"The greatest secret of all time is that there were never any secrets."

The "Secret" of achievement is not very complicated.  It's easy if you know how.  It's a loop.  A method. It can be applied to anything and it all starts with one thing.  An idea.  Thoughts are things.  (More on this in "The Inner World" Chapter.)

The source to a good quality life and well being is having a good idea, testing it against the real world, execute it to completion and reap the benefits and then improving upon the process.  That's it.

It is as simple as:  

I'm hungry.  --> There's pizza in the fridge!  -->  I'm going to get the pizza and eat it!  --> I feel better!

In more abstracted terms:

I'm Suffering --> I have an Idea --> I Executed the Idea --> I received the Reward

Good ideas, founded in reality are the gateways to change.  They are portals into future potential realities.  But there is more nuance to this.  

I'm going to use another simple analogy here.

You have a goal.  That goal is to get the basketball into a hoop.  You take action and throw it.  You miss.  You try again being mindful of the motion and action.  You miss again.  Each time you touch reality and your body gets feedback from your hands and muscles on what you did and if it worked or not.  Each time you adjust.  This I call "calibration."  By repeating this loop, getting feedback from reality, calibrating yourself over repetitions, days even years.  Your brain expands to have an innate understanding of the nature of the ball and the hoop also the world around you.  You start to internalize what the real world is.  Eventually you go from:

Unconscious Incompetence --> Conscious Incompetence --> Conscious Competence --> Unconscious Competence

I dare say the final stage would be Creative Competence.  This is where your brain has so internalized the outer world within, and your body has so calibrated to manipulate it that you become able to create and improvise new ways of doing things on the spot. 

Think Michael Jordan as a defender tries to block him in a unique way creating a unique shot to get the ball in the hoop.  Think Jimmy Hendrix coming up with a brand new riff on the spot and adjusting it to a new drum beat he has never heard of before.  Think Dave Chapel coming up with a killer joke on the spot and nailing the punchline.  Or Elon Musk applying first principles thinking to take a process or business that has been done a certain way and throwing it out to create something much more efficient.  By the way this level  is the fucking funnest part of it all.  Flow mindset is THE BEST.  

I want to call out something that is very important.  This is the same exact method that is used in science.  Same exact thing.  The only difference is it's a bit more abstracted.  You have a hypothesis, you test it against the real world, you adjust your hypothesis or you come to a conclusion that you were right.  You now have a model of the world.  You have an innate understanding of things.  You can use this to do amazing things.  Look around you.  Every single thing that you see that is man made is based on the concept in this paragraph as well as the previous.

 “If you know the way broadly you will see it in all things.” ― Miyamoto Musashi 

Sidebar:  In science instead of our senses like eyes, ears, touch we use technical instruments and external sensors along with applied mathematics to quantify the precision relationships between things as we test them against our original idea.

Building an accurate model and understanding of the real world in your brain across different aspects of life is extremely beneficial to success and achievement.  To put it in other words it's like having a really good BULLSHIT filter.  Good skill to have.

Good Idea --> Execution --> Reward 

In order for the formula  to work.  You have to have an idea that is based on the real world or your inner world.  You have to understand how each world works.  The better you understand each world and how it works:

• The more readily you will have good ideas grounded in reality come to you
• The easier it will be for you to execute in the real world
• The less you will fail
• The more you will reap the rewards
• The more you will enjoy the "calibration" part of the journey and the loop as a whole
• You will start to see ideas EVERYWHERE on how to improve your life and well being
• You will execute on those ideas on a regular basis without much wasted effort
• You will take failures in stride and realize that is part of the learning process
• You will start to realize where your "failures" came from:
  • Was it a bad idea to start with?
  • Was it bad execution on my part?
• You will begin to understand the nature of things and that almost everything is a skill
• You will realize that skills can be learned, developed and calibrated against the real world
• You will change how you look at failure and see it as a lesson
• You will learn the lesson because you will know it is actually the path of least resistance
• You realize that not learning and saving the lesson means you will repeat the suffering
• You will learn to do important things RIGHT the first time
• Most importantly you will have BELIEF in yourself - despite the external world - that you can improve your quality of life.  This by itself will give you some peace
• After overcoming obstacles you will actually begin to miss the obstacles
• You will look back at the challenging parts of your life and miss the challenge or journey that pushed you to grow
• You will realize that it is a lifetimes journey
• The more you calibrate you will realize how to assign better timelines and be able to set reasonable long term goals for 5, 10, 30 years in advance
• This will also help because you will not disappoint yourself - you will realize its just a matter of time and effort
• You will realize that the process is actually exciting
• Your goals will become bigger and you will learn to break them down into sub goals
• What was once chaos and suffering will turn into a symphony of causality
• You will not even blame yourself for when you failed because of course! under these circumstances you failed
• The deeper you understand one thing the more it will help you understand other things
• The more you master one thing through calibration the more you will start to see it in all things

The Challenge

The nuance here is that when you start.  When you are born as a baby.  You know only what is hardwired into you by your genetics.  You don't know what you don't know.  You aren't born with understanding yourself completely.  You aren't born with understanding the nature of the world.  My hope is that Livefully.net can help speed this process up - but more importantly give you the keys to be able to learn from your experience and feedback and calibration faster.

Idea-->Execution-->Reward  Then iterate by going back learning from what you did, adjusting the idea and the execution to make it better.  Rinse and repeat the process and apply it to all aspects of your life.  When this becomes a habit you start on an upward spiral that is very hard to stop.  You have abundant energy.  You know how to focus specifically it to create meaningful change.   This is where HYPER achievers live.  People that outperform disproportionately.  People who you just can't keep down.  If you don't master this loop you will suffer.  You will win a million dollars in the lottery and be straight back to where you started.  If you do have it you will make a million dollars, lose it and then come back and make $10 million.

Sidebar: I want to call out that this applies to the outer world or outer world achievement.  There exist the scenario that is all too common where you achieve success in the outer world but can be very disturbed on the inside.  Thoughts are things and we will go into this on a deeper level in the chapter on the "Inner World."