Task For 1 week, when you feel critical of a person or initiative, reframe it. Examples Christmas Singers I went to church on Christmas week. The place was packed, perhaps 700-1000 people. I sat down and the singers at the front had their eyes closed and they were patting their chests and my first impulse was “they should be less demonstrative, it comes across as showy and insincere.” I caught myself and followed up with the thought: “Artists are different than thinkers. I have no reason to believe they aren’t sincere. This is a busy time of year and they spent their time practicising to make an enjoyable service. It’s enjoyable to have such talented people.” ...

The Shadow Self I read an interesting article on integrating the shadow self. A key idea is that certain parts of ourselves are buried in our subconscious. They are not part of our self-image. We reject them because we don’t like them or to own them costs us too much. So we put them in an invisible bag and drag them around with us our whole life. Integrate the Shadow Self If you want to be healthy, you need to learn what the traits are of your shadow self. You integrate them, but finding them and accepting them as part of you - accept without judgment.1 ...

The Task For 2 weeks, do not bring your phone into the bathroom. The Philosophy This is intended to be an embodiment of virtue that you can master without enormous amounts of will power. The victory isn’t superficial. To Cage the Beast, you must win control of all the rooms in your house. You will win your first territory. Scoring Each day, you begin 2 points. If you bring the phone into your bathroom in your house, even accidentally, you lose a point. ...

Where Did I Write That? If I wanted to find unpublished articles, I could use the following Terminal Command: findstr /S /I /M /C:“draft:true” *.md /S - Goes through all the subdirectories /I - Case insensitive /M - List the files we find the search text in. If you leave out the /C: it will list a file with any of the words in the search string. /C: - Only find the files with the exact contents of the search string *.md - Only look in markdown files. ...

If you want fitness to permeate the world, you begin by empowering the most driven and intense people. They will push themselves to the extreme and develop all kinds of lessons and skills along the way that can then be passed on to the masses. The church started this way. The desert fathers and monks were extreme personalities, bent on learning how to be virtuous. Extreme personalities like Cassian, Aquinas and Gregory the great analyzed virtue in huge tomes but eventually broke it down into lists of 7 virtues and 7 vices. ...

You can gain a lot of virtue simply by trying. No techniques. No strategies. Just repeatedly trying. If you were new to basketball and I gave you no instructions, I just told you to shoot 10,000 freethrows - you would get ridiculously good. Of course, if I taught you proper form you would get better quicker, be more consistent and have a higher ceiling, but you don’t need it. The formula is simple. You decide what you want, you try repeatedly, and your brain does the rest. ...

A Beast on the Loose For many, a phone addiction feels unbeatable. We are unlocking our phones 40+ times a day. We shudder to look at the usage statistics. “Really, I spent 6 hours on my phone today?” We are losing precious years of our lives, losing time with our friends and family. Potential prodigies are vegging fulltime. The phone is like a lion, terrorizing our lives. It is the King of the Urban Jungle. You cannot live with a lion on the loose. You must cage the beast. ...

Isn’t Measuring Virtue Bad, Boring, and Impossible? No. Read why here. How Do I Acquire Measurable Amounts of Virtue? There is a simple formula to acquiring virtue. Create measurable embodiments of virtue, develop a scoring system, then track your performance. Don’t try to acquire a virtue like “mercy”, it’s too big. Instead, focus on mastering its specific embodiments. You see “mercy” embodied in people when … They aren’t critical of a boss doing a poor job. They don’t get angry when people cut them off in traffic. They don’t bring up faults of their spouses in a fight. There are hundreds more examples … So, for three weeks, pick some specific embodiment. For example: ...

PART 3: Measuring Virtue: Impossible? How can I possibly know how humble I am? Am I 10 units more humble than last week? How do I compare against the church’s average? These are all fair questions. The first key insight is that humility is not a thing that you can measure. It is too big. It is too general. Just like basketball’s concept of “Shooting ability.” Shooting Isn’t Measurable, But Shooting Skills Are Shooting ability is a real concept, but there is no way to measure it. ...