Making it better than it was

Contents

• Can we strengthen our personal universe?
• There is no bad knowledge
• Rebuilding your mind
• How this works
  • It challenges your personal universe to be more flexible
  • It challenges your personal universe to be more accurate
  • It challenges your personal universe to be more integrated
  • It challenges your personal universe to be more more expansive
• Why this works
  • It helps counter cognitive biases
  • It’s self-correcting
  • It is game like and can make you feel good. There is evidence that learning new skills and getting better at things makes us feel better and fights depression.

Summary

• If you’re not actively maintaining your personal universe, you don’t know if you can trust it. Any improvements will be left to chance.
• We’re also naturally able to learn from others. That’s a great ability and is at the heart of our civilization as human beings, but it can also take the form of outsourcing our thinking to others.
• Persuasive people give you arguments and conclusions and often we accept them at face value.
• Cognitive bias can be used against you.
• Improvement of the personal universe always seems to be done in a piecemeal way, not comprehensively
• A better personal universe is one that is more flexible, more accurate, more interconnected, and more expansive.

Notes

Start with universe is a thinking tool that helps us maintain that consistency.

Second challenge: self honesty

Self and personal universe

This book offers a way to think about who you are, not necessarily in a philosophical way, but perhaps a more practical way.

The idea of a personal universe gives us a way to think about the “self”. Both ourselves and other selves.

The concept of a personal universe is a thinking tool. It’s a kind of perspective or lense you can you to understand yourself and others.

It’s an invention, like any tool.

Start with universe

Could go with Youniverse, but that feels gimmicky.

Personal universe is clumsy.

I don’t see being able to co-opt Universe to mean personal universe.

Is there another way? I’m thinking something like Purple cow for attention-getting product.

I don’t think purple cow is the way either.

I think if we look more closely at start with universe as Fuller meant it, he meant start with humanity’s universe. Start with reality as others outside of you have experienced and communicated it. Start with universe as a standard against which you test your ideas. Start with the community of thinkers who use reality as a benchmark. Try to see yourself as others see you. Try to see universe as others see it.

In the book, start simple and just say: we are capable of creating a personal universe that has little to do with reality. So start with accepting the idea that you want reality to be your benchmark. That means starting with Universe as the gold standard against which you test your ideas.

How your self came to be

You are part of the human family and one of the things we do is try to pass on our knowledge and experience to the next generation or even later generations than that. You are the recipient of that effort, regardless of how well it was done or how effective it was.

An attempt to talk about experience and knowledge

You have your own experiences, and you have tried to learn from them. Since that knowledge is inferred or deduced from first-hand experience, we might call that first-hand knowledge. But you also have knowledge based on what others have told you. At best this is second-hand knowledge, but is often third-, fourth- or more distant knowledge.

That might seem like it would be best to have all first-hand knowledge, but when it comes to knowledge, you have to be careful about it at all levels. It’s possible to have bad first-hand knowledge and great fourth-hand knowledge.

Experience, on the other hand, is best first-hand. Our experiences are a rich source of skill, and they can produce excellent first-hand knowledge as well.

The weird categorization of people by experience

One of the things we’ve discovered as a species is that we don’t all experience things the same way. If you experience exhaustion when you’re around other people too long, we call that being an introvert. If your experience is that you remember and learn things best by moving and building things, then we say you’re a kinesthetic learner. But each of these things is based on your experience of Universe.

It’s easy to get the chicken and egg mixed up and think “I’m an introvert, therefore my experience with be that I get exhausted if I’m around people too long”

If you look at psychological self-evaluations, they are trying to get a sense of your experiences. What you’re thinking about, how you’re feeling, whether you’re experiencing anxiety, etc.

Labelling a set of experiences such as calling people “introverted” or “extroverted” is useful in that it helps others, with perhaps a different set of default experiences, understand us better.

Setting a standard

By establishing that what makes us who we are is an internal model of Universe, and that our model should reflect the objective Universe as closely as possible, we give ourselves a standard against which we can test our thinking. In a way it’s a pragmatic view. If this idea works in the actual Universe, then it is valid.

Also, it gives us a standard that we can use across all parts of who we are.

It explains to some degree how changes in one part of our lives can affect other aspects. Our mind, like Universe is fully integrated, or at least it tries to be. The more flexible you can make it, and the more interconnected you can make it, you’ll see more benefit across the board when you make a change in one area.

Ethics

There is more to it than just validation. Just today it was reported that a very prominent politician had confided to a journalist that yes, it was bad to stoke racism to get votes, but it works.

There, the question is “works for who?” Certainly not everyone.

Challenging your personal universe

The one I’ve outlined in the book could be called the Trust Challenge, but there have to be others, and I think I need to try to identify them.

There would be challenges at each level intended to make it more accurate, more flexible, more integrated and more expansive.

Can we strengthen our personal universe?

It’s amazing to me that I have yet to come across any other books or courses that really try to look at the whole mind and see how we might be able to strengthen it as a whole. We see a lot of self-help programs that are directed toward memory or addiction or self-esteem, but none that address the whole thing.

It is my experience that I was able to improve my whole mind by following some simple practices and adopting some simple perspectives or ways to look at knowledge. We’ll be addressing each of those practices and perspectives in later chapters, but I want to take some time to explain why these simple changes can have such profound results.

There is no bad knowledge

First, let’s establish that you already have a great personal universe. It’s done some amazing things for you already, and it will continue to do so.

Usually, when we talk about self-improvement, we talk about getting rid of some “bad thing” we don’t like. If we’re lucky, we might have some “good thing” to replace it with, but often, getting rid of the “bad thing” is all we’re trying to do.

There is no “bad thing” in your personal universe.

Rebuilding your mind

It can be tempting to think that you need to start over. That somehow, you can rebuild your mind from scratch and end up with something better.

First, it’s not possible to rebuild your mind. We don’t have a way of wiping your mind clean and starting fresh. And second, why would you want to?

You have a lifetime of experience that is immensely valuable. Even if you could, you don’t want to throw that away. Those experiences are what make you unique. They are more valuable to you than anything else you have, even if some of them are painful experiences.

The personal universe you have now is not wrong. You don’t need to throw it out and start over. You don’t need to rebuild it. You need to add to it. You need to properly identify things and give them the proper labels. If you discover that something is just plain false, you don’t throw it out or try to forget it. You label it as false and move on.

Creating an accurate personal universe is about “and”. I know this thing… and… what else can I tie to it?

How this works

It challenges your personal universe to be more flexible

• Giving up knowing

It challenges your personal universe to be more accurate

• Mining for gold

It challenges your personal universe to be more integrated

• Connecting the dots

It challenges your personal universe to be more expansive

• Expanding your personal universe
• Moving forward

Why this works

It helps counter cognitive biases

The practices and perspectives we discuss in this book work because they help short-circuit some of the not-so-helpful ways our minds process the world around us. Scientists have started calling these “cognitive biases”, and they’re akin to bugs in a software program that makes it vulnerable to hacking. In our case, these bugs lead us to false conclusions or errors in judgement, and they can be exploited by others as well.

Here are some of the ways that the practices and perspectives in this book help mitigate these cognitive biases.

It’s self-correcting

I feel like my overall system is self correcting, but I should be clear on how that is. I think it has to do with keeping an open mind and inviting in alternative views. Someone will point out your errors eventually.

Seth Godin identifies science and engineering as self- correcting, but not blind obedience to dogma. 10/26/2018

Your personal universe is inherently self-referential. That means it depends on itself to monitor itself. That can create something that is internally consistent but not consistent with objective reality.

• Looking for contradictory experiences that others have.
• Fullers idea of building in the real world to test assumptions.