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10 Most Life-Changing Ideas I’ve Discovered after 500+ Posts

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After 500+ posts on this site (including 100+ book summaries and 100+ newsletters), it’s time to curate a top-10 list of the most life-changing ideas I’ve discovered to date.

Whether you’re new to Sloww or have been following for years, this is a great place to jump in.

Happy learning and living!

Post Contents: Click a link to jump to a section below

📚 Sloww Stage Support:

🌎 Sloww Stage 1:

🧭 Sloww Stage 2:

🧠 Sloww Stage 3:

☯️ Sloww Stage 4:

Sloww Awaken & Actualize the Art of Living

10 Most Life-Changing Ideas I’ve Discovered after 500+ Posts

📚 Sloww Stage Support

This idea supports all following stages.

1. Lifelong Learning & Synthesizing Minds

This idea goes by many names: lifelong learning, adult learning, transformative learning, synthesizing, interdisciplinary thinking, etc. While those concepts do have nuanced definitions, we can also think about them as a single thing: never-ending learning that’s building networked knowledge. This topic is extra impactful to me because I now understand that it’s how I seem to be wired and how I can give myself to the world (it’s my purpose). It’s been such a big realization that it’s even the topic of my first course!

Supporting Posts:

🌎 Sloww Stage 1

The next two ideas are related to: Sloww Stage 1: How do I design a lighter life?

2. Slow & Simple Living

The discovery of the concepts of slow living, simple living, voluntary simplicity, and downshifting completely rocked my worldview. Prior to this discovery, I had no idea there were people out there intentionally choosing slower and simpler lives. These ideas I discovered in late 2015 and early 2016 planted the seed for all things Sloww.

Supporting Posts on Busyness:

Supporting Posts on Slow Living:

Supporting Posts on Simple Living:

3. Lifestyle Design

I’ve realized that much of intentional living comes down to lifestyle design. And, when it comes to lifestyle design, nothing has been more impactful for me than Jacob Lund Fisker’s work on Early Retirement Extreme. He’s applied systems thinking to lifestyle design, and it brilliantly covers all aspects of life. The most impactful idea I’ve taken from him is to design a “web of goals.” This concept helps you set up your life in a way where you have mutually-reinforcing positive goals and byproducts (maximizing synergy) while also reducing/eliminating negative byproducts (minimizing waste). The “web” focuses on the connections between your lifestyle choices and includes everything from health to wealth to wisdom. An example would be a web where you live within walking/biking distance of work and the grocery store—your commute doubles as your daily exercise (maximizing synergy) while eliminating the need for a car and saving money (minimizing waste). The “web of goals” idea is presented in much more detail in the 🔒Early Retirement Extreme Synthesis.

Supporting Posts on Lifestyle Design:

Supporting Posts on FIRE/ERE:

Supporting Posts on Money:

🧭 Sloww Stage 2

The next two ideas are related to: Sloww Stage 2: How do I find higher purpose?

4. The Lottery of Birth

This idea is literally something that I now think about daily and has positively altered my worldview and how I interact with others in the world. If I could put anything on a billboard, this may be it. And, the best part is that the lottery of birth requires no science or spirituality to understand. What is the lottery of birth? It’s a reminder that you did not choose: to exist, your nature, your nurture, the location you were born into, the time you were born into, and so much more. No one did! And all of those shape you and your life path—just like they shape every other human. It may be one of the most simple, yet most profound, realizations any human can have to lead to compassion for all. Pair it with the 🔒“veil of ignorance” thought experiment.

Supporting Posts:

5. Ikigai Life Purpose

Ikigai was a concept I discovered either during my existential crisis in 2015 or in 2016 when I was discovering my purpose. But, my discovery of the viral 4-circle diagram led me down a path to uncover that it’s not really ikigai. Eventually, I put 5+ years of research on the subject into an eBook: Ikigai 2.0: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Finding Life Purpose & Making Money Meaningfully (+ Bonus Workbook). This is the process I used to find my own purpose, and it’s still the approach I recommend to everyone who asks me the best way to find purpose. In my mind, you will not find anything more comprehensive (yet concise) than Ikigai 2.0.

Supporting Posts on Ikigai:

Supporting Posts on Purpose:

Supporting Posts on Monetizing Purpose:

🧠 Sloww Stage 3

The next three ideas are related to: Sloww Stage 3: How do I master the mind?

6. Mental Models & Memetic Immunity

Mental models seem to get a bad rap from a lot of people. It seems to be because many think learning about mental models doesn’t equate to applying them. That’s true. But, at the same time, no awareness of something is a guarantee that it will not be applied. So, I fully believe in being aware of all these concepts, learning about them effectively through tactics like spaced repetition and interleaving, and integrating and embodying them through consistent practice in your day-to-day life. To help with this, I launched Mini Mind.

Supporting Posts:

7. The Meta-Crisis

This is the newest idea on the list because it’s a concept that’s just now becoming self-aware. There are several ways to think about the “meta-crisis.” The simplest way is that meta often means “x about x” or “x of x” (e.g. metacognition = cognition about/of cognition). Therefore, meta-crisis would mean a crisis about/of crises. When you consider all of the interconnected crises humanity faces today, that phenomenon is the meta-crisis. Keep an eye on this evolving and emerging space. This idea is so big that I even created a side project about it: MetaCrisis.org.

Supporting Posts:

8. Human Development

The concept of human development (or psychological development, vertical development, stage theories, etc) has completely transformed how I view myself, others, and humanity as a whole. Of all the theories I’ve seen, Susanne Cook-Greuter’s work on Ego Development Theory has resonated the most. Why? Because I didn’t discover it until after I had already gone through several of the stages, and it was incredible how closely my own experience matched the stage descriptions. Stage theories have their fair share of critics out there, but I’ve found learning about them to absolutely be a net positive in my life.

Supporting Posts on Brain Hemispheres:

Supporting Posts on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

Supporting Posts on Ego Development Theory, Integral Theory, & More:

☯️ Sloww Stage 4

The final two ideas are related to: Sloww Stage 4: How do I embody wisdom?

9. Nonduality

It’s only fitting that we start to wrap up this list with a concept that can hardly be described as a concept. While appreciating the mind, we simultaneously need to realize what’s beyond mind. The books and teachers below may just be “fingers pointing at the moon,” but they seem to be pretty good guides.

Supporting Posts on Science + Spirituality:

Supporting Posts on Tao & Zen:

Supporting Posts on Nonduality:

10. Free Will

Free will could technically fall into Sloww Stage 3, but it’s such a polarizing topic that I feel like one needs to go through everything else on this list to truly get these posts.

Supporting Posts:

What Sloww concepts have been life-changing ideas for you so far? Please let me know in the comments!

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