Last updated 2022

Work, health, hobbies, etc… broken down into eight “buckets”

You may be asking… why are you sharing this?

3 reasons:

1. For myself, to have an organized, written out, articulated framework for how I view the world.
2. For my kids, in case I die prematurely, they’ll know more about their dad and how he looked at life. When my dad died, the fragility of life became top of mind.
3. For you. Maybe we met, but didn't get to spend enough time together. This can be a starting point for learning more about one another.

Eight buckets:

Worldview

• We all have some kind of worldview, whether we know it or not. As David Foster Wallace says, “everyone worships, the only choice we get is what to worship”. Here are a few things that shape me.
• Global - Separating out, in a more literal sense, "world" and "view - we're all in this together. We’re all in this together. Just because humans have drawn arbitrary lines across the globe doesn’t mean God sees us parceled off that way. Most of the lines were drawn by colonizers long ago, but we can reimagine, and see ourselves as citizens of the world.
• Privilege - I’m extremely fortunate to be a native english speaker, educated, come from a stable middle-class family, white, American, and feel a responsibility to do something with that privilege (and often still figuring out what executing on that looks like).
• Faith - One of the nice things about faith, and how it differs from science, is that it (at least attempts) to answer some of the hardest and most important questions - questions of meaning, significance, and purpose. Despite its usefulness, at this point at least in urban areas that I tend to be in, it’s becoming quite contrarian and rare to believe in a God. And I expect that trend to only continue. I guess I’m one of the few “survivors” still standing. Having grown up in a Christian home, I’ve continued with the faith but with a few nuances and variants.
  • Branding: Christianity has a profound “branding” problem. Social media has a way of optimizing for high emotions (rage, disgust, anger, etc.). Instead of hearing about the quiet sacrifices, pastoral care leading to healed hearts, deep generosity, etc., we hear about how Christians don’t believe in separation of church and state, they don’t want women to have control of their bodies, shame culture, how greedy they are, or pastors' moral failures. And we have a huge problem for the trajectory of the faith as a result.
  • Defining “Christian”: Is someone from the rural south just as “American” as someone in NYC? Yes? But also no. The US is quite large, with very different people, and Christianity is the same way, with both awesome people and batshit crazy people (many of which you’ve seen on social media). I tend to first think of Jesus “the person”, not of Christians, “the people”. The words and actions of historical Jesus, before the words and actions of the people living today that identify as Christian.
  • Sacrificial: Though I grew up in the more evangelical (now a highly politicized term) flavor of Christianity, I’ve come to a more progressive & sacrificial version. What I mean is “dying to oneself” to benefit others. This unique lens and set of principles has helped form the foundation for how I think about all the other buckets.
  • Logical no brainer (for me): If you're familiar with Pascals wager and it's four quadrants, or the variant Pascals mugging, which says we should focus on improbable cases with implausibly high rewards. From that angle, eternal life being improbable, but about as high of a reward as it gets, therefore we might as well act as if there is a God that is giving meaning to life.

Relationships

• These matter more than many of the other things on this page. What matters at the end of a life? Relationships with people, not things. People matter.
• You are the sum of your closest friends and people you spend time with, so choose wisely (as a side note, a tangent of that concept is “you are what you do”. Want to know someone's values? See how they spend their time, their money, etc.).
• Family: I’m fortunate to be surrounded by my favorite person each day, my wife, and we’ve pumped out some pretty cool kids too. In my experience, most entrepreneurial men like me overweight work and underweight time with their family. I’m trying the reverse (though sometimes fail).

Health