a live frog early in the morning. If you are fortunate, you can choose which frog you’ll eat and then you will take the biggest and ugliest one first of course.

 

GTD was familiar before this course. I have used it a couple years ago. I found it very useful to write down next physical tasks to do on projects and it was easier to prioritize when one knew what was needed to do exactly. This kind of to do -list takes more time to do but beats the old ones by and large.

 

 

Extended Mind, Idea Cloud, using the environment, failure management and Tick Tock

 

The extended mind was useful tip to use. What is needed though is trusted site since, it will cause a nervous breakdown if one loses its notes. Nimbus Notes -application (introduced in the course) was my first try and partly free to use but when taking notes everyday it wanted the user to upgrade to a pro-version. I haven’t yet tried to pro-version, but I will strongly consider that or similar products.

 

I have taken notes for years and they are all over the different places. I will do my best to gather them to Idea cloud in the near future. Maybe my use of environment needs an upgrade too.

 

Failure management for me is like a Lesson’s Learned from Military Organizations I have worked with or like the OODA-loop from John Boyd. Since we all make mistakes, it is better to learn from them. The faster we learn from mistakes the better. The OODA-loop is a process or cycle to Observe, Orient, Decide and Act.

 

Tick Tock -tool reminds me little of NLP (neuro linguistic programming) which is basically harnessing the language one uses more effectively. One can change its worries for more positive and actionable versions. 

 

 

Creative Thinking, feeding system one, note taking and Creative Process

 

Next, I will reveal a big secret, so big that I may risk my life because of these thoughts. In dictatorship countries like Russian, China and other non-western countries, the things or more specifically thoughts I am about reveal would be highly forbidden and people thinking like me vanished or wiped away from this universe. Luckily, I live in Finland and have freedom of speech which includes the written stuff too. This type of dramatization is one tool to make or keep readers(s) awake and steal their attention for a while. The tip came from the author of Brain Rules John Medina, who has excellent books on the matter. 

 

Our system one is built through evolution to react on threats and certain thing over others. This is usable to know if one wants to control where to focus. Note taking for future was one great tip for creativity. I haven’t thought about it that way, although I have written stuff my whole life. It only needs one trusted archive and a system to find what one wants to find later. This course gave me the Idea Cloud.

 

Creativity as a process is something new and interesting and gave me things to learn more. Lauri and Paavo Järvilehto have done a great job pulling this process to our knowledge. If I understood it correctly, our system one is constantly bombarded with info from our surroundings and system two pulls the ideas out of that. If we don’t take notes on things that pop up to our consciousness, we might lose them for good. The first thing in a Creative Process is to gather or collect things. The second step is to classify the collected material in bigger chunks. Third step is to make a sketch aka take the leading idea to further consideration and refine and lastly finalize. What I need to do is get myself the Järvilehto’s (2020) book Pim! Olet luova.

 

 

 

 

Thinking Together, classical argumentation Ethos, Pathos Logos, critique and dialogue.

 

Better thinking makes better life – Esa Saarinen

 

I have jumped on the train of new evolution of civilization, we can call it TEAL as an example. Frederic Laloux was a brave man to write down “a roadmap” of different levels of civilization in his book Reinventing Organizations (2014). Some still live on the past evolutionary phases and look upon great leaders, power and revolutions. What we need instead is values and evolving purpose (through our lifetime) with the power there at the ground level where it is needed to make good things happen together with our chosen partners. Leaders are not born but they are chosen among us, and we must have a power to choose otherwise.

 

My cornerstone belief is that this world would and will be much better place if our civilization is run more self-organized way, like the Dutch company Buurtzorg. The entrepreneurship would be my first choice to organize businesses. Small independent units across the globe will better survive and turn down the effects of climate chance. Lust for power and wealth should be changed to lust to give more for each other and for lust to serve the greater good (😊see that joke from the movie Hot Fuzz). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYTeTK57sCQ

 

Small cities could run their own electric networks and small powerplants. We would succeed having non-polluting hydrogen vehicles, we would have local organic food plants. Governments were there to protect our way of living without making slaves of their citizens. We would still have academic freedom. To have ultimate freedom would be to have our skin in the game, in life and us responsible of things and others. Moral order would be recognized universally (which somehow reminds me about the Holy Bible), and/or we could freely choose to live where we wanted. We would stop fighting over recourses and prosper to other dimensions, perhaps some other planets.

 

In my enjoyable life I will go to bed wanting to wake up next morning full of energy and desire to do those daily projects I feel interested of. It would be reassuring thought to have someone you love next to your deathbed holding your hand and wishing you goose pumping and chilling flight to unknown. The opposite of life is not death the opposite of life is not living with purpose. Death may be an end of something, and it may well be a transferring moment of us coming together with the wholeness we all end up. We may as well be flock of birds or flowers seeking sunlight and growing from the tears. God only knows but I feel fortunate to have experienced the moment I felt I died my mother next to me. I had a loving feeling and a chance to say goodbye, then pain, the only thing that’s real lost its meaning and I felt peace, kind of surrounded by warm calmness, full of relief. There wasn’t fear anymore but a total fulfillment. 

 

In my argumentation the Pathos seems to be easily on top. I feel strongly about some emotions and wish readers could sometimes feel the same. Ethos aka who is the speaker sometime looses is meaning. I feel no need to make a big number of myself but as an enthusiastic person may seem one to others. Sometimes I notice that people have prejudices of me as a person just because I have or have had certain professions. We tend to have hidden assumptions of others but what we need instead is dialogical communication. Thanks to emeritus professor Esa Saarinen, I have started to listen more carefully what other people are saying and not make so many false assumptions.  

 

From dialogue to critique. Like I mentioned earlier my Logos needs improvement. I don’t follow logical structure enough. Also, Kairos, the timing and sensitivity needs to reflected better. All and all, this course has giving me courage to follow my path forward and hone my craft further. Jordan Peterson has a similar tool, like this second essay called the Self Authoring Suite which includes Past Authoring, Present Authoring and Future Authoring -programs. My next practicality will probably be and finish that written story as a refined Life Development Plan.

 

This journey has been a delightful and inspiring and will definitely continue. Thank You professor Lauri Järvilehto for making this possible online and for me to participate into this magnificent course from my home in Kalajoki. 


https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-Stoic-ebook/dp/B0040JHNQG

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