Note. This post was originally published on Jun 13th, 2024 on my old blog  "The Good Life Digest"

When I entered university, I was like a sling-shot going off.

I had spent the first year after high school aimlessly living day after day, repeating the same steps, and procrastinating on deciding what I wanted to do with my future.

I spent the second year waiting to finally start university because I had missed the registration deadline by one fucking day.

So you can imagine that the energy stored up in me needed to go somewhere.

And go somewhere it did: Into my studies.

I finally found some purpose, something meaningful to invest my energy in. But I also noticed that this was more of a rarity, and that most of my peers did not have similar experiences…

The Never Ending Cycle

Most of my peers did not see university as an amazing opportunity. They complained about the workload, how boring the topics were, and how basically everything about studying – except partying – sucked. And there were some good reasons for this.

The first thing that we all noticed when we came to uni was that this was not high school anymore. I still remember our guide for the introduction week making fun about us thinking that a 20 page reading is a lot. Well, he was right.

Most of the people in my year got blindsided by the sheer amount of work that the university required from us. They basically started out one step behind. This made them stressed and over time gave them the feeling that they just cannot keep up. Then the first resit came and kicked off a resit cycle. All not so good things. And it didn’t get better…

Over time, a lot of people became complacent. They accepted – or decided – that uni just sucks. They approached it as something unpleasant to just power through. To hopefully have a bit of fun with their friends afterwards – or worse, drown themselves in TikTok or Netflix. Uni was a burden on life, not a path to the live they truly wanted to live.

The problem with this was the following.

It turned everyday into the same grind. Waking up not wanting to go to the tutorial or lecture. Scraping yourself out of the bed. And going to uni with the expectation that it would suck. It was the first step towards living the same day over and over again. Not only until the rest of their time at uni, but until the end of their lives. After all, do you really think you are going to end up in a place you love by doing something you hate?

The thing is, this was not their fault. Not entirely at least…

Lack of Perspective

You see, the problem with academia (or any institution that you spent most of your time in) is that everyone has more or less the same perspective. This is definitely true for the staff side of things. But it also holds mostly for the student side.

This is not in itself a bad thing, but it comes with some dangers.

The primary danger is that it is very easy to get stuck in a single way of looking at the world. You have your go to approaches to solve the problems that pop up in your life. But once you have exhausted the approaches of your single perspective, you start feeling lost, frustrated, and helpless. You don’t know what else to do.

This is what happened to my peers. When things got tough, they tried to deal with it using the approaches that their current (and very limited) perspective allowed them to. They quickly found that these approaches did not work, and so, they got stuck.

The meta-problem here is that in academia, there is one perspective – that of academia. Most of the people working at uni have never held a full time job outside a university. They have been trained to look at the world through a very particular perspective.

This perspective allows them to be good scientists. But it also interferes with educating you in a way that prepares you for life after uni. After all, if all you know is to live a life inside academia, how can you properly prepare someone for a life outside academia?

So, the people working at uni have a particular way of looking at the world. And because there is only one perspective at uni, your teachers struggle to show you a new perspective. This is, more often than not, because they themselves got stuck within this one perspective and found stability in staying within the academic environment – at least they know this perspective.

But this means that you are stuck with the common perspectives around you:

• “I just want to pass the next exam and get my degree”
• “I HAVE to read this, but its sooo boring”
• “Why are teachers making it so unnecessarily difficult for us?”
• “I don’t need to think about what I will do later, I’ll just enjoy my time before can’t anymore”
• “Being a student is about enjoying life”

All of these perspective are very common at university (especially among students).

They are also incredibly limiting:

• Do you really want to go through the motions without actually learning something?
• Do you really HAVE to learn this? And who’s fault is it that it is boring?
• Do teachers really make it unnecessarily difficult or do they want to see you grow?
• Do you really think you can only enjoy yourself while being at uni? Afterwards it’s just downhill? Is this the life you want to live?
• Really? You can just enjoy life when you are a student?

You see, the problem is that, if you just stick with the perspective that is presented to you at uni, you will most likely not be shaken out of your routine way of looking at things, and you won’t even ask the questions that I asked you above.

But it doesn’t have to be this way…

Uni Is a Socially Accepted License to Experiment with Who You Want to Be

The thing with Uni is, that it really is a gift from society. When you are a student at university, you have a socially accepted license to experiment with who you want to be. (and even if you are starting out in your job, you should treat it the same way)

You can make stupid mistakes without having to deal with major consequences of the real world (like losing a job, flat, house, or something else that is important).

Uni is the time during which you really can stumble around. You can try out who you want to be. What you want to do. And most importantly, what kind of people you want to surround yourself with.

I referenced the idea earlier that its not important to think about what you want to do after university. Nothing could be further from the truth. But it also does not mean that you have to have a 100% clear idea of what you want to do.

What it does require, is that you genuinely ask the question: How do I want my life to look like in a couple of years? And to really mean it…

When I came to Maastricht I really did not know what I wanted to do. My ideas for my future changed with every course we had. But with every course, assignment, and topic, I learned something else: what I did NOT want.

You see, specifying what you don’t want is much easier than specifying what you want. The first requires you to deeply know yourself which, truth be told, you probably don’t. But knowing what you don’t want only requires you to look at your day to day experience and extrapolate from there…

• Do you really want to work with these type of people later on?
• Do you really want to work in this field?
• Do you really want to have your life look like this in the future?

I asked myself these questions, and I quickly learned what I did NOT want from my future. And by taking the opposite of what I did not want, I learned a little bit more about what I want. I want to…

• …live a life full of meaning.
• …do something or contributing to something that I consider valuable to society.
• …work with people whom I respect and who inspire me.
• …have at least some freedom or choice in how I make my living.

These things did not 100% specify what I wanted in my future. They did not give me a 100% worked out step-by-step plan on how to approach uni. But they did give me a series of realisations…

I realised that suddenly, uni made much more sense. It became much more meaningful because I started to set my time as a student in relationship to a future that I genuinely wanted to live in.

I realised that the hurdles of university gave me the opportunity to rise to the challenge, develop my abilities, and put myself in a position where I can genuinely add value to society.

I realised that the difficulty became worthwhile. It still was not pleasant. It still was tough. But at least it did not feel unnecessary anymore.

And I realised that through my studies I could set myself up for a life that I genuinely wanted to live. And more importantly: that being a student was already part of this life.

Notice the contrast. How asking the question of what you want from life changes how you look at life. How it makes life itself more meaningful.

And this is what university is for!

Uni is there to give you the space to ask what you want from life. To set you up with hurdles and opportunities that help you develop into the person who can live this life. You need to realise that this is the primary purpose of university in our day and age. The degree is just the excuse so that you get some time to experiment. But asking the question is what it really is about…

And so, what I want to do for the rest of this newsletter is to outline the framework that I developed based on over half a decade of experience and education about how to ask this question properly. Not only “What do I want from life” but: “How Good Could Life Be?”…

The Process of Living a Meaningful Life

This quote perfectly brings across what I have been writing about so far. Remember how my view on the difficulties of university shifted once I asked these questions about my life? What happened there was that I specified my “Why”. I started to outline some reasons – my reasons – for why I was at university and what I wanted to do with my time as a student. My “Why” allowed me to deal with the “Hows”, first of university, and then of life in general. And it will be the same for you if you genuinely ask what you want from life and how good it could be…

So, what the rest of this newsletter will be is a process of uncovering your “Why” for the context of your life, so that you can deal with the “Hows” that the world requires from you.

With that being said, lets jump into the process.

1 Understand How Your Perceptions Shape Reality

The first thing that you need to understand to make sense of your life and your role within it is to understand how your perception shapes reality.

Understanding this will allow you to learn from your perception and experience. It will allow you to get to know your Self, deeply, and to use the new knowledge that you gained to answer the question of “How Good Could Life Be?”.

There are at least four levels to your perception and how you make sense of the world:

1. Action
2. Incentives
3. Perspective
4. and Mode of Being

Lets discuss them one by one.

1.1 Action - The Output of Perception

At the lowest level of the perceptual hierarchy lies action. It is the final product. Its what you do everyday. Its what you do right now, sitting here, reading this. Its moving your eyes across the page, standing up to grab a glass of water, or pursuing one of your goals.

Action is crucial, because its the process of using your body to interact with the world. Its the step where your perceptions are actualised and acted upon. Its how you make a change in the world.

People often think that their actions are separate from their thoughts and perceptions. Or they think that they are in full alignment with one another. Non of this is true.

Rather, action is the outcome of prioritisation process that starts at the top of your perceptual hierarchy. It is the necessity that comes from being a limited being – from having to make choices. And because of that, it is the fundamental expression of who you are.

I don’t care what you say you find important. Your actions are the “vote” that really shows what is important to you.

This is the first realisation that you need to have: Your action can tell you something about what is important to you.

You might say that your studies, a friend, or your health are important to you. But how do you act? Do your action reflect the value that you claim you find important?

For instance, I might say that I find studying important. But then I procrastinate and wait until the very last moment to be driven to studying not because I want to, but because I have to. These are not the same. So what’s going on here?

1.2 Incentives & Interpretations - The Shapers of Action

Your actions are shaped by the incentives within and your interpretation of the current environment, or context.

Here you can get the first glimpse of why perception and action are part of the same process.

Take the example from earlier. You say you want to study. That studying is important to you.

But when it comes to sitting down, you procrastinate and do something else – doing your laundry, meeting with friends, or doom scrolling on TikTok. It doesn’t matter. The point is that you don’t do what you said is important to you? Why?

One option is that studying actually is not important to you. This might well be the case, but another thing is more likely:

a) you haven’t made clear to yourself why and how important studying is to you and b) the value of studying is constantly overshadowed by other incentives (e.g., doing your laundry, meeting with friends, or doom scrolling on TikTok).

The environment is full of cues that want to be interpreted. Everything is information. And your brain is an information processor. It constantly looks at new information (the heap of cloth in the corner, the message from your friend, or the phone in your pocket).

You are constantly labelling the things that happen around you as either positive, irrelevant, or negative to one or multiple of your goals - the things that you value and are important to you.

But the cues that the environment tries to give to you about how you should act to actualise your values are overshadowed by all the noise.

Noise are all the things in the environment that seem relevant in the moment (cloth, message, phone, etc.) but are not as relevant as your goals and dreams in the long run.

How can you make sense of what you should do when you are pulled in 50 different directions? No wonder you procrastinate.

So what can you do about it?

1.3 Values and Goals - Giving Yourself Signal In All The Noise

You can cut through the noise by specifying your goals and making them explicit to yourself.

Setting goals is almost a cliche at this point. But this is mainly due to two reasons:

1. Our environments are littered with things that try to capture our attention and distract us from the things that are genuinely important to us and
2. because people don’t understand the depths of what they are actually doing when they set a goal.

What you do when you set a goal is to set out on a journey through what I call the Value Landscape.

Let me explain…

Evolution works by natural selection.

How this is usually interpreted is that specific adaptations and behaviours are selected for. If they help the organism’s offspring to survive, they are selected. If not, they will get lost. But this misses a crucial point.

What evolution does is that different potential futures select for different outcomes. Imagine you are a hunter gatherer and you have just spotted a deer - or a bush of berries depending on your diet. Suddenly, you hear a rustle in the bush next to you. You have two options…

1. You continue hunting the deer (or berries) or…
2. run for your life (even if there might not be a tiger in the bush).

What happens here is not only that the behaviour of running away is selected for. What happens is that different futures select for YOU. Some of those futures VALUE you being alive. The others VALUE you being dead.

The key takeaway here is that different futures VALUE different things.

But why is this relevant?

Because here is what humans did: we flipped evolution on its head.

Somehow, we humans have developed the ability to look far enough into the future and stop it from doing the selection. Instead, we took over. And we started to do the selection ourselves. We started selecting the futures THAT WE VALUED.

We are the only animal that has a real say in the game. We can select against futures that want us dead (or unhappy and miserable) and select for futures in which we are alive (and full of joy and meaning).

And this is what you are doing when you set goals! When you sit down to set a goal, you make a hypothesis about what futures you want to select for and which ones not. You clarify to yourself what you value and what not. And you make it easier for yourself to interpret the cues the environment throws at you.

Suddenly, you are not pulled in 50 directions anymore, because you know what cues in the environment are signals towards a future in which you really want to live, and what signals are just noise and distraction.

This is a complicated process. But before I give you some more specific tips on how to do that, lets have a look at the highest level of your perceptual hierarchy…

1.4 Your Mode of Being – The Top of Your Hierarchy of Perception

At the highest level of the hierarchy of perception lies your mode of being. The way you are oriented in the world. It is the most fundamental aspect of your Being. And has been described in a lot of different ways:

• The Mode of Having or Being – Erich Fromm
• The modes of the left and right hemisphere – Iain McGilchrist
• The Task Positive Network (TPN) and Default Mode Network (DMN) – Dan Koe (based on a lot of neuroscientific work)
• The realm of the profane and the realm of the sacred – Emile Durkheim
• The human world and Phantasia – The Never Ending Story by Michael Ende

These distinctions all get at the same thing. And its probably best expressed in the conceptualisation by Erich Fromm:

You can go through the world constantly thinking about what you could have, who you could sleep with, and how happy you could be. This is the mode of ‘Having’, the left hemisphere, your TPN, the realm of the profane, or simply, our currently normal way of being in the human world.

On the other hand lies the the mode of Being. This is a frame that is open, not goal-directed. It simply takes things for what they are. It is sometimes called mindfulness, but also has been described as the right hemisphere’s mode of being, the DMN, being in the realm of the sacred, or the world of Phantasia.

The thing with these is that one is not better than the other. But they have to be in the right relationship to each other.

Iain McGilchrist describes this over 1300+ pages in his book ‘The Matter With Things’. Essentially, what you want is that your right hemisphere is in charge, but can call on the left hemisphere when its serving you.

Think back to the deer-tiger example. You (or your right hemisphere) spotted the deer. Your RH decides to give control to the LH, because its strong suite is pursuit and focus. But suddenly the RH (which really is primarily responsible for shifting attention) hears the rustle from the tiger in the bushes…

In one scenario, the LH gives back control to the RH so that you can investigate the rustle and see things for what they are.

In the other scenario, the LH becomes a tyrant and doesn’t give back to control. It just really wants to get the delicious deer. You know where this is leading…

The point is that goal pursuit is really important and we cannot do without it. As I said above, goals help us to make sense of the cues of the environment and cut through the noise. But at the same time, they flavour our interpretation of these cues.

This in itself is not good or bad, but sometimes we need to simply take a step back and and try to see things for what they are, and remove the bias of our perception as much as possible.

This is especially relevant when you start creating your Minimal Viable Vision for the future…

2 Develop a Minimal Viable Vision for the Future

Now its finally time to do something practical.

I first got this idea of creating a Vision for your future by Jordan Peterson. Later, I listened to Dan Koe, who elaborated on this with his idea of the Minimum Viable Vision (MVV).

The idea is simple. Outline how you would like your life to look like in 3-5 years time.

• How does your average day look like?
• Who do you spend your time with?
• How does your family life look like?
• Are you in a relationship? With whom?
• What do you do career wise? Are you in education or the workplace? What would you like to work?
• What are your hobbies?
• How healthy are you?
• etc.

The exact questions are less important than how detailed you write about them!

One objection that we got when we implemented an exercise that does this with students in a curriculum here at UM was that “this is basically just fantasising”.

Let me tell you: it is not!

But I get what this person meant.

Some people take this to go completely unrealistic. They think about having a Yacht and making millions if not billions a couple of years out of university. They don’t dream. They are delusional!

What I want you to do when you ask yourself about how you would like your future to look like is to dream. To think about what you think is possible. And to allow yourself to step outside the comfort zone.

There is this edge where you are doubtful whether what you wish for is possible. You have conflicting feelings about it.

On the one hand, you feel that it could be possible. And this thought gets you excited.

On the other hand you are a bit doubtful about whether it is actually possible.

When you feel both these things simultaneously, you know that you are at the right level with your dream. Lean into this feeling (I know it feels odd and uncomfortable at first). Flesh out this specific part of your ideal future even more. This helps you to better cut through the noise.

If you want to (and I highly recommend this) you can complement your MVV by outlining your personal hell. This is basically the opposite of you MVV. Its how you don’t want your life to look like in 3-5 years time.

In fact, I would encourage you to start with this, and to start small.

Carl Jung once said:

What he meant was this: People don’t find joy and happiness in their lives because they want everything immediately and right now, in the best possible version that exists. These are the people who are delusional. Don’t be one of them. Start small.

In the context of your personal hell, this means looking at the right now. Not in the future. Not in the past. That is too big. Start in the now.

• What do you currently dislike in your day-to-day life?
• Over which of those things do you think you have at least a little bit of control (think twice about this. You have at least some control over almost everything to some degree, even if its just your reaction to the thing).
• Which of these things are you willing to fix?

By engaging in this process and starting to remove things that you personally dislike about your life, you give yourself proof that you are someone who can take control over their lives.

This is also why it is important to start small. Start with tiny things that annoy you.

For example: I hate having to clean up dishes or prepare breakfast just before going to bed. So, I developed the habit of preparing my breakfast for the next day immediately when coming home from work.

This does not sound special, but if you do this with 10 things, your life will already look completely different.

And to help you achieve this, I will now outline the step-by-step process that you can go through to turn your life – over time – into the best possible version that you can imagine…

3 Hypothesise, Experience, Evaluate & Educate, 🔁

So, here we finally are. The practicalities. Let get into it.

As I mentioned above, this is not a one-step fix. There is no such thing. People who say there is are lying.

But this is much more exciting. Its a way of being in the world that is aimed at making your life and the lives of the people around you as good as they can possibly be. Its a way of aiming at making the world a better place. It is a life lived by asking the question “How Good Could Life Be?”

Its a process of 3 steps:

1. Hypothesise
2. Experience
3. Evaluate & Educate

• Repeat 🔁

3.1 Hypothesising

You start by hypothesising about what could make your life better.

Remember to start small.

For example, you can ask yourself what would make tomorrow better than today? This can be loads of things:

• not drinking coffee too late because it interferes with sleep
• not looking at your phone while studying so that you get everything done in time and can spend your time on things that you actually want to do
• not drinking as much
• etc.

There is no right or wrong. There is just you asking the question of what would make tomorrow better than today (later on you can expand this by asking what would make next week/month/quarter/year/etc. better. But remember to start small and work yourself up).

Once you have an answer, brainstorm about what you could do and would do to actually make this happen.

This could be:

• Setting a strict limit on your coffee consumption (mine is no coffee after 12pm).
• Putting your phone in a different room while studying.
• Limiting the number of times you go out in a month.

Again: there is no right or wrong. There is only what works for you and what makes your life better. That’s why we have the next step.

To truly figure out what works and doesn’t in the context of our lives, we need to…

3.2 Experience

In the previous step you made a plan for what might make tomorrow better.

Now tomorrow rolled around and you tried to implement your plan on making it better than yesterday.

While you (try to) do this, pay attention to how you feel.

• Did you actually do what you said you would do?
• If yes, how did it make you feel?
• If no, why not? What interfered with it?

Just pay attention to what makes your day better according to your own definition of better. If it makes you genuinely feel better in the long run its good. If you thought it makes you feel better but it actually makes you feel worse, its bad.

Your feelings and experience come first! They are what determines right or wrong when it comes to making your life better.

3.3 Evaluate & Educate

Now that you made your experience, it is time to evaluate it.

The goal here is simple. To understand what worked or not.

In the case that something worked you can ask yourself how you can implement it sustainably in your life. Chances are that once you licked blood, you want more. This is understandable and even laudable, but it has the danger of biting off more than you can chew. Think about how you can implement it sustainable and slowly but surely make it a fixed part of who you are.

In case your experiment did not work out, it is good to come to an understanding of why not. This can already inform a new hypothesis.

Maybe what you want to remove from your life does not actually make it better. Or your approach simply did not work.

When your experiment failed it is important to figure out what you have to learn to increase the chance that your experiment will be successful in the next run.

This could be a number of things:

• New ideas (e.g., broadening your horizon)
• A skill
• A tool that you need to acquire or learn to use (which is also a skill)
• etc.

Once you know what you need to learn, go learn it. Then go into the next round of experimentation, by forming a new or modified hypothesis, testing it through experience, evaluating your experience, and educating yourself further.

This way, step-by-step and across time, you will develop yourself as a human being. You will grow into the person that you want to be. And you will be able to not only make your own life better, but also that of the people around you: your family, friends, community, and maybe even your whole country or even the entire world.

The answer to the question of “How Good Could Life Be” is not an obvious one. So go out there and start exploring!

Next Steps

So what to do next?

Pretty simple, I have given you everything you need to get started:

1. Remember how the different levels of your perception influence how you see the world. Learn to be in the right mode of being at the right time, so that you can set appropriate goals that are in line with your values, which help you to cut through the noisy cues in the environment and focus on what really matter, so that you can act in full alignment with who you want to be as a human being.
2. Develop your Minimal Viable Vision. In whatever way works for you. Write, paint, make a powerpoint presentation, a mood board. It does not matter. Do what works for you.
3. Continually Hypothesise, Experience, Evaluate & Educate to turn your life, step by step, into the life that you want to live.
4. Live your life asking the question “How Good Could Life Be?”

This is not a sequence. All of those influence each other. Remember that this is a process. Start small (ideally with number 3 on the list above). This will automatically help you to get to know yourself, what mode of being you are in, and what you actually do and don’t want from your future. Then, just continue to strive upwards to make your life and the lives of the people around you as good as possible.

Remember that this is why you are at university and that it’s your job as a human being to continue doing this as long as you can…

Now go and do!

All the best and much success with it,
Niklas