“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” -Richard Feynman
Note for the skill tree: This multi-week workshop can help with many Meditative skills, and will provide a framework useful for the Unseen Chances skill line in the Pragmatist archetype.
High Concept
Path Mapping is a mindfulness and introspection exercise, as well as an auto-sorting list of all the things that comprise the person you want to be. It also includes exercises for creating a path forward to becoming that person.
Goals
- Bring one’s problems to conscious attention.
- Learn the valuable skill of facing uncomfortable truths.
- Provide a meta-system that helps you prioritize what direction to take on the Guild’s skill tree system (or any other system you wish to use).
- Give you the tools needed to effectively accomplish those goals and acquire those skills.
- Provide the raw materials on which all other exercises can be used on, and help measure the effectiveness of any self-help techniques you use.
Background and Summary
There are two broad levels of self-improvement the Guild provides:
1.) The Skill Tree, along with our workshops and Cohort system, is heavily action-oriented, meant to make tangible improvements in your life and equip you with the skills needed to become as “agentic” as possible.
2.) The Path is the abstract guiding philosophy of the Guild, which broadly consists of our Guild values of honesty, effectiveness, empathy, cooperation, and courage. It also includes our vision of raising the sanity waterline in order to save the world. From these values and vision emerge all systems we create, and any changes we make to those systems in the future. The document you are now reading rests a meta level higher than the skill tree, meant to help guide you on your Path within the Guild. It can be used to judge whether the Guild (or any other self improvement system) is helping you in accordance with your values.
Inspired by tabletop RPG games, Path Mapping has its roots in CFAR’s ‘Bug List’ exercise, with elements of the FMEA for added rigor. It also takes inspiration from Tim Ferris’ “Fear Setting” and “Dreamline” exercises, as well as Jordan Peterson’s “Self Authoring Program” (this is not an endorsement of any other views expressed by these people).
By the end, Path Mapping will help you create a list of all the goals you have (and all the problems you want to solve) along with two values you assign to each item: “Impact” and “Solvability”.
Impact (how much the goal could positively affect your life): Scale of 1-5, with 1 being least impactful and 5 being most impactful.
Solvability (how easy it is to solve): Scale of 1-5 (1 is most difficult to solve, 5 is easiest to solve).
“Impact” and “Solvability” are multiplied together to create a “Priority Number”. As its name implies, this total number determines how much of a priority it should be to accomplish the goal.
To generate these goals, several activities are performed:
- Character Backstory is a very short autobiography, designed to provide context for the rest of the module, and help you process any micro-traumas that are in your past.
- Exploring Strengths and Weaknesses is an activity for assessing your strengths and weaknesses.
- Daydreaming Heaven and Hell takes your past and your present and helps you model your best and worst possible futures.
- Facing Your Fear helps you identify your motivation to to act in spite of your fear or complacency.
- Game Plan is the final step. Now that you have outlined your trajectory from the past, to the present, to the future, and you have integrated your intrinsic motivation to act, we now make the plan.
All activities require writing. The reason for this is that clear writing is clear thinking; the things in your mind that prevent you from communicating effectively with others also prevent you from communicating effectively with yourself.
Tip: At any point throughout this module, if you have any difficulty getting words onto paper, one trick is to use something called “Diffuse Mode” thinking.
Contrasted with “Focus Mode”, Diffuse Mode is when you are not exerting energy to actively keep your attention on a single thing, but rather allowing your mind to wander. Both Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali were famous for leveraging this. When you are in the shower and aimlessly thinking, that is Diffuse Mode thinking, and why some people get so many great ideas in the shower. You keep the project or the problem running as sort of a “subroutine”, and then go off and do other things; when your mind naturally wanders, it won’t stray too far from it.
Another option is to simply take a nap (no longer than 30 minutes, so you don’t enter the deeper phases of sleep), and immediately begin thinking again on the problem when you wake up.
Character Backstory
Purpose and benefits:
In any good RPG, you write a backstory for your character. This gives you context for how to build the character, and provides a guide for how you play that character. This ensures that when we do the Exploring Strengths and Weaknesses step, you will be most likely to find everything.
In real life, we have the added disadvantage of also having lived that backstory and all the trauma and micro traumas associated with that. When your body experiences danger, it needs to be able to put that danger in the past in order to let go of the physical stress that accompanies it. So in addition to giving us context for our character build, writing out our backstory provides an outlet to process the stress that may be causing us problems without us even realizing it.
Chapter Titles
The first stage is to separate our life into different Chapter Titles, each is a pithy description of a chunk of your life. Try to keep the total number between 7-14 Chapters total.
The length of one Chapter does not need to describe the same amount of time as another Chapter in your life, for the same reason that not every chapter in a book has the same number of pages. They can be as long as Elementary School, or as short as the first six months of moving to a new city. Take the time here and try and get this general table of contents for the history of your life written. Again, this is just the Chapter Title, not the contents of the Chapter itself.
Chapter Content
Once you have completed the above exercise, it's time to start digging into what's written in those Chapters. For each chapter, write from 4 to 6 significant experiences that happened during this time.
Some of these will be conventionally important moments such as a graduation, a marriage, a death in the family. It's important to realize that this is your personal story, and events that might seem small or trivial to others often have a huge impact on us (e.g. small betrayals and small kindnesses can have a huge ripple effect).
If one of those events seems small or trivial, write it down anyway because if you remembered it it's probably worth thinking about again. Give a short description; beginning, middle, and end of the event. Describe how this event shaped you and why you think it is still emotionally relevant enough for us to think about it.
Fleshing out the backstory
At this point you should have from 16-36 events under the various Chapters of your life. While each of these was significant, it's probably clear from your experience that some of them came to mind very easily because they had a very big impact, and others were more of a struggle to fill in. Pick the 10 most important events to further analyze.
For each of the ten experiences that you have chosen, answer the following questions:
- How did this experience start or come about?
- Do you think that it was a positive or negative experience?
- Were the people you were interacting with in your life helping you or hurting you during this experience?
- In what way did your beliefs or actions end up helping to create the circumstances that led you to this experience?
- Would you do anything different with the benefit of foresight if you were in the same experience again?
- Were these events that are out of your control or should have been the responsibility of someone else or just beyond prediction?
Many of you might not be able to finish this whole activity in one workshop session. That is fine; consider the remainder as your homework. You will have a week to complete this.
Once you have finished all of these steps you will have the basic outline of your own autobiography, which hopefully has relieved some stress, and will inform the activity in the next session.
Tip: If, at any point, you discover that a particular Chapter or experience within that Chapter is too traumatic to even think about, make a placeholder that makes sense to you and revisit it within the next 3 months. Confer with trusted friends on how you should go about resolving this trauma, even if that’s just advice on how to acquire a therapist.