Personal Universe Outline

Personal Universe

How to strengthen your mind for a better future

By Jim Applegate

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Expanded Outline

  • Introduction
    • The world is a confusing and sometimes scary place these days.
      • Political polarization
      • Fake news
      • Terrorism
      • Climate change
      • Pandemics
    • What if you could know everything that humans know? How would you feel?
      • Less fear because…
        • Confident
          • All the knowledge of the World would be at your fingertips. You could call upon that knowledge to solve any problem, deal with any situation, and handle any challenge.
        • Capable
          • You’d be able to build anything, fix anything, do any job, run any business or government, fight any battle, and negotiate any peace. You’d be able to drive or fly any vehicle, treat any illness or injury, climb any mountain…
        • Resilient
          • You’d learn quickly from mistakes, and integrate new information quickly and easily.
        • Curious
          • Since you wouldn’t be omniscient and would only know what humans have discovered, you’d realize how much you still don’t know. Your curiosity would be intensified. You’d have a profound sense of mystery: of the unknown and unknowable aspects of the Universe.
        • Self-aware
          • You’d know who you are and where you came from. You’d know your flaws and your strengths.
        • Insightful
          • You’d understand how things work and see connections that others can’t.
        • Powerful!
    • You can’t know everything, but you already have a wealth of experience and knowledge inside you – your personal universe.
      • It’s an internal model of Universe
      • Ideally it would closely match reality.
      • But as a product of our brain and mind, it doesn’t have to.
    • We each have a choice:
      • We can build a personal universe that validates all our weaknesses and fears…
      • Or we can build a strong personal universe that helps us be confident, capable, resilient, curious, self-aware, insightful and powerful.
      • This book is about how to follow through on the second choice.
    • An overview
      • Start with Universe refers to the importance of the personal universe in solving difficult problems, making decisions, designing solutions, and operating in Universe.
      • Personal universe is a metaphor for the things we hold in our mind and make us who we are. It is the pool of experiences and knowledge that the thinking tools act upon.
      • The challenges are thinking tools that work on and strengthen your personal universe.
      • The idea is that by constantly challenging your personal universe, you will make it more flexible, more accurate, more interconnected and more expansive, and that will make you more effective in the real world.
    • The rest of this book goes into more detail. It looks at ways you can strengthen your personal universe and create a better future for you, your family and the world:
      • Chapter 1: Introducing your personal universe
        • You have a miniature version of humanity’s universe inside you. It consists of all your experiences and the things you have learned from your and others’ experiences. It’s arguably your most important asset, so it’s about time you got to know each other.
      • Chapter 2: Making it better than it was
        • Right now, you have a kind of default version of your personal universe; it’s what you created automatically without really thinking about it. We can improve it if we just pay it a little attention. The secret is to challenge it to make it more flexible, accurate, integrated and expansive.
      • Chapter 3: Outfitting your toolbox
        • Before you start looking at your personal universe, we need to make sure you have a few basic tools ready to go. You need to have some basic critical thinking skills and be willing to make changes to what you know. You also need some way to capture your thoughts in the moment so you can think more about them later.
      • Chapter 4: Letting go of knowing
        • We like to think of our knowledge as something dependable we can lean on in tough times. We talk about it being a solid foundation upon which we can build our lives. But holding on to knowledge too tightly locks us in place. It closes us to new information, and we end up defending what we think we know instead of continuing to grow.
      • Chapter 5: Mining for gold
        • Your personal universe contains some hard-won nuggets of wisdom built from your direct experiences. It also contains a bunch of stuff you half-learned and heard second-, third-, or even fourth-hand. Thankfully, it’s not difficult to identify what’s gold and what needs a little alchemy to transform it into gold.
      • Chapter 6: Connecting the dots
        • We like to categorize and subdivide our knowledge into neat silos. But the physical Universe doesn’t separate music from mathematics or engineering from art. It’s fully integrated, with everything being interconnected in complex and wonderful ways. Our personal universe can benefit from being the same way.
      • Chapter 7: Expanding your universe
        • Universe is so big and complex that our minds can’t actually comprehend it as a whole, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. The more we experience things ourselves and the more we can learn from other people’s experiences, the richer and more useful our personal universe will become.
      • Chapter 8: Moving forward
        • Challenging your personal universe is a life-long process and one that is well-worth the effort. There are a number of strategies you can implement that will keep the process moving forward, almost automatically. There are also some areas of knowledge that are worth special attention as they can help strengthen your personal universe more quickly and efficiently.
  • Chapter 1: Introducing your personal universe
    • What is a personal universe?
      • It’s a metaphor
        • You won’t find references to “personal universe” in psychology or neuroscience journals. It’s not a topic among philosophers.
        • It’s a metaphor for all the things we hold in our minds that make us who we are: our experiences, what we’ve learned from those experiences, and what we’ve learned from other people’s experiences.
        • Metaphors are, in themselves, thinking tools.
        • It is a kind of perspective or lens you can use to look at yourself and others.
      • It’s a thinking tool
        • It’s a thinking tool that gives you new ways of thinking about yourself and others and helps you make deliberate changes that move you toward who you want to be.
        • It offers a way to think about who you are in a practical way.
        • It offers a way to think about other people.
        • It is designed to help you understand yourself and others better.
      • It’s something you already have
      • It’s who you are
        • It’s an intimate reflection of who you are: a dynamic, interconnected system containing all your hard-won experience and knowledge.
      • It’s the most valuable asset you have
        • It is the center of your wealth.
        • It contains all the skill and knowledge you use in your job.
      • It’s under your control
        • Your personal universe is a product of your brain and mind, and as such, it is under your control.
    • What’s in your personal universe?
      • Direct experiences (E)
      • Things you’ve heard (K)
      • Things you’ve read (K)
      • Stuff your friends told you (K)
      • Things you half-remember from school (K)
      • Conclusions you’ve reached (E)
      • Emotions you’ve felt (E)
      • Things you’ve imagined (E)
      • Dreams (E)
      • Memories that have changed over the years (E)
      • Things you’ve seen on TV (K)
      • Trivia (K)
      • Muscle memory (E)
      • Values (E)
      • Choices you’ve made (E)
      • Generalizations you’ve made (K)
      • Your mental models (K)
    • What’s NOT in your personal universe?
      • Personality type
      • Learning style
      • Why not? About labels
        • We have a tendency to get labels reversed. We think that because we are personality type X, we have Y experiences, but it really the other way around. We have X experiences, so we call that personality type Y.
        • Labelling our experiences adds a bit of knowledge to our personal universe, but they don’t fundamentally change anything about our experiences.
    • Why call it a “universe”?
      • Universe is the word we use to signify everything. It is all-inclusive.
      • Sir Arthur Eddington and others have defined Universe as all humanity’s communicated experience of Universe.
      • I call that Humanity’s universe, and you are a part of that.
      • Calling your portion your “personal universe” acknowledges that fact and gives credit for how important you are.
      • Three Universes
        • Objective universe
        • Humanity’s universe
        • Personal universe
      • Access to the Universes
        • Access to objective universe = experience
        • Access to Humanity’s universe = learning
    • How did you get the personal universe you have?
      • You were born to build one
      • 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 future generations.
      • You are the recipient of that effort, regardless of how well it was done or how effective it was.
  • Chapter 2: Making it better than it was
    • Maintaining consistency
      • There is evidence that we are good at creating a consistent model of Universe internally.
      • We have mechanisms like cognitive dissonance that alert us when we’re entertaining contradictory ideas.
      • But we don’t have much built in that helps us maintain a model that’s consistent with external universe.
      • In fact we find that our cognitive biases actually work against us for that purpose.
    • How do we strengthen our personal universe?
    • There is no bad knowledge
    • Challenging your personal universe…
      • To be more flexible
      • To be more accurate
      • To be more integrated
      • To be more expansive
  • Chapter 3: Outfitting your toolbox
    • A spiral of thinking
    • The basics of clear thinking
    • A growth mindset
    • Slow brain and fast brain (system 1 and system 2)
    • Interruptible line of thought (notebook)
  • Chapter 4: Letting go of knowing (flexibility)
    • The need for knowledge to be solid and unchanging freezes you in place
    • It’s never that simple
      • People are complicated
    • Getting to “I don’t know”
    • Everything you know could be wrong
    • Knowledge is always incomplete
    • Leaving room for new ideas
    • Restoring a sense of the mysterious
  • Chapter 5: Mining for gold (accuracy)
    • Who can you trust?
    • The problem of honesty
    • Faith and belief
    • Processing what you “know”
      • Monitoring in the flow of life
      • Assigning a trust rating to what you know (high trust = gold)
      • Rethinking
    • Learning from your past
    • Moving forward
  • Chapter 6: Connecting the dots (integration)
    • The Universe is fully integrated
    • Synergy
    • Systems thinking
    • Generalized principles
  • Chapter 7: Expanding your universe (comprehesive)
    • Seeing yourself
      • Understanding your context
      • Your advantages
        • Systemic biases that affect your opportunities
        • Cognitive biases that affect how others see you
        • Cognitive biases that affect how you think people see you
      • Personality assessments
      • StrengthsFinder
      • Learning style
    • Being a self-directed learner
  • Chapter 8: Moving forward
    • A lifelong process
    • Avoiding the echo chamber
    • Further study
      • Science
      • Generalized principles
      • General semantics

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