Top mental models on personal transformation and reinvention, developing a growth mindset and resilience, personal values, and aging
Identifying what you value is one of the highest leverage things that you can do as a person. It's incredibly important to identify what you value, and also, to identify how you value things. In this manual, we will talk about value, how to identify your values, how to value things, and how to get more value in your life and in your business.
This model will help you understand how to adapt better, how to turn change and adversity into success, and what that can mean for your life. This mental model can (and should) be applied across domains, from personal to professional, to increase your ability to not only survive, but to thrive through change and stressors.
Often, when we talk about adopting and developing skills, we think of math, spelling, riding a bike, driving, or learning a foreign language. But the transformation in areas like dating, thriving in marriage, writing a book, starting a business, requires a different type of change, a different type than knowing nine times nine, or remembering a formula. Transformation is a radical shift at the identity level and we are dissecting it in this manual.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The Janus Skills model is a unique combination of extremely useful and extremely rare. It is counterintuitive and is literally the opposite of conventional wisdom.
The idea behind reinvention is that you can take all of your skills, knowledge, relationships, stories, and resources, like puzzle pieces, and put them together in a new way to create value on a higher level than you hadn't even considered before and to open a pathway forward and upward in your life. In short, you can learn this skill and master it.
We've been refusing the call to become our greatest selves, to take care of this planet, to really think through what we're going to do if there's a major problem. Now we've been pushed over the threshold by the pandemic, and we are now going on what is probably the first collective Hero's Journey that we've been on.
This month we're learning about development and developmental models. Development is interesting and important because once you understand this model, you have a sense of how to go to the next level in life. You start to understand transformation and reinvention, and how to really achieve things in a highly leveraged way.
Life organizes itself into emergent levels and developmental psychology theorists tell us that this set of emergent orders also governs psychological development. We go through orders of development that transcend and include the previous orders. This is important because in situations where everything looks like it's about to break down, often it’s an emergence that’s about to happen, a breakthrough to a higher order of complexity.
Humans have evolved over tens of thousands of years in an environment that is very different than the one we live in now. During this process, we developed unconscious biases which helped us survive in those tough environments, but can hinder us in today’s modern society. By recognizing those biases we can make infinitely better decisions.
Here, you can find the results of my research on aging. This 92-pages long document contains my organized notes and within them, you can find key terminology, best resources, highlights, top 1% thought leaders to follow, and how-to info to help you apply the ideas.