In this post, I give a personal account of my journey over the past 7 years. I also try to articulate the problems I’m attempting to address in my work, along with my motivations for doing so. I hope this context adds to the richness and relevance of the ideas I share.
I started Think Grow Prosper in January of 2014, during a period when I felt my life was falling apart. One way I dealt with the turmoil was by posting inspiring and positive quotes on Instagram that I’d collected over the years. I had read a good number of personal development books ever since my high school psychology teacher used The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People as the curriculum for an entire semester.
So I went back through my old books and journals for insights, advice, ideas—anything that might help give me perspective and remind me of what mattered so I could move forward. When I came across something useful, I posted it. Not primarily for others but for myself—a public diary of sorts. For some reason, this seemed to strike a chord with people and my page grew quickly. Before then, I wasn’t much into social media. But now I had an audience so I was posting every day.
Spending 8-9 hours a day on social media is a sure way to stay plugged into the public stream of consciousness. So when the 2016 U.S. Presidential election happened, I couldn’t avoid the cacophony of contentious conversations that dominated my feed.
I saw good people with different views argue bitterly and unproductively about important issues. I saw relationships end over ideological differences. I saw my country become increasingly polarized. More and more it seemed as though people were living in separate moral worlds from one another.
This caused me to look at personal development in a new light. Where does it fit into the bigger picture? How does it relate to politics—and morality more broadly? And how was I contributing to this ongoing conversation? My simple Instagram quotes may have been uplifting but they weren’t doing justice to the complexity of the human condition, nor did they sufficiently satisfy my growing curiosity about what justifies right action.
So I set out to rebuild my knowledge structure from scratch, though I didn’t know it at the time.
My education begins
The process was scattered and unorganized at first. I was a mad scientist in a lab. I read books and listened to lectures on a range of subjects—physics, psychology, logic, astronomy, anthropology. Most of it went over my head. I didn’t know what problem I was trying to solve or even what I was doing exactly. I just wanted to know stuff. I needed to know stuff. I was searching for something but didn’t yet know what.
Admittedly, there was also a part of me that was trying to compensate for what I saw as a weakness: my lack of formal education. I didn’t grasp the true value of higher learning when I was younger so I dropped out of community college after a few semesters. Ever since, I’d harbored a constant suspicion that everyone knew more than me.
So I kept learning, kept reading. Eventually, I began to see patterns in my studies, especially the humanities. I started to catch brief glimpses into how different disciplines connected with each other.
It was around this time when I learned that most of our knowledge since Aristotle and through the 19th century was considered philosophy. Historically, philosophy has been the master discipline that has given birth to all the others. With this in mind, it seemed that studying philosophy was likely to be a good bang for my buck. So I took courses and read books on the ideas, arguments, and thinkers that have shaped our world.
Looking back, I conceptualize this period of intense learning as my personal, micro version of the Enlightenment. In the same way that Western Europe in the 18th century shed old ways of thinking and experienced an intellectual flowering, I examined many of my own long-standing assumptions and acquired new lenses through which to view and understand the world.
My wife refers to this period as my “what-is-what” stage because I began to question everything. I couldn’t write anything without second guessing myself. It was a disorienting and chaotic time but also one of great discovery and growth. I suppose those things often go together.
During this process, I had a recurring set of thoughts:
Did I know anything at all? Had I acquired any wisdom or knowledge worth having? Had I paid the slightest bit of attention in school—or in life for that matter?
I wasn’t sure. But I was paying attention now. A whole new world was opening up to me. I had seen too much and there was no going back.
My political awakening
In retrospect, a lot of what I was doing was orienting myself politically. As long as I’ve been politically aware, I’ve considered myself left-leaning. But with the polarization of American politics during the Trump presidency (and in an effort to correct for my natural political biases), it struck me as necessary to take a step back and make a serious attempt at understanding the other side of the political spectrum. I figured while I was at it, I might as well do an audit of my own personal beliefs and presuppositions. Before I try to figure out the world, maybe I should try and figure out myself a bit.
A field of research that helped me do this was personality psychology—in particular, the Big Five Personality Model. Learning about trait differences and their influence on a person’s political views not only gave me a peek into the workings of my own mind but also the minds of others whom I hadn’t quite understood up to that point. Doing this earnestly and in good faith gave me a more self-awareness and moral empathy than I had acquired during the previous 10 years of my life.
I was particularly interested in how political views on both the right and left could go too far. Something that bothered me was that I frequently observed people who called themselves liberals but did not act like it. These people exhibited behavior and espoused beliefs that did not represent anything resembling my own, including deplatforming speakers with whom they disagreed, denying basic science in order to uphold ideological positions, and having little tolerance for dissenting views.
How deep does the rabbit hole go?
But politics was just the tip of the iceberg. Political views, I realized, were just mental processes that could be understood using psychology. In turn, these mental processes influence behavior that, when played out on the collective level, could be understood through a sociological lens. And both our behavior and mental processes are themselves products of evolution, which is the domain of biology. And in order to make sense it all, we must contextualize it in history.
The rabbit hole goes deep.
One of the first books that helped me put together the pieces of this puzzle was Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. In it, historian Yuval Noah Harari weaves together research from multiple fields to offer a framework for making sense of the patterns that characterize our species and the civilizations we build. More than anything, Sapiens helped me take a long view of history and think in timeframes that span tens of thousands of years rather than decades or centuries.
I found other guides along the way, too. These people were precise and deliberate in their thinking and speech, the embodiment of what good philosophers should be. Their arguments were nuanced and clear. They had an eclectic and unpredictable mix of views that could not be summed up in a single label. And they had a vast working knowledge of a variety of subjects outside their chosen field which they seamlessly wove into conversations to buttress their points.
One of these guides was social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose book The Righteous Mind was another intellectual milestone for me. He makes the case that morality is much richer and more complex than issues of harm and fairness. There are a diversity of values upon which people base notions of right and wrong and each of them is shaped by evolution and influenced by our upbringing. Thus, when it comes to making moral judgments, we don’t think rationally—we think intuitively. This theory goes a long way in accounting for seemingly intractable disagreements between political parties. It also laid the groundwork for how I would come to think about morality.
A universal philosophy?
The more chunks of knowledge I grasped, the more I saw how the different areas of knowledge fit together to form a cohesive picture of reality. This reassured me that my eclectic curriculum was not in vain. No subject exists in isolation and the most interesting ones exist at the intersection of multiple fields.
A given event could be explained and analyzed through any number of disciplines. Take the assassination of Gandhi. It was a historical event no doubt but the death of his body—from the bullet wounds to the shutting down of his organs—could just as easily be viewed through the lens of biology. And the mental processes that drove his assassin to kill him were the domain of psychology. We could also consider the matter from the perspective of philosophy, politics, or even geography.
Explanations in one field of knowledge, I realized, touch explanations in many other fields—and maybe even all other fields. This suggests a kind of unity of knowledge. A note I jotted down to myself around that time succinctly sums up my thoughts:
Are all fundamental truths interconnected somehow? I think they are.
Meanwhile, the culture wars raged on and with them, my earnest attempt at illuminating the disagreements and misunderstandings that fueled them, if only for my own sanity. Beneath the straw man attacks and moral grandstanding, I sensed there were deep, complex, and consequential questions that needed to be grappled with:
By what rules and principles should a just society be governed? How should we conceptualize a person’s identity? What are our moral obligations to each other? Does technological progress make us happier? Should happiness be the ultimate goal in life? How can we find meaning?
On their face, some of these questions seemed political. But it became clear to me that they overlapped with personal development to a surprising degree.
A new era
When my son was born in early 2019, my learning became more focused and intense. Like an AI researcher, it quickly dawned on me that I would be responsible for writing the first draft of a moral code that another agent would use to navigate the world. My knowledge was no longer theoretical, it was practical. I needed to get clarity on the most important question of all: How to live.
I wasn’t starting from scratch. My parents instilled in me solid values and I had read a variety of personal development books. I was making a living writing about life advice, after all. I had some idea of what it meant to be a “good” person, however vague or abstract that idea might have been.
The thing I was really seeking was a solid foundation on which to ground all life advice—a framework to make sense of personal development as a whole. I also wanted a way to reconcile conflicting advice. What were the principles behind the principles?
I became obsessed with finding common ground between conflicting worldviews and schools of thought. I relied heavily on my philosopher’s toolkit and also research from various fields of psychology. I had a vague notion that this would somehow lead to a theory of everything for how best to conduct oneself in the world.
Could such a theory be produced I wondered? Had anyone attempted it? Wouldn’t we all need to share the same basic values for it to work? Do we need a universally accepted philosophy to sustain civilization? Is this even remotely possible? More importantly, am I actually onto something or just devolving into a delusional cult leader?
It seemed to me that what our global society needed was a philosophy we could collectively embrace and use as the basis for cooperating flexibly at scale. After all, this is a strategy humans have used in the past with considerable success. (I’m looking at you Christianity.)
But since the Enlightenment, religion has been on the decline. It stopped having the power it once did partly because we became too clever for our own good. We questioned our foundational beliefs to death. This led to a period of great discovery and novelty but also one of great moral uncertainty and confusion. Updating one’s personal beliefs is a highly uncomfortable and destabilizing process. Updating the worldview of an entire society is hell. And the 20th century experienced no shortage of that.
The way forward
Although the global population has continued to bloom, the internet has been making the world a smaller and smaller place. A band of hunter gatherers might go their entire lives without seeing a person from another tribe. A medieval peasant was likely never to leave the walls of his or her city. But a modern person lives and works alongside countless numbers of complete strangers everyday.
The point is that we can no longer isolate ourselves into moral tribes. In our global society, any philosophy that has any chance of being accepted universally must be viable for everyone, everywhere, under any circumstances.
It seems to me that such a philosophy must also answer two crucial questions:
What does “good” mean? (a good person, a good life, good action, etc.)
How do we go about achieving and upholding this standard of good?
These answers must be accepted by most people, in most places if we are to live harmoniously.
Which brings me to where I am now. I’ve spent the past year developing a framework that I hope will provide a shared language to help us effectively navigate the complexity of reality together. This framework is not a set of rigid, static rules but rather a map of values meant to help us understand how our actions and worldviews fit within the broader moral landscape.
Additionally, this framework is designed to be useful at different scales, both big and small. It can be used as a lens through which to analyze complex cultural issues but also as a practical guide for improving one’s personal well-being and quality of life. In both cases, the aim is harmony.
By harmony, I do not mean the dangerous idea of utopia but rather the integration of competing aspects of our nature. The musical analogy applies: In the same way that different notes and instruments can be played together to produce a beautifully layered and cohesive piece of music, so too does the interplay of our diverse and conflicting values produce a rich and fulfilling life—both individually and collectively. Much of my thinking now revolves around this central idea.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers, I’m simply trying to figure out the truth as best as I can manage. Much of what I write is aimed at some version of myself—either past, present, or future.
I hope you enjoy this journey into my thought process and writing process. And I hope the insights, tools, and resources I offer here will help you live better, just as they have helped me.
To harmony,
Ruben