How to have a theory of life.

Okay. This is about theories, having theories of life. So you can have a theory of life. Everyone, that is, if you want to know what you want to do, if you want to actually kind of point yourself in a direction and have a North Star, or something you’re going to navigate by, then you probably need some kind of theory of life that has a North Star so you know where to point yourself. It helps you navigate, right?

So you want to know what your theory of life is. And you can actually create a theory of life in a lot of different ways. You can sort of look at all the experiences you’ve had and figure out, okay, what do I think is going on? And you can base your theory of life on that. Or you can look forward. You can also have a theory of life that’s forward looking.

You can actually decide what your theory of life is. It can be whatever you want. So you can actually decide to have a theory of life that is forward looking and that is the theory of life that you want to have, or the theory that you want to have about it, so you can take all that stuff that you learned in the past and then you can say instead of looking back and saying that that’s the way it has to be, I’m going to actually flip that and look forward and say, well, going forward, anything is possible. And so this is going to be my theory of what I want and, in my case, because the thing that I really enjoy the most is creativity, and what creativity wants is to be possible, and to be proven possible, and so I actually believe, I’ve been looking around a long time for my team, and I’m building my theory of life based on looking toward the future and pointing toward what I want, as opposed to pointing toward the past and what I just expect to get more of, I actually want to get more of what I don’t know I’m going to get. I want to have surprises. I want to have a life of adventure. I want to be surprised by life, I want to actually open up possibility in my future, so I decided to have a theory that is based on the idea that anything is possible. And I also know that once you think something is possible, then you start to try and do it. So the idea of possibility is also connected with the idea that you actually start tinkering with things and seeing what works. And if you’re fascinated enough with possibility, don’t stop with tinkering, you don’t stop until you actually get it to work.

And so this is a theory that poses a question, and the question is, does the theory create the person or does the person create the theory?

I like to believe that the theory has the potential to create the person. Of course, because I believe that anything’s possible, of course I can believe that’s possible. And I think what you’ll find, if you start adopting at the root of everything just a core theory that anything is possible, that there’s always a way to figure things out, then it’s actually, you know, having the theory makes it come true. It may not make it fully come true, but you’ll probably manifest a lot more possibilities than you would have if you had any other kind of philosophy.

So the philosophy that anything’s possible is an optimistic philosophy, which is okay as long as it’s informed by realism, so this optimistic philosophy has to be also connected to reality. And this is the reason that it’s a science; because you have to learn from what you do. But you have to be focusing on what you’re learning that’s productive and constructive out of what you do. You’re going to have learnings that are painful sometimes, but that’s not where your focus should be. So if you adopt a philosophy that anything is possible, and you start saying yes to things but you start getting hurt by some of the things, well you’re going to sort of be a little more careful around those things, but you’re still going to retain, or attempt to retain, at your core, the idea that anything is possible.

And if you didn’t find a way, maybe it was because you weren’t looking hard enough or maybe there could have been a way if... Maybe there might have been a way. Maybe there might have been a way if you’d thought about it a little bit harder. So just because you didn’t find a way doesn’t mean there wasn’t a way. And this is a good philosophy, because you keep finding new things. It’s a great philosophy, because it works, it’s productive, and you say yes to things that you might not say yes to if you had another philosophy. You open up yourself to the world, you listen to people differently because you think anything’s possible. You pre-judge them less because you think anything’s possible. So if you believe that the theory creates the person, then you might as well adopt the philosophy of the person that you want to become, as opposed to the person that you are, so you can continue to get closer and closer to that person that you want to become.

So I think a theory of life is actually a very important thing, because if you do it, depending on how you do it, but if you do it the way that I do it, having a theory of life actually changes your life. So if you want to change your life, if you want to have a theory of life that changes your life, you just sit down and think about the theory of life that you want.

This is kind of like saying that the way to create something is create something and the way to make it is to make it, but that is a fact. That the only way to make something is to make it. You can talk about it all day, but the only way to make it is to actually make it.