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Structure Your Self Improvement

with a Skilltree for life. With our weekly workshops and the support of a like-minded community, you can unlock your true potential.
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The Pragmatist
Take what works, discard the rest.

Max Level Pragmatist

Paul Coren was once just another failed entrepreneur buried in a mountain of debt. Now, ten years later, he's a max-level Pragmatist with a net worth in the tens of millions.

At work, Paul meets with clients and investors for his startup, Synthica. Like its founder, his company hums along, an flawlessly efficient engine. Paul reinvests most of the money in the company, but if it weren't for the grand ambition burning in his mind, he could retire today and live a wealthy life.

At night, Paul spends time with a carefully curated circle of friends. One night he's networking with the local mayor, the next he's hosting a dinner party with half a dozen lobbyists at his well-appointed home. He knows his friends only like him because of his money, but he tells himself that's just how the game is played.

The Meditative
Face your fears and live your passions.

Max Level Meditative

Morgan Vesper always loved drawing — and their parents always said art wasn't a proper career. That shadow whispered in Morgan's ear when they went to college, and again when they graduated into a tech job they hated.

It took another three years for Morgan to realize their life was on a dead-end course. Now, a decade later, Morgan is a max-level Meditative with an underground hit webcomic, Inkwitch.

During the day, Morgan works on their webcomic. Sometimes they look back and marvel at how much their art has improved. Probably from the daily practice, though it never feels like work. Drawing is just too much fun.

In the evening, Morgan works out with an eclectic routine. They also hold regular parties at their house. Most of Morgan's friends aren't anyone 'of note' — but status games have no place in Morgan's life.

The Empiricist
Step by step, towards the truth.

Max Level Empiricist

Eva Davis started her career as a nameless chemical technician with a slowly fading passion for science. Today, ten years later, she's a max-level Empiricist advancing the field of anti-aging medicine.

At work, Eva is a brilliant lab scientist for a biotech startup, Everlife. She devises experiments, runs them, and uses the results to, someday, allow the elderly to spend more time with their children and grandchildren. The reaper's scythe-hand weakens one day at a time.

Eva spends most of her time at work, but when she allows herself a rare moment of relaxation, Eva applies her razor-sharp mind to the world around her. Knowledge is everywhere — from the science papers she reads, to the natural history museum she frequents, to the endless stream of books she devours. She stays up late into most nights reading, telling herself that the exhaustion the next day is the price of knowledge.

At the heart of the Path are three Archetypes, representing different strategies and approaches to life. Click each Archetype to learn more.

The Path System

The Path system removes the barriers to self improvement by reducing the cognitive load of wondering what to work on, providing extrinsic social motivation, and playing into a completionist challenge-and-reward mindset.

The Path is a vast map to self-improvement. It's comprised of Skills — small, easily achievable tasks. Each Skill belongs to one of the three Archetypes and we have Skills for everything from rationality to exercise to haggling. Generally speaking, each Archetype focuses on specific areas:

  • Pragmatist: Direct life improvement, making money, and networking
  • Meditative: Mental and physical health, art, and community
  • Empiricist: Learning, teaching, and clear thinking

The more Skills you acquire in an Archetype, the higher your Archetype level. When you're a level 100 Empiricist, everyone knows you're a badass. Each Archetype can be worked on separately, allowing you to specialize and pursue what you find most rewarding. Real people are complex mixes of all three Archetypes, and the Path reflects that.

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Introductory Pragmatist (red), Meditative (green), and Empiricist (blue) Skills.

Weekly Online Workshops

Force of will alone isn't enough to spark personal growth. To that end, the Guild also offers weekly online workshops centered around unusual self-improvement topics such as:

  • Practical Social Networking: Master the art of making friends while remaining genuine to your true self
  • Creating an Exobrain: Get ahead of the game with the effective use of digital productivity systems
  • Street Epistemology: Have successful conversations about even the most controversial topics

We release a new online workshop every week — when you're a Guild member, personal growth happens on a dependable schedule.

Cohorts

Even with the Practitioner's Path, personal growth rarely happens in isolation. You can achieve more with a reliable community that helps you stick to your goals and become your superhuman self.

When you join the Guild, you'll be assigned a cohort, or a permanent support group of four to eight people. Cohorts take online workshops together, hang out on a weekly basis, and form the backbone of your time spent with the Guild. Need help with a life crisis? Unsure what to do next? Or perhaps you simply want reliable accountability partners — whatever the issue, your cohort is there to ensure you succeed.

Prompt Engineering
Taste and Shaping
Applied Decision Theory 1
Effective Compliments
Feeling Rational
Applied Decision Theory 2
Acing the ITT
Trigger Action Planning
New Years' Resolutions
Applied Decision Theory 3
Internal Double Crux
Applied Decision Theory 4
We offer a new workshop every week.

Member Testimonials

In addition to helping me make a lot of new friends and networking opportunities, the Guild also played a large role in teaching me to understand my values and motivations and develop clear goals for the future. The friendly and supportive environment has given me the encouragement to try things and grow as an individual, while being a safe place to explore and come to that sense of better understanding.

Guild members helped me edit my resume, beta read my stories and art, and find a psychiatrist so I could finally treat my ADHD.

  • The Character Sheet workshop helped me plan for a future I actually wanted to live in while giving me new insights into how I spend energy and what would be valuable to spend energy on.
  • The Metalearning workshop helped me me understand skill building at a deeper level and helped me tackle a number of skills I had previously bounced off or found extremely challenging to develop.
  • The Social Networking workshop helped me kickstart my Twitter career.

Through all of this, I've gradually become more able to tackle fun and interesting projects and exert agency on the world, and I've pretty much completely solved my executive functioning issues. I'm really happy with all the friends I've made through the Guild and I hope to keep building cool connections and seeing where this all goes.

Octavia N
The Guild is a great place to teach and learn. I love the insightful conversations I've had with conscientious people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Olivia G
The Guild is a place for people who care about doing the best they can as well as they can. Not just doing what they think is right, but doing it in the best way they can find.
Johnny W
ROSE has been great for me so far, and the meetings are a highlight of my week.
Scott Z
My favorite part was the team camaraderie. I felt like I was friends with the people in my cohort.
Stephen Z

Join the Guild

Seedling
$0/month
Structure your self-improvement.
15 Path levels per Archetype
Unlimited workshops per month
Full community access
One cohort*
Flower
$15/month
Unlock your true potential.
Unlimited Path levels
Unlimited workshops per month
Full community access
One cohort*
Rose Bush
$50/month
Become a Guild insider.
Unlimited Path levels
Unlimited workshops per month
Full community access
One cohort*
One one-hour meeting with a Council member per month
* Cohorts are permanent groups of four to six Guildmates that help you advance through the Path.

News

Decoding AI: From Childhood Learning to Transformer Models

This article delves into the process by which a child builds a mental geometry of concepts, starting with simple associations and gradually forming a complex web of understanding. It draws parallels between this cognitive development and the way AI models, particularly Transformers, encode and process information as vectors in a high-dimensional space. By understanding these geometric representations, the article sheds light on both the capabilities and limitations of AI in generating meaningful outputs and the importance of effective prompt engineering.
This article explores how a child's conceptual understanding evolves through a geometric mental model, drawing parallels to how AI, specifically Transformer models, process and represent information in a high-dimensional space.

⚙️ Success Engineering and Shadow Work

Learn about the discipline of success engineering, what our book clubs have been reading, and how to implement a hedging strategy in our July 2024 newsletter.
Learn about the discipline of success engineering, what our book clubs have been reading, and how to implement a hedging strategy in our July 2024 newsletter.

🕯️ Prepare for nuclear war and learn the Guild's values

This article provides additional material for our Emergency Preparedness workshop and an essay on the origins of the Guild's values.
Read about how and why to prepare to survive nuclear war and the origins of the Guild's values in our May 2024 newsletter.
Visit the ROSE archives for more articles.