0:00:00 - 0:00:21 Plan the same thing as your character. So I got an email from someone asking a collection of questions and this is the distillation of one. And let me explain it to you this way. If you take a tile or brick in this case, and you smash it with a hammer, depending on where you hit it, you're going to see 0:00:20 - 0:00:43 a different pattern in how it shatters. Now, let's swap out a person in place of this brick and let's smash the person with a hammer depending on how you smash them. You're going to get a bunch of different fragments that are a different set of things. And you, another way of looking at this is if you 0:00:43 - 0:01:11 look at different facets on a prism or jewel, the different angles at which you look at an object will yield a different perspective. You're, you're categorizing a person with a different set of categories in each facet of how you look at them or how you analyze them. So what are some examples of these 0:01:10 - 0:01:31 sets of categories? Well, you could enumerate these, all you'd like thi this is just a, a set of some to get your mind working and to help you see what I'm talking about here, let's call one virtues. These would be things like compassion, courage, justice, and so forth. And so for every single person 0:01:31 - 0:01:52 , if you made a list of virtues, you could generate a little graph that looks like a wheel and each spoke on the wheel will be one of these categories. And you could measure well, they have tons of courage but not much compassion or they're very just people, but you know, they're not whatever another 0:01:51 - 0:02:08 flavor would be to look at something you might call qualities. These would be things like their temperament or their tenacity or their creativity. Now, you might think about this list and say, well, I see things on this that might be on a virtue list or vice versa. It doesn't matter, don't, don't get 0:02:08 - 0:02:29 too hung up on what the categories are or what their uh parent categories are. The point is, you can just slice it differently. We could talk about someone's understanding and go down their knowledge, their wisdom and so on. One of these cats categorizations is the life plan, the life plan. And there's 0:02:29 - 0:02:52 different video talks about what I mean by your life plan, but it's your transcendent purpose, decomposed into measurable goals, decomposed into tasks over time, decomposed into today's to do list. It's what you say you want boiled down to what you do about it today. Now, all this being said, I've I've 0:02:52 - 0:03:18 drawn this picture with the, these categorizations being equal, just different flavors, different facets. Um Summing up, I would call this your character. It's who you are. It's how you are and it's what you do and why you do it. But the question here, sorry, I got ahead of myself. The, the point here 0:03:18 - 0:03:49 is that if you want to improve your character, there are a whole lot of different ways you can approach it. If you work on any of these things, you will improve your character. So that's useful. But if you really want to supercharge this improvement, you should figure out how God is in any of these ways 0:03:48 - 0:04:11 and try to make yourself more like that. Now, if all these things are interchangeable and they're just sort of different ways of looking at the same thing and you'll get a little progress out of any way that you slice it. Then why so much focus on the life plan? Why am I droning on about that endlessly 0:04:11 - 0:04:41 ? Because these things are not equal, these things are not equal. If you attempt to improve any of these, these characteristics on their own accord, you will only be as effective as you are at making and executing a life plan. If you just think about these things in the ether, you just say I'd like to 0:04:41 - 0:05:03 be a more compassionate person. OK. Fine. But how intentional are you in planning, how you are and executing according to the plan. If you're good at that, then what you're really doing is the life plan. You're injecting this thing into your life plan. But because you're doing it implicitly, you're guaranteed 0:05:02 - 0:05:27 to not do it as well as if you did it explicitly, uh, an analog for this. That, that might help you. Believe me is if we were playing darts and I was trying to hit the dart on the bull's eye and you had a blindfold on and we spun you in a chair 20 times and just threw it in a random direction. Who, which 0:05:26 - 0:05:54 of us do you think is gonna win the game? And it won't even matter if you're better at darts than I am because you're doing it the worst possible way you see. So beyond being really the only way to accomplish anything on the right side of the screen. A life plan also provides you sufficient motive and 0:05:54 - 0:06:15 effectual action. The other things are nice goals to have, but it's not, it's just one piece of the puzzle. It doesn't actually take you there. You've got no plan and you've got no reasons to believe that the hard things you need to do each day to get toward that outcome are worth doing. You don't even 0:00:00 - 0:00:21 Plan the same thing as your character. So I got an email from someone asking a collection of questions and this is the distillation of one. And let me explain it to you this way. If you take a tile or brick in this case, and you smash it with a hammer, depending on where you hit it, you're going to see 0:00:20 - 0:00:43 a different pattern in how it shatters. Now, let's swap out a person in place of this brick and let's smash the person with a hammer depending on how you smash them. You're going to get a bunch of different fragments that are a different set of things. And you, another way of looking at this is if you 0:00:43 - 0:01:11 look at different facets on a prism or jewel, the different angles at which you look at an object will yield a different perspective. You're, you're categorizing a person with a different set of categories in each facet of how you look at them or how you analyze them. So what are some examples of these 0:01:10 - 0:01:31 sets of categories? Well, you could enumerate these, all you'd like thi this is just a, a set of some to get your mind working and to help you see what I'm talking about here, let's call one virtues. These would be things like compassion, courage, justice, and so forth. And so for every single person 0:01:31 - 0:01:52 , if you made a list of virtues, you could generate a little graph that looks like a wheel and each spoke on the wheel will be one of these categories. And you could measure well, they have tons of courage but not much compassion or they're very just people, but you know, they're not whatever another 0:01:51 - 0:02:08 flavor would be to look at something you might call qualities. These would be things like their temperament or their tenacity or their creativity. Now, you might think about this list and say, well, I see things on this that might be on a virtue list or vice versa. It doesn't matter, don't, don't get 0:02:08 - 0:02:29 too hung up on what the categories are or what their uh parent categories are. The point is, you can just slice it differently. We could talk about someone's understanding and go down their knowledge, their wisdom and so on. One of these cats categorizations is the life plan, the life plan. And there's 0:02:29 - 0:02:52 different video talks about what I mean by your life plan, but it's your transcendent purpose, decomposed into measurable goals, decomposed into tasks over time, decomposed into today's to do list. It's what you say you want boiled down to what you do about it today. Now, all this being said, I've I've 0:02:52 - 0:03:18 drawn this picture with the, these categorizations being equal, just different flavors, different facets. Um Summing up, I would call this your character. It's who you are. It's how you are and it's what you do and why you do it. But the question here, sorry, I got ahead of myself. The, the point here 0:03:18 - 0:03:49 is that if you want to improve your character, there are a whole lot of different ways you can approach it. If you work on any of these things, you will improve your character. So that's useful. But if you really want to supercharge this improvement, you should figure out how God is in any of these ways 0:03:48 - 0:04:11 and try to make yourself more like that. Now, if all these things are interchangeable and they're just sort of different ways of looking at the same thing and you'll get a little progress out of any way that you slice it. Then why so much focus on the life plan? Why am I droning on about that endlessly 0:04:11 - 0:04:41 ? Because these things are not equal, these things are not equal. If you attempt to improve any of these, these characteristics on their own accord, you will only be as effective as you are at making and executing a life plan. If you just think about these things in the ether, you just say I'd like to 0:04:41 - 0:05:03 be a more compassionate person. OK. Fine. But how intentional are you in planning, how you are and executing according to the plan. If you're good at that, then what you're really doing is the life plan. You're injecting this thing into your life plan. But because you're doing it implicitly, you're guaranteed 0:05:02 - 0:05:27 to not do it as well as if you did it explicitly, uh, an analog for this. That, that might help you. Believe me is if we were playing darts and I was trying to hit the dart on the bull's eye and you had a blindfold on and we spun you in a chair 20 times and just threw it in a random direction. Who, which 0:05:26 - 0:05:54 of us do you think is gonna win the game? And it won't even matter if you're better at darts than I am because you're doing it the worst possible way you see. So beyond being really the only way to accomplish anything on the right side of the screen. A life plan also provides you sufficient motive and 0:05:54 - 0:06:15 effectual action. The other things are nice goals to have, but it's not, it's just one piece of the puzzle. It doesn't actually take you there. You've got no plan and you've got no reasons to believe that the hard things you need to do each day to get toward that outcome are worth doing. You don't even 0:06:15 - 0:06:34 know what they are let alone whether they're worth doing or not. That process is the life plan. That's how you break it down to your daily choices. If you can't break something down to your daily choices. You are never going to get it. It's as simple as that.