The “Life - Strategy” Thematic Dialogue

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Life Development
Life Development

Oliver Ding

This page is used for curating ideas about Life Development. I use the following keywords:

Adult Development

Career / Work

Life / The Meaning of Life

Freedom / Happiness

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Wikipedia > Adult Development

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_development⁠

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Other Wikipedia items:

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Career⁠

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Work (human activity)⁠

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Meaning of Life

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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/⁠

Other items

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Life⁠

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Philosophical Approaches to Work and Labor⁠

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Ancient Theories of Freedom and Determinism⁠

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Happiness⁠

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“Development” - 1507 documents found⁠

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“Life” - 1660 documents found⁠

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Quora

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https://www.quora.com/search?q=life⁠

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Google Images / Diagrams

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Link⁠

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Google Scholar > Life Course

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Link⁠

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The Culture Demands of Our Minds

Robert Kegan (1994)

In 1994, the developmental psychologist Robert Kegan published a book titled

In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life⁠

. In Over Our Heads focuses on the fit or lack of fit between what the culture demands of our minds and our mental capacity to meet these demands. According to Robert Kegan,

The psychological phenomenon is the evolution of consciousness, the personal unfolding of ways of organizing experience that are not simply replaced as we grow but subsumed into more complex systems of mind…The cultural phenomenon is the ‘hidden curriculum,’ the idea that to the list of artifacts and arrangements a culture creates and the social sciences study we should add the claims or demands the culture makes on the minds of its constituents. (1994, p.9)

Kegan’s “psychological — cultural” dialogue approach is the seed of my ideas about three types of freedoms. See the diagram below.

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I developed the above diagram for the Life Discovery Toolkit on Jan 23, 2022. I use three dimensions of the concept of “Life” to develop the above model. There are at least three ways to understand the concept of “Life”.

Life as Organism: this is the perspective of biological theories.

Life as Practice: this is the perspective of social theories.

Life as Ideal Type: this is the perspective of humanities.

These three perspectives can be called Biological Life, Sociocultural Life, and Spiritual Life. I also defined three types of Freedom.

Why did I choose “Freedom” as a core concept for this idea? On Jan 1, 2022, I designed

the Strategist’s Mandala⁠

and used “Degrees of Freedom” as its primary theme. I learned the term from the Japanese strategy consultant

Kenichi Ohmae’s writings⁠

. However, “Degrees of Freedom” is a traditional term of strategic thinking in the context of business competitions. For individual life development, I don’t consider competition as the first thing.

Material Freedom: Independence of both Sociocultural Life and Biological Life.

Mental Freedom: Independence of both Spiritual Life and Biological Life.

Cultural Freedom: Independence of Sociocultural Life and Spiritual Life.

This model leads to a challenge: What’s Freedom? My rough answer is the following diagram. I use a simple formula to define “Freedom”. The pair of concepts of “Supply — Demand” is inspired by economics.

It’s clear that I want to expand the “psychological — cultural” dialogue to the “psychological — biological” dialogue and the “cultural — biological” dialogue.

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The above diagram is my intuitive idea about the model which leads to a slogan: Being by Doing.

It looks like this is a dialogue between Humanistic Psychology and Activity Theory.

Activity Theory: Doing means delivering “Value” as Offers to others.

Humanistic Psychology: Being means maintaining “Equilibrium” as Order for self.

If a person wants to offer values to satisfy others’ demands, he or she should keep a good order for internal equilibrium in order to maintain the supply system.

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Life Discovery: The “Being by Doing” Principle

The Starting Point of the Life Discovery Toolkit

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https://medium.com/call4/being-by-doing-4eb1fda4b926?sk=28c6771a81caf20fc2d9dea71ee50454⁠

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