I have spent much of my life vacationing in the deepest recesses of the accessible regions of my mind; it’s where I feel most at home and find the most joy. It is the source of my insights, poetry and prose. Tossing ideas and analysing then from a multitude of angles is indeed a pastime and at times a source of solace.
Nevertheless, an endlessly inquisitive mind can have its downsides: for one, ‘over-thinkers’ - as my wife calls us - are prone to ‘thinking too much’ at the expense of taking necessary action, a situation commonly referred to as ‘analysis paralysis.’
My fascination with systems has led me to consider life as a government and my own life has been optimised by deconstructing its activities into three primary ‘arenas’:
1. The central government or headquarters: where judgement-calls and decisions are made.
2. The legislative-judicial branch: where thoughts are refined and policies clarified
3. The executive branch: where implementation is agreed upon and conducted.
The headquarters must be in order because it is from it’s instructions that dreams are crystallised and visions eventually realised. ‘Getting one’s house in order’ is therefore first on the list of life administration tasks.
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible. -- TH Lawrence
The legislative-judicial branch is where personal purpose and meaning are incorporated into your life. What is your ‘why’? Why are you on this Earth? What values do you live by? This branch of life is where the Constitution by which you govern your personal affairs is formulated, its vital importance being underscored in Socrates’s famous statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
In the executive branch, plans and optimal systems for implementation are devised, stress-tested and refined; "applied conceptualization" in short. This is the region of Robert Sternberg’s ‘practical intelligence’ and its activity separates the mere dreamer from the doer.
The three arenas are interrelated and engineering them work to work in harmony leads to the situation beautifully and aptly described by TH Lawrence:
“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”
As my thinking evolves, so too will this analogy of life’s most meaningful activities. With practice, you’ll become increasingly proficient at governing your life in a structured and well-ordered manner. And instead of an MBA, you’ll be well on your way to securing your MLA (Masters in Life Administration), the competencies of which we all must sooner or later acquire, should a fully-lived existence be one of our objectives.
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