Are there Formulas for Success?
I read some “life formulas” derived by Naval Ravikant, an American CEO and it got me thinking about many things. Here is how he outlined Happiness in a series of formulas that drill down
Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships
>Health = Exercise + Diet + Sleep
>>Exercise = High intensity resistance training + sports + rest
>>Diet = Natural Foods + Intermittent Fasting + Plants
>>Sleep = No Alarms + 8–9 hours of sleep + circadian rhythms
>Wealth = Income + Wealth * (Return on Investment)
>>Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge
>>>Accountability = Personal Branding + Personal Platform + risk?
>>>Leverage = Capital + People + IP
>>>Specific Knowledge = knowing how to do something society cannot yet easily train other people to do
>>Return on investment = “Buy and Hold” + Valuation + Margin of Safety
I like a lot of what he proposed, it was certainly thought-provoking if nothing else and I like the structure. In my classic form, I will take the work of someone way more renowned than I and add my own spin to it. I would contend that there are a few higher-level formulas and concepts to what has been stated.
Eudaemonia = (Happiness * Acceptance) ^ Metacognition
Eudaemonia was a philosophical term used by the ancient greeks to define happiness in more broad terms. It also happens to be fairly well aligned with Buddhism’s Eightfold Path.
In my eyes, Eudaemonia is on a scale of 0 to 1 where one never ends up at a 0 or a 1 for long unless they are dead. The closer to 1 you are the more you are thriving, the closer to 0 the more you are in survival mode. You could look at it similarly to Maslow’s Pyramid, there are tiers on the way to eudaemonia or as he defined it “Self-Actualization.”
Everything that has been outlined before this sentence (and everything that I write subsequently) is a matter of opinion. It is all registered as thoughts, neurons firing in our brains, for us humans. And Metacognition can be thought of as thinking about thinking, hence the meta in front. Maybe Metacognition’s formula would look something like this:
Metacognition = Create + Observe Creation = Creativity?
Why do I think that metacognition is exponentially correlated to Happiness and Acceptance? I believe it is among other things our grasp of reality. One won’t have the true numbers of how happy or accepting they are if they don’t have a firm grasp on reality. The main ways I’ve found of building metacognition are through creation; creating things yourself, observing the creations of others, and observing your creations along with creation in the cosmic sense. Maybe this means that metacognition is closely correlated to creativity? Leonardo Di Vinci, widely acknowledged as one of the most creative geniuses of all time, was known to be intensely inquisitive by nature as he was making observations about everything he could. He also journaled more than many historical figures, the son of a long lineage of scribes. These activities seem to be in line with how we have defined metacognition here. But I digress… regularly.
I believe that there is a pre-requisite to all of these concepts and it’s named different things but amounts to about the same thing.. Willpower, Discipline, Persistence, etc. Thriving takes a lot of hard work, it’s way easier to give up or be overwhelmed instead of looking adversity in the eye and finding a way to rise above it. Nature could be looked at as leaning heavily towards 0 and humanity’s efforts to approach 1 have been accomplished through our faculties of logic and reasoning. The jury is still out on whether humanity’s efforts to thrive are actually good for Nature and the universe… see Climate Change.
Applying this formula to my life, I would say that my happiness is impacted right now by the amount of sleep that I am getting. My daughter has been recently giving us all a challenge in this domain with her first sleep regression. And sleep seems to be a dependency on many of these other eudaemonia sub-components. But if I find the willpower to get creative there’s a chance I can still thrive in the face of this adversity and the challenges I’ll face as life rolls on. Either that or I’ll eventually die trying 💀