That peak reflects the total sum of your achievements according to your intrinsic values. This may include, for instance, your happiness, the happiness of your loved ones, your positive impact on the world, living virtuously, achieving your deeply meaningful goals, and so on.

Unfortunately, the mountains you face are foggy as hell. Plus, they have dense forests, huge boulders, and brambles covering them. Your mountains are untamed, uncharted.

• The fog means that you can only see clearly for a short distance, and the further you look, the harder it is to tell what’s out there.
• The dense forests mean that to go a considerable distance in most directions, you’ll have to whack your way through with substantial effort.
• The huge boulders will sometimes make a path impassible that had looked promising from around the bend.
• The brambles mean that certain paths will cause considerable pain if you take them. Even more inconveniently, beautiful grasses and flowers sometimes conceal the brambles.

These are your personal mountains, unique in all the world. Your mountains are determined by a combination of:

(1) Your intrinsic values. It is your values that determine the height of each landing and peak, including the height of wherever you’re standing right now.
(2) The structure of the real world, which makes some paths easier to traverse than others. The locations of the forests, boulders, and brambles are metaphors for this structure.
(3) Your current life situation. This is represented by your current latitude and longitude on the mountain range, as well as your physical and mental health, resources, and skills.

Looking out from a distance, you can see the dim outlines of many high-up peaks far away that look promising, but they are in different directions from each other. That means you’ll have to make tough choices about what direction to go, even at the beginning of your journey.

This journey will take your entire life. If you’re like most people, it will be long and hard but also too short. It will be wondrous, terrifying, joyful, and sad.

Rather than trying to travel a great distance in order to climb to great heights, it is easier to find the first comfortable spot, set up a hammock and tent, and make camp there forever. Who can blame you for making that choice (except, perhaps, yourself)?

If you decide to take the journey, you’ll need to use your tool belt, which (if you’re lucky) comes equipped with five (metaphorical) tools.

To have the greatest chance of reaching the highest peaks, you’ll want to train yourself to be a master of each tool.

Here are the tools to master.

Tool 1: The walking stick, which is what you use to move forward along the path you’ve chosen.

By far, the most common tool you’ll use is the walking stick. For every choice of path, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time walking.

Maybe you’ll give up and turn back at the first encounter with a snake, tiger, or tornado. Or maybe you’ll use the walking stick to keep going.

You’re using the walking stick when you create a to-do list and tick items off of it. You’re using it when you push through fear to do something valuable.

Mostly, climbing a mountain involves using your walking stick, but if you only use that, you’re doomed.

Tool 2: The telescope, which allows you to peer at the shape of the mountain, collecting data and facts about the world that you can use to select your path.

The questions that guide your use of the telescope are ones like:

• What questions could I ask that would help me choose my path?
• What do I need to know about the mountains that I don’t yet know?
• What important question am I confused about?
• Where is my lack of knowledge showing?

The scope, like each of your tools, takes many forms. In a start-up, it may look like talking to customers, running surveys, examining other products, or scrutinizing the structure of your own product, keeping a keen eye out for flaws. In your career, it may look like researching career paths, talking to others who have tried different routes, quickly trying things out, and soliciting feedback on your work from your colleagues.

What you’re looking for with the telescope are indications of which nearby paths lead quickest up the mountain, as well as hints for other (potentially faraway) parts of the mountain range that may have yet higher peaks (even if you have to go a ways back down the mountain to get there).

Being good at using the scope means being observant, impartial, curious, methodical, open to criticism, and empirical. And it means being able and willing to cope with reality.

Tool 3: The notepad, which you use to formulate your theories about how the world works, as well as to devise plans.

This tool will most dramatically increase how effectively you use the telescope because there are far too many potential things to point the scope at. Your theories on the notepad, therefore, guide your use of the scope. At the same time, the scope provides data to go into your theories in the notebook.

Some of your theories will be explicit, penned in detail with full awareness, but most will be implicit, born out of the things you’ve seen, etched in your subconscious with a shadowy ink.

In your personal life, your notebook contains your understanding of yourself, your partner, your parents, your friends, and human nature. It contains your understanding of your mountains (as well as other people’s mountains) and your beliefs about where the brambles, boulders, and high peaks lie.

To use the notebook is to sit and reflect, to make predictions, to spell out your thoughts, to reduce ambiguity through precision, to derive new knowledge from other things you already know, to come to new conclusions.

Being good at using the notebook means being thoughtful, philosophical, reflective, logical, cautious, precise, and rational.

Tool 4: The jump rope, which you use to practice and improve your skills.

Sometimes, this will take the form of physical training – maybe you don’t yet have the bushwhacking skills to knock away the brambles. Oftentimes, the training and practice will be mental rather than physical. Maybe you don’t know enough about how to use the scope, or your facility with the notepad is not where it needs to be.

Early on in your journey, you’ll need to use the metaphorical jump rope a lot so that you can build the skills you’ll need for the journey. Over time, you’ll need it less often, but there will always be new skills that are useful to train as you climb higher.

The jump rope is informed by the scope and the notebook. Sometimes the scope will tell you about the sort of paths you’ll soon need to face, and the jump rope will help you prepare for them. Other times, you’ll turn the lens of the scope on yourself to see your weaknesses. You can then use the jump rope to work on these, to reshape yourself.

You’re using the jump rope when you’re reading to learn, taking a course to understand something important, practicing how to do something, asking someone to teach you, breaking a difficult skill into smaller pieces, or asking a question when you’re confused.

If your walking speed is slow, or you find another weakness that is slowing you down, use the jump rope to get that skill up to par. But just as importantly, use the jump rope to hone what you’re already good at, to sharpen it into an exceptional skill.

Tool 5: The whistle, which is how you get the help you need from others.

Most things that are worth doing can’t be done alone, and those that travel without a whistle put themselves in great peril. Sometimes you’ll need the help of others to clear a path, to show you how to use the other tools effectively, or to help you understand why you’re stuck. No matter where you’re headed on the mountains, there are those that have gone that way before who have advice to share.

Using the whistle may mean requesting assistance or a favor, but it can also mean asking advice, asking a simple question, or getting support when you’re mentally exhausted.

Being good at using the whistle means investing time in your relationships, developing deep connections, being a good friend when others use their whistles, meeting new people when you perceive gaps, and being bold enough to call for support when you could use it.

Never travel without a whistle when you don’t have to.

So how, then, do you get to the top of your mountains? Well, you will never get to the very top – the mountains stretch forever. But you can climb high. To maximize your chances, use:

(1) The walking stick (to keep moving forward without giving up).
(2) The telescope (to investigate the mountains carefully and with minimal bias so that you can understand where the brambles and boulders are).
(3) The notepad (to reflect carefully on your beliefs and formulate your plans).
(4) The jump rope (to improve your weaknesses and enhance your strengths).
(5) The whistle (to get help and support).

Good luck – may your climb be a joyous one!

This piece was first written on May 19, 2023, and first appeared on this site on September 22, 2023.

Can you justifiably believe that you may be able to really change the world?

There’s a certain seeming absurdity in believing you can change the world. And by “change the world,” I don’t mean playing a small (though still meaningful) cumulative role in bringing about change as part of a group of many thousands of people, each contributing incrementally. I mean, causing a large and important positive change to occur (and not merely by dumb luck) that would not have occurred (or that would have occurred much more slowly) had you not put in the effort.

The irony is that just believing you can change the world makes you, I think, significantly more likely to actually succeed at it, for at least four reasons:

(1) If you believe you can do it, you’re probably much more likely to TRY AT ALL compared to if you don’t, since the idea doesn’t seem automatically stupid or doomed to fail.

(2) When trying to create change, you’re likely to encounter numerous problems and obstacles, and if you really believing you can make change, you may be less likely to give up when these problems occur (e.g., if your first, second, and third attempts at a solution don’t work). Creating significant change probably requires smashing your way through, or skillfully dodging, EVERY ONE of these obstacles. In that vein, it’s amazing to see how often successful startups had times when they looked like they were going to fail, and if the founders had given up, they probably would have.

(3) When you really believe you can do something, others are more likely to believe it too, meaning it becomes easier to persuade others to help you or join you in your mission.

(4) If you really believe you can make change, you may feel more of a moral obligation to actually try really hard to do so. For instance, if you think you can actually ease the suffering of a million people with effort, isn’t it very important that you try hard to do so? On the other hand, if it were something you’re not capable of (or you convinced yourself of that anyway), then you wouldn’t be (or feel) obligated to solve the problem.

BOOTSTRAPPING BELIEFS

Hence, believing you can change the world is what I’ll call a “bootstrapping belief” (in the sense that it is a self-starting process). Your belief in it causes that very same belief to become truer. Another example of a bootstrapping belief might be a belief that the placebo effect has a strong effect on you. The more you believe it, the more effective the placebo effect may actually be, just by virtue of you having that belief

Yet, even with its bootstrapping nature, there is still a certain absurdity in believing you can change the world.

If you believe all that, and you’re truly willing and able to put in the effort, then maybe (with some luck) you really can.

If you don’t already believe “I may be able to really change the world,” maybe you can find yourself able to rationally endorse “I may be able to really change the world” with these extra conditions added. And if you already believe you can change the world, maybe adding these conditions to your belief will make it substantially more likely to be true.

Of course, being able to “change the world” is not binary. The amount of impact you can have is a continuous variable from “not at all” to “massive,” and the probability that you can change the world (in any particular way) is a continuous variable between 0 and 1. What I’m suggesting is that, compared to the statement “I can change the world,” the statement “I can change the world [given certain conditions]” should have a higher probability of being true.