A couple years ago I was meeting Brian Cunningham, an entrepreneur in the Washing DC area and now a good friend. When I first met Brian, he called me into his office and he said, well let me tell you a bit about myself and then you can tell me about yourself. So he proceeded to pull out a single laminated sheet of paper, which had on it in the center the thing that was driving his life and around it all the pieces of his life. So he had pieces for his wife, for his family, for his businesses, for his ventures, for his dreams. And he showed this to me finished in about 10 or 15 minutes. He looked at me and he said, well tell me about yourself. And I was stuck. I didn't know where to start. And when I went a couple days later to try to form my own life ring, I found that I had so many bubbles that it was just utter confusion. Well in the last couple years I've learned a thing or two about how to design a life ring, and that's what I want to discuss today in this video about the life ring exercise. So, the first thing that I want to do is to show an example. In forming a life ring, it's often helpful to find a partner whom you can work with. And I would advise you might set up a coffee, you might set up going hiking, anything to just enjoy some time together. The partner will help you maintain some accuracy in your thoughts and help you think of things about yourself that maybe you haven't. So, in the upper-left hand corner of this life ring, we're going to add their names. Here I'm just going to add Darrell Velegol and I always like to add the date. So with time as you increase the accuracy of your life ring and revise it, you can keep both dates. The date you started on and the current date. Now in the center of the life ring, one single sheet, you're going to have your driving force. So here we're going to put striving force like this. This might be your family, it might be your career, it might be an Olympic sport, it could be anything. Your faith. Within that driving force, I would add a picture that represents that driving force to you. So what is it that captures that driving force in your life? Next step is around it to list the primary categories of your life. So you might have a category for yourself. How are you going to take care of yourself? You might have a category for your family, and maybe even want to separate that into, into your spouse and your, and your family or your partner and their family. You might have one for your venture. [BLANK_AUDIO] In addition you might have another bubble that represents your day job or your career. And another one for community. And maybe some others. If you find yourself getting too many bubbles, you might need to reduce them a bit. Let's say that you have five or six bubbles like this, representing the primary categories of your life. Once you know those bubbles, identify what is the primary outcome that you want in each. So for my venture, for instance, the primary outcome I want is to get across this idea of center, which I'm discussing in this course. So centered to me in order to reach that I'd need a certain strategy. And some of the pieces in that strategy are, I'm going to be teaching a course this fall. It's CHEM-497 called Physics Of Community, it's material that I had been thinking about for almost 25 years. I'm pulling it together into a single coherent course. And I'll be spending a certain number of hours each day developing that course. Another task that I'll have in my strategy is to develop the community I need for, for this center. This Mooc community is one part of that. A very important part of that. Another important part will be attending certain conferences and meeting the people that I need to around the country and around the world who can help me with, with this physics community, which will involve pieces such as game theory and information theory and other ideas along with social experts within individual communities that help people make decisions to reach their dreams. Well, as I go through these, I will have it for each bubble what are the primary, what is my strategy and the primary tasks or experiments I need to run. Then I'm going to choose a WIG, a wildly important goal. Now in this case I've written already about my WIG. It's that my venture with, with center. So this is something that each, in my case, semester or your case you might use a quarter or a semester, you would choose to measure certain things about that semester so that you can advance in it. After you have this entire life ring, this is something I review each day because the wrong voices can start to sneak up on you and tell you that you're not enough. You don't have enough. You're not smart enough. You don't know the right people. No, this life ring is telling you everyday, here's where I'm heading. I see the path forward and I can do it. I can do it. So you're giving yourself a positive voice with this every single day. And, so these are the primary pieces of forming a life ring. I encourage you to give it a shot with a, with a partner. Try it. See if it helps to, helps you to navigate the complexities of life and to focus in on those things that you want to advance. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. Hope you have a great day.
