Creative Breakthrough
As you remember from the module on general strategy, the project consists of two parts: the Balanced System and the Creative Breakthrough. We have described the different phases in your life when this or that approach makes sense. If your personal architecture suits you and it is on the rise, then it makes sense to optimize. If it does not suit you, then there is no sense in optimizing it; it's better find a new personal architecture.
The Balanced System is the optimization of your life such as it is, with the preservation of personal architecture, the current life model. This approach is built on very well-known approaches in business, namely the "balanced scorecard" and "operational efficiency." This approach gives specific recommendations, many of which are numerical, which can be put into practice right now.
There are other situations when personal architecture has outlived its usefulness and it is necessary to look for a different life model or another personal architecture. In this situation, use the approach described here - the Creative Breakthrough. The Creative Breakthrough is based on a different methodology in business that is called "business model innovation". It's much more creative, requires a greater expansion of the boundaries of what is possible, and requires much greater changes in your life.
Our task now is to start the process for a Creative Breakthrough that sets the stage for you to be clear on how you can start in this direction.
What is personal architecture? This is not just a general term; it is a set of clearly linked elements, each of which is very important. And without any of them, this architecture is not harmonious and will fall apart.
First is your physical foundation. First, as most existentialists agree, the main purpose of life is life itself. We add: life and health. If you do not live, if you don't have a physical foundation and no health, then there's nothing to even talk about because there's nothing to improve.
Next, we build your architecture like a building with pillars. The first pillar is your overall value and overall mission. It may be value only to you, to others, or to the world civilization. It is up to you.
Paul: I cite this example when creating strategies for businesses, especially for large corporations. Imagine that you are a traveler who got lost in the desert, it's very hot and you're very thirsty. Suddenly, you see a vending machine with cold soda in front of you. It's not a mirage, but a real machine where you push a button to get your hands on the first cool can of soda that you can drink right away.
What is the value of a can of soda for you in this situation? Can you measure this value in dollars? It is very hard to do so, because its value is very high. The question we ask is what are you and what are you doing in your life that allows you to bring such a great value? Try to answer these questions. When you can answer these questions, you might find the answer to what your mission in life is.
The second pillar is a little different from the first. You need to know what you enjoy in life. What are your sources and formula of pleasure? We can create a lot of value, but from that value we may get little pleasure and joy. As a result, many people like that live bleak lives, despite the fact that they create a lot of value. So what is your formula for pleasure? What brings you pleasure? Why are you allowed to get this pleasure? If you consider the world as hostile, it's hard to get pleasure. Maybe you can only get it in a fight. And do you get a kick out of creating value (first pillar) or something else entirely? Why?
The third pillar is strategic control and game zone. If you have a formula for creating value, a formula of getting pleasure, then you need to understand how the whole structure can be stable. What is your protection and strategic control? What have your built, that makes you sure, that the value and pleasure will not disappear in the future? The flip side of this question is what is the role of the game and where is your boundary between the zones of stability and game? The modules on confidence and optimism describe the zones of stability and game.
Let's suppose that you answer the first three questions positively. Your goal is to create maximum value for others, get maximum pleasure for yourself and ensure maximum long-term strategic stability of the most important elements in your life, while providing enough flexibility in the game zone.
The question then becomes, what you actually do? The fourth pillar is your scope of activity. Do you only do what is needed for the first three, or you do many other, often useless things?
It's great to create maximum value, to extract the maximum pleasure, and to be able to do the maximum to protect what's important to you.
But given that, the less you'll have to do, the better. Why do extra stuff?
These four elements must be clear to you, but it does not always happen that way. Ask yourself these questions right now. When you have all of the above, then you can proceed to a financial strategy, social relationships, family, and other elements, which are the “roof” covering all of the pillars. And in the end, it leads to a long-term sense of satisfaction with life and happiness.
When we talk about personal architecture, that you need to understand what yours is now, and creatively generate new ideas about your potential new personal architecture for the future, we will talk specifically about the construct described above. It's not just a general idea of some kind of life model, but a set of these specific, closely related components.
The next item that you need to understand is the degrees of freedom representing your choices. Every day, your life consists of choices. Your making decisions is in most cases the result of choices available to you. Our approach is systemic. You have some degrees of freedom (or, as mathematicians say, dimensions), which are the elements of choices that you make.
For example, you can choose where to live, where to work, who spend your life with, how to develop physically and financially, and what you will do to attain self-realization. There are many more degrees of freedom. For example, your children, your attitude to smoking and alcohol, and even trivial things such as what size your car or your house is, are all the elements of choice that you deal with throughout your life.
Let's consider a few examples of how the different choice factors influence each other. For example, when we talk about having a job, you have two dimensions: income (e.g. salary) and self-realization from this work and how much pleasure it brings to you:
- Work can be a dead end, where there is not enough income or no self-realization.
- The may be a scenario where you are only working for money, not for fulfillment.
- A poor artist can fulfill himself, but cannot get enough money.
- There may be a dream job in which you have both a great income and self-realization.
Your work is just one example of the choices you have in your life.
Another example of choice is deciding where to live.
There are both internal and external conditions, which makes this two-dimensional.
- "Life in the swamp hat" means not having any good external conditions or housing.
- "A hut on the sea" (or a little room in Paris) means having external conditions that you want and dream of, but not having very good housing.
- "My castle" means having excellent internal accommodation, what you want, but everything outside is unattractive and you don't want to come out of this castle.
- "Dream house" means having a good place that you like, such as a beautiful house in your dream location.
Domains such as your relationships give you more than one map of choice.
For example,
- "I love"
vs.
- "I'm loved"
it would be great to have both.
Another example is having both brains and beauty in your partner and in yourself. This would be
- "physical qualities"
vs.
- "moral qualities/intelligence"
it would be great to have both.
Another map is
- "I help to develop"
vs.
- "I'm helped to develop"
it would be great to have both.
Another trade-off:
- "Interest and emotions"
vs.
- "Comfort"
it can even be said about love vs. comfortable existence (e.g. around finances or home chores). And it would be great to have both too.
And that was only one area of your life: relationships.
In fact, these elements are very connected, and the scales themselves affect each other.
Let's say you may have a dream house, but not a dream job; or perhaps you can have a dream job, but not a dream house. It'd be great to have both a dream house and a dream job.
Or maybe your success in your career and finances is to the detriment of your physical development. Of course, everyone wants to have both..
If you spend a lot of time staying in shape, you may not have enough time to communicate with your family and children.
Even trivial things like an apartment or a car can often present a choice when you have to choose how to spend money or time as just one of the elements of choice. This issue is often the subject of optimization.
All of these degrees of freedom, all these scales will eventually add up to one single ocean of choice. This is what is depicted in blue. This is a multi-dimensional space, a multi-dimensional puzzle. You are currently in a specific spot within this space. You work somewhere (being unemployed is also a spot), you live somewhere, you have (or don't have) a life partner, you have your current financial situation, and you have or don't have a car, etc.
In this ocean, you are on some island. The question is whether this is a green island, or a dry and rocky one with nothing there.
You can also see the boundaries of your potential vision (red dotted line), looking beyond these boundaries may make little sense. These boundaries can be very wide and of course, this can be very different for different people.
Your current personal architecture is located on your current island. Maybe this is a beautiful palace, or maybe it is a ruin.
Maybe you're creating some kind of value, but don't get pleasure out of it. Maybe you are in an unstable situation, without much control, but you do what you need, and your personal architecture is a half-ruined building overgrown with ivy.
Your challenge is to find those green islands with fertile soil, where you can build a new palace of your life which is your new personal architecture.
This Creative Breakthrough is the ultimate purpose of this section that we're beginning here. Build a new you, reinvent yourself in this multi-dimensional space of choice. The process is to:
- Expand the boundaries of what you see as possible in your life
- Understand all the choices and alternatives in your life
- Make your final choice and firm decision about your new life
- Plan and mobilize resources to build your new personal architecture
- Pragmatically execute the plan and enjoy your new wonderful life
We will talk in more detail about the process of how to do this. The actual process is a bit complicated, so we refer to it as the advanced level, but what you are reading right now is the main foundation of it.