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Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays, where 0 is "not at all satisfied", and 10 is "completely satisfied"?
Take a moment to estimate where you are right now.
What if, within the next year, you could increase that number by one point? How would life feel? What would have to change? What would improve if you treated your mind and body like a high-performance athlete?
TL;DR: We are creating a weekly, evidence-based newsletter to help you get there. Subscribe here.
You probably already have your favourite self-help influencers, coaches, and projects. There are millions of hours of content out there. We don't want to be yet another one of these.
Instead, we aim to build an evidence-based aggregation of the "80/20" of what actually works. Across all areas of life.
A few people tried this before within EA. Examples we are aware of are, for example, the open principles project, effective self-help, good enough, upgradable, and better.so. What makes this different?
We want a framework that is complete without being overwhelming. We think it's the "Wheel of Life" - a common tool from coaching.
That means we will cover ten areas of life, in order: Body, Mind, Home, Money, Friends, Love, Family, Work, Play, Meaning. Each of these areas will get five principles, for a total of fifty principles.
This will develop as we go, but to test the ideas, we posted the initial list on Reddit and reached 130k people, with over 400 upvotes. People commented that they printed the list and put it on their fridge.
We then turned this initial list into a website (https://euzoia.org) where content will be updated as we go. For example, we introduced a "Family" category after some feedback that two guys in our early 30s probably don't have much experience there, but this does take up a large part of many people's lives. We'd love more feedback and help like this in our community, more on that later.
This isn't a "from EAs for EAs" project. This is a project that we hope can help a much broader group of people live better lives. That means: We will avoid jargon and complex language as much as possible, we want to build a community that values research but won't fight about the last decimal in the weighted factor model, and we want to create content in channels that reach audiences beyond this community.
A list of 50 principles can be overwhelming and hard to act on. Luckily, the year has about 52 weeks, making this the perfect fit for a weekly content calendar. Each week, we will deep dive into one of the principles and create a newsletter, a podcast and probably other content from it.
Not sure about you, but we know a few people who started a podcast or newsletter just to drop it again after one month. We ran a few tests to make sure we can execute on this with maximally one day a week next to our main hustles.
We believe that this constraint is actually great because it forces us to stick to the 80/20 idea and embrace the community we want to build, because help and input from the community will allow the content to become 10x better in a way that we don't have the capacity for ourselves.
We aim for the principles to be pretty timeless. Unless somebody invents a neurostimulation device that puts you into hedonic bliss without side effects, the things that actually work don't change that much.
This means that we can iterate on the principles and the advice every year. New sleep research? Feedback from the community on their best ways to make friends? A new app to be more productive? We'll include it in next year's iteration of the corresponding principle.
This is not ‘change your life every week.’ It is a weekly prompt to reflect, try one small change, and move on. It's an invitation to reflect on that area that week. Make a small change, maybe. It'll come back again next year. Pick your battles.
We are fully aware that the content is the easy part, and behaviour change is the hard part. We have some ideas on how to help with behaviour change, but this is for sure the biggest question on whether or not this project can have a meaningful impact.
One thing that could work for behaviour change is accountability and a community with shared values. That's why we will start one:
We are starting this with the two of us, but we would love for this to become a community project.
We are both two white guys without children, whereas we would love for Euzoia to become a project that speaks to many people. This can only work if we speak with many voices.
Every week, we will start a channel with the topic for next week, and we'd love to hear in there, people's experience with the topic - what worked and didn't work for them - and then feature some of those stories, with consent, of course, in the newsletter.
Behaviour change is hard, but it gets easier when sharing your struggles and working together to stay accountable, share wins, and encourage each other. After each newsletter is published, we hope to use that channel to share experiences working with the ideas, and maybe already share new ideas for next year's iteration.
Yes, we know, Discord. Many of you probably don't use it yet and would prefer Slack. The thing is: We want Euzoia to be free, easy, and foster discussions.
Discord is free. Discord allows for discussion forums for each of the principles. And Discord makes it super easy to record podcasts. Give it a try, we promise you'll love it after the first few minutes.
Feedback on writing & presentation: If I didn't know that the authors have been posting here on the forum for a while and one is a GWWC pledger, I'd've guessed this was spam.