Congratulations! You’re sufficiently codependent, inauthentic, pathetic, and agency-less that you’ve been given the opportunity to do the two deepest weeks of introspection and inner work of your entire MRP journey.  If you don’t, you should just quit, because nothing is ever going to change unless you change it.  

Raw material - 

Get a legal pad and a pen. 

Sit down, and at the top of each page, one at a time, write the following - 

  1. What can I control?
  2. What am I responsible for? 
  3. What am I not responsible for? 
  4. What am I going to start being responsible for?  
  5. What do I want to achieve?
  6. What am I afraid of?
  7. What will I not tolerate?  
  8. What makes sense to me?
  9. Where am I lying to myself?  (if you can fill a page with honest introspection on this, you get a gold star.  Nothing will speed up your progress more than this)
  10. In what ways am I sabotaging my own success?  
  11. What do I want to stop doing?
  12. Where do I feel most aligned/congruent? 
  13. Which do I do more of? Reacting or Responding?  
  14. What do I want my life to look like? (Rule: you cannot make anybody else start doing anything they aren’t already doing)
  15. What emotions that I am not feeling now, would I like to feel in the future?  

Then, you’re going to write as many bullet points under each one as you can.  Be thorough.  This is about defining your vision, and creating an ideal personal reality for yourself to work toward, and to define at least a preliminary plan for getting there.  

I did this over a number of days, having written out all the prompts first, and then reading through them periodically, writing a few things on a given prompt, and working on this 20’ at a time.  You’ve got two weeks, might as well use them.  

You now have the raw material of your vision on paper, that you can refer back to and add to.  It’s time to refine and distill this.  

Vision - 

Top of page - 

  1. My Priorities

From your achievements, responsibilities, things you can control, things you won’t tolerate, things you want to stop doing, things you want to become, and ways you can stop lying to yourself, and everything else you brainstormed, you’re going to define your list of priorities.  Write them as a list first, then go back and order them later.  

Up next, you get to use your brain!  This is the hard part.  Write this at the top of 3 pages in a row.

  1. What is my vision?  

Considering your priorities, and everything you wrote in the lists above, you’re going to answer that question once.  Read over your work.  

Remove the bullshit, refine the intentions, distill each sentence to its essence, and answer it again.  Read that over.  

Refine it, combine similar sentences and ideas, simplify wherever you can, and answer it a third time.  

The goal is to create personally relevant, broadly-applicable, mental model-like maxims.  Read what you’ve written, and repeat the process again if you feel necessary.  I found utility in doing it again days later, once I’d lived with it for a bit.  The goal is for you to have a standard for yourself, an ideal future state, that you can use as a guiding principle during your journey through life.  In literally any situation, you need to be able to ask yourself “does this course of action align with my vision?” and have a useful answer.  The goal is to define a new set of principles to live by.  Replace the words ‘my vision’ with ‘my higher self,’ or ‘my idea of godliness’ if you’re still somebody who gets caught up in the specifics of semantics.  Bitch.  

Women -

Here’s the only time you get to talk about other people during this whole exercise (if you did already, you’re a retard, and should start over) - 

  1. In what ways does an ideal woman/do ideal women fit into this vision?

This intends to create a clear vision for how women fit in your life, a standard you can use to define the deficiencies in your current situation, an practical understanding of the things you control regarding this, and to make a plan for the future you want.  Do yourself a favor, and filter every step through the following lens.

  1. 'Does this add to/enable/enhance my vision, or does this validate me and make me feel good?’  If it’s the second one, don’t be retarded, you don’t need anyone’s validation.  Do not lie to yourself here. Nothing will hold you back more.

The Plan -

Last is your plan step.  

  1. What actions would make my life look more like the one I want it to look like? or What actions align with my vision?  

This is another way of arriving at the MAP in Athol Kay’s sidebar books.  This is your Male Action Plan to achieve your vision.  Write as many real, immediately actionable steps as you can.  Things you can do today, tomorrow, next week, or next month.  No further out than that.  You will be re-evaluating this as often as you want, so focus on the things you can do in the now.  Action is the only way anything actually changes.  

So E-T, what’s the point of this?  

Most people cannot think.  Chances are good you can’t think in the way you need to for this process.  It’s calorically expensive to think, so most of us are out of practice, since our brains are super good at wiring themselves to accomplish all our daily tasks with the least possible cognition.  

It’s not a problem if you cannot introspect effectively inside your head, you just have to start using tools to help you think, until you have enough practice that you can start doing it on the fly.  Thinking is having an idea, interacting with it to create a new idea that has progressed beyond the limits or intention of the first, and then repeating that cycle.  Since most people are so on autopilot that they have forgotten how to do this inside their head, the solution is to use the medium of journaling. An added plus is that it establishes stronger memories of the subject material than simply thinking or talking does.  This is one reason why OYS works so well.  It forces a lot of men, who have never engaged in complex thought about their situation and mental models, to interact with their own ideas through the medium of text.  Writing and thinking are the same.  

Once you have a Vision and a Plan, it’s a simple matter of not being a complacent, unreliable pussy, and actually doing the work to get where you want to go, and not be afraid of making difficult decisions.  

Go journal.  See you in two weeks.  And go fucking lift for fuck’s sake.