The Epitaph Exercise
This is a powerful exercise to gain clarity on your life purpose.
What do you want to have written on your tombstone?
Express it as identities.
Example (my epitaph):
Here lies Dani, the Ever-Playful.
(The name of my Superhero identity)
Life-Artist
(How I choose to engage with life)
Master Teacher
(What I want to playfully master over a lifetime)
Use your epitaph as a guiding star throughout your life and as a mantra to recover balance.
Project Transformational Vocabulary
Fragments from imaginary dialogues
“Another project?“
“This is an organic evolution of my linguistics project [<link; shot read].“
“What’s it about?“
“I know the concept of transformational vocabulary from Tony Robbins.
The words we attach to our experience become our experience. Words have a biochemical effect on the body. (Tony Robbins)
You can change your emotional state through the language you use to describe your experience. Tony calls this type of language, transformational vocabulary.
Language is a tool. However, Tony’s idea is but one application of it. Jason Silva shares a mind-blowing perspective:
The words you use to map reality affect your experience of reality. Words do not just describe; words are generative.
Language is a metaphysical tool. […] We create and perceive our world through language. We think reality into existence through linguistic construction in real-time.
I’m fascinated by the magical technology we call ‘language’. I see language and meaning as the ultimate playground. I’m especially interested in practical ways of using language for personal transformation and for shaping your subjective reality – I call this process, reality painting.
I see concepts as the (modular) building blocks of meaning. In playing with concepts, we’re playing with meaning in the same way a child is playing with Legos.
We all have an internal concept library we unconsciously use to construct meaning in real-time. The library was unconsciously (and haphazardly) ‘compiled’ over the course of our life. I want to make this process conscious and deliberate.
I’ve started compiling a dictionary of the most powerful concepts that make up my personal universe of meaning, and of the most powerful concepts humanity has created that are transferrable across domains and disciplines. I call this project, Transformational Vocabulary – in homage to and as an extension of Tony’s idea.
I’m interested not just in the concepts, but also in the interconnections between them. I use Obsidian for this project because it allows me to see them as a graph – as a beautiful (and useful) constellation of meaning.
I’m also deconstructing and organizing the concepts, identifying various kinds of linguistic and semantic structures.“
Life of Meaning 2
Fragments from imaginary dialogues
“What is the meaning of life for you?”
“I like to express it as a mind-map. I call such mind-maps maps of meaning.
My highest-order map looks like this:
Each item on the map is itself a deep mind-map.”
Life-Games
Two things in life make you feel alive: Growing and Giving. (Tony Robbins)
Fragments from imaginary dialogues
“What are life-games?”
“I think of my life as a game. I call it The Beautiful Game [<link; short read]. It’s a modular game made up of a myriad interlocking pieces – each piece a game.
I call the Beautiful Game and the games that make it up, life-games.”
“What are the most important life-games?”
“Growing and Giving.
The Beautiful Game is made up of two big games: The Inner Game and The Outer Game. The Inner Game is the Game of Growing; The Outer Game is the Game of Giving.
The Game of Growing is the game of becoming the best you can possibly be. It is made up of two games: The Game of Wisdom and The Game of Mastery.
The Game of Giving is the game of using your Gifts in greatest service to the world, of being an exceptional value provider – the highest expression of Love. Another name for it is The Game of Contribution.
All these are daily games. In their compounded effect, they shape the well-lived life.”
Epitaph Mantra
Fragments from imaginary dialogues
“How do you want to be remembered?
If you were to write your epitaph, what would it look like?”
“Dani the Ever-Playful
Loved to play with ideas.
Playfully sought to master Thinking and understand Understanding,
to make life a Work of Art and inspire others to do the same.“
“What if you thought of it as a mantra – an epitaph mantra?”
“A mantra that’s also a Memento Mori reminder. Powerful.”
Life of Meaning
Fragments from imaginary dialogues
“What do you want?”
“I want to play.
I want to create.
I want to learn.
I want to move.
I want to create value for other people.
I want to do it every single day… forever.“
On Writing and Editing
Fragments from imaginary dialogues
“I recently started studying editing and proofreading. Currently, this is my main area of focus.”
“Besides writing you mean?”
“I got started with editing because I want to get into freelancing. But I discovered that writing and editing go beautifully together, they’re complementary skills.
Editing helps me become a better writer.“
“How?”
“Editing involves delving into the principles and mechanics of good writing.
In acquiring the skill of editing, you’re developing what I call the editing eye. This is essentially pattern-recognition. You’re internalizing perceptual lenses [<link; short read] that allow you to see any piece of writing with new eyes.”
“Can you give an example?”
“One such lens is wordiness – using more words than necessary or unnecessarily complex or abstract words.
Internalizing the lens means actually seeing the instances of wordiness in a text, in all its forms:
Filler Words / Stretchers: Words that add quantity not quality.
eg
William persuades by means of logic.
William persuades by logic.
Redundancies: Words that say the same thing more than once.
eg
We share in common a love for reading.
We share a love for reading.
Phony Intensifiers: Words that attempt to exaggerate what you’re saying. Such words strain to appear confident but actually signal the opposite.
eg
I am absolutely confident in my abilities.
I am confident in my abilities.
Thickeners: Words that few people use in everyday speech.
eg
Sarah found the means whereby she could cheat on tomorrow’s test.
Sarah found a way to cheat on tomorrow’s test.
etc.”
My Niche
Make yourself useful.
Make yourself scarce.(Jack Butcher)
Fragments from imaginary dialogues
“What is your niche?
Express it as one skill, and three skills.”
“Expressed as one skill, my niche is Thinking/Awareness. I consider it life’s most important skill.”
“Why the pairing?”
“I’ve integrated them together into one concept (Concept-Stacking [<link; short read]). Another way of expressing it is Thinking/Non-Thinking.”
“Like Yin/Yang?”
“Precisely.
Expressed as three skills, my niche is:
Meta-Thinking – Deconstructing and creating meaning and mental tools of thought, optimally directing attention, QM (Questions and Mental Models), …
Creative Thinking – Creativity and Design
Meta-Learning – Optimal Learning”
“If we think of these skills as tools, what is their ultimate output?”
“Artful Living – Life and Experience Design
Over the coming years, I want to discover ways of making myself useful in all these areas.”
Life Patterns
What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits. (Carl Jung)
Fragments from imaginary dialogues
“What current aspects of your life are an evolution of previous ones?”
“I’ve identified three major aspects:
Moving as a child
I love moving.
I used to love moving as a child. Running, jumping, climbing, creative physical challenges… I realize I was doing Parkour long before I knew Parkour existed. Discovering Parkour was actually a rediscovery. Parkour is an evolution of my playful childhood adventures, and something I see myself doing forever. As I like to say, ‘Traceur forever’.
Soul Quest: Parkour Mastery
Identity: Mover, Traceur, Athlete
Mantra: Move beautiful.
My gaming years
I love playing.
Video games have been an addiction for me for many years. Many people play games as a temporary distraction from the real world. For me, they were my reality. I lived in imaginary fantastic worlds, and the real world was a temporary distraction.
I left video games behind and finally discovered the game of my life: my own life. I call it The Beautiful Game [<link; medium read]. The game is a meta-game, which is made up of a myriad lower-order games. I engage in it as both a Player and a Designer.
Soul Quest: Playful Living – Life as Play
Identity: Dani, the Ever-Playful
Mantra: Play is destiny.
Thinking as passion
I love thinking.
I lived in my head most of my life. At some point, I jokingly remarked that if I were to visually represent what the world looked like for me, it would have been mostly empty space and curves of attractive women.
I’ve been playing with ideas for a long time – one of my favorite pastimes. I disregarded other areas of my life, but in the process I got pretty good at it.
The next level in my evolution as a Thinker is meta-thinking, a concept I created to describe the (practical) process of creating conceptual tools and deconstructing meaning. It also involves balancing Thinking with Awareness. I realized that in order to master Thinking I also need to master Non-Thinking, disengaging the mind.
Soul Quests: Thinking Mastery – becoming a Super Thinker; Artful Living – Life as Art
Identity: Thinker, Life-Artist, Explorer and Creator of Meaning
Mantra: Think beautiful.”
Dani Trusca 
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