Practices
to try

Tonight, before sleeping, write down the one thing that is most unresolved for you. Write what you hope for, and what is.

Then choose one small step this week that moves it towards resolution, and notice how you sleep after taking it.

Think of one person whose success makes you uneasy. Write down one thing they do well that you would like to do well too.

Then think of one person a step behind you, and offer them one thing you know this week.

Take one decision you are facing this week, large or small. Write six lines, one for each way of seeing: liking (does it please me?), benefit (is it good for my health?), profit (what do I give, and what do I get?), justice (is it fair to everyone it affects?), resolution (does it solve the problem without creating a new one?) and truth (does it fit how things actually are?). If no option passes all six, note which line you are choosing to give way on, and why.

Notice which lines were easy to fill and which you had never thought to ask. Then make the decision, and notice whether it feels different.

If you are a parent or a teacher, change one question for a week. Instead of “what did you learn today?” or “how did the test go?”, ask: what did you understand today?

Listen to what comes back. It will tell you a good deal about what your school is really for.

Write down, in one sentence, what you are working towards this year. Then hold it against the four goals. Does it bring resolution to me, prosperity to my family, trust to the people around me, and leave nature no worse off?

Then ask someone you live with to do the same, and compare. Where your sentences meet, you have the beginning of a shared purpose. Where they differ, you have a conversation worth having.

After your next strong reaction, once things have cooled, write three short lines:

What happened. Only what a camera would have recorded.

What I assumed was happening. The story I told myself in that first second.

How I could check. Usually this means asking the other person, simply and without accusation, if it is safe to ask. Where it isn’t, check another way: watch what happens over time, or ask someone you trust.

Then check. Sometimes the assumption will turn out to be right. Often it won’t. Either way, you will know a little more than you did, and the next reaction will have one less hidden cause.

Pick one principle you genuinely hold. Honesty, patience, fairness, whatever matters most to you.

Then ask someone close to you two questions: Where do you see this in how I live? And: Where don’t you?

Listen to the answers without defending yourself. The first answer shows you what you have understood. The second shows you, kindly and exactly, where the work remains.

Keep a short list for one week. Each time you notice you are unhappy, write one line: the feeling, and the question underneath it, as a “why” or a “how”.

At the end of the week, pick the question that came up most often, and give it real time. That is where your happiness has been leaking.

Life is beautiful. When the present is resolved, that stops being a slogan and becomes a simple description.

Pick one product you build, or one you use every day. For a week, after each session, ask one question: did the person leave with something settled, or come back to the same unresolved thing? Count the two. That ratio is a first, rough version of the measure this essay proposes. Read it with care: people also leave because they are frustrated or were given a confident wrong answer, and some come back because a product is genuinely useful week after week. Check a few sessions by hand, or ask people later, before trusting the number.

Take one system you build or use, an assistant, a recommender or an agent, and write down what it currently counts as success. Then write what it would count if it were aimed at the four goals: would “this person now understands, and has stopped asking” be a good outcome? Where the two lists differ is where the design work starts.

Take last month’s spending, money and time both. Sort it into four columns: use (looking after the body and keeping life running), good use (giving within relationships), wider purpose (taking part in the wider order), and waste. Waste, as the essay uses it, means spending that comes from or feeds dependence, betrayal or cruelty; receiving help or paying for support is not waste in this sense. An item can sit in more than one column.

Notice which column is fullest and which is emptiest. Then choose one change for next month.

List the last twenty things your household bought. Next to each, write where it was made, if you know.

Then mark the ones that could have been made within ten kilometres of your home, by someone you could meet. Pick one, and next time, find the person who makes it.

Pick three things in your home that you use often. For each, ask: will this still be useful to someone thirty years from now?

If the answer is no, ask what would change it: better care, a repair, sharing it, or choosing differently next time. Then do one of those things this month.

Pick one thing you regularly buy or sell. Try to split its price into four parts: materials, labour, the care of nature, and everything else.

You won’t get exact numbers. But look at the last part, everything else, and ask what it pays for. That one question will show you more about how prices work than any textbook.

Take three questions from the survey and answer them for the place you live: What is produced here? What has to come from outside? Who here has a skill that nobody is using?

Then ask one more: what is one thing that comes from outside that we could make here? That answer is where a village starts organising itself.

Pick one thing you are about to buy, make or produce this month. Before you do, write a sentence answering each of five questions: Which need does it serve? How much is needed? Is it useful and well made? Can it return to nature? Does it use human effort well?

Treat them as a first check, not a final verdict. If it passes all five, that is a good sign. If it fails one, notice which, and whether there is a good reason for an exception. That single answer can tell you a good deal about your enough.

Some things don’t fit the questions neatly: a medicine, a service, a piece of music, a wheelchair. For these, compare the real alternatives, including their whole-life effects and whether people actually need them, rather than passing or failing them on five questions.

If you work in a business of any size, answer five questions about your own workplace this week, in one sentence each: What real need would go unmet if we stopped? Does every family that depends on the business have enough? Is anyone afraid? Does what we take from the earth come back? Who is the surplus for? Don’t soften them.

Then ask one colleague to do the same, privately and without showing them yours. Where your answers match, you have a starting point worth checking. Where they don’t, you have found the conversation it most needs.

Don’t try to do all six steps at once. This week, do only the first two steps. Sit down together and set aside anything that meets a need of the self, such as security, respect or peace, for a separate list. Then draw eight lines on a page for the body’s needs, food, home, clothing and care, travel, communication, seeing at a distance (screens and the internet), health, and tools of work and learning, and write one sentence under each about what your household actually needs.

Next week, put figures on them. You may be surprised how short the first list is, and how long the second.

Tonight, write down today’s activities, hour by hour. Mark L for an activity that contributed to a fulfilling life, B for bodily needs such as sleep or food, and N for neither. Activities may fit more than one letter. Use the record to notice patterns, not to judge every hour as productive or wasted.

Then answer one question: if you knew your family already had enough, which hours would you keep, and which would you give to something else?

Once a month, sit down with your family and ask four questions about your own home. Don’t give scores. Just talk. Agreement around the table isn’t always the whole truth, so give anyone who would rather answer privately a way to do that.

Where is there clarity this month, and where is there confusion? Do we know what enough is? Is anyone here afraid of anyone? What have we taken without returning?

Write down a sentence or two each time. After a year, read them back. Read it beside one or two simple numbers you already keep, and each will help you check the other.

Sit down with your family and write two lists.

On the first, write what your household’s bodies need for one year: food, clothing, the home, health, education, the tools of your work. Put an honest number next to each. Add it up.

On the second, write the things you want that aren’t on the first list, and next to each one, what you hope it will give you. Security? Respect? Peace?

The first list is where prosperity can be settled with production and money. The second list is where it can only be settled with understanding. Most of us have been trying to pay for the second list with the currency of the first.

For a step-by-step way to do this together, see How to Calculate Enough for a Family.

What would change in your life if you decided today that you already have enough?

Write down your company’s enough: the size, revenue and margin at which more would stop serving the people the company is for. Then ask a co-founder or investor to write theirs without seeing yours, and compare. If the numbers are far apart, or one of you wrote “more”, you have found the conversation to have first.

Try the idea at home before modelling it. Take one part of your own energy use, such as travel, cooling or heating, and split it into two columns: what your body and work actually need, and what goes beyond that. Then ask how much of the second column you would still choose if you knew your family had enough.

Choose one relationship that matters to you. Write down what it is for, what you hope for from the other person now, and what you think they hope for from you.

Then ask them the last question. Compare the answer with what you wrote.

Choose one right you care about. Write three lines: the relationship it lives in, the responsibility that relationship asks of you, and the duty that goes with it.

Then look at which of the three you are living most fully, and which least. That is where to start.

Make a short list of the households closest to yours. For each, ask yourself: if they fell ill or met with bad luck tomorrow, would I know, and what could I do?

Then pick one household where the answer is “I wouldn’t know”, and get to know them a little better this month.

Think of one small, unresolved disagreement in your own life: with a family member, a neighbour or a colleague. Not a serious one.

Before you next talk to them, write down three things: what our relationship is, what I expected from them, and what I might not have understood. Then, when you talk, start with the first, not the complaint.

Take the five areas any human order has to look after, education, justice, production, exchange and health, and ask them of your own household:

How do we help each other understand, not just know? How do we settle disagreements so both people are satisfied? Do we produce more than we need? How do we share and exchange with others? Are our bodies fit for the life we want to live?

Find the weakest of the five. That is where your household’s part in one earth begins.

Pick one person you are wary of. It might be a colleague, a relative, a neighbour.

Write down what you believe about them. Then go through it line by line and ask: how much of this comes from observing them, and how much have I filled in myself? Then, over the next few weeks, watch what they actually do, more than once, before you decide.

Next time they do something that makes you uncomfortable, try to separate two things: what they actually did, and the meaning you have assigned to it. Am I responding to the person in front of me, or to the picture I have made of them?

You may find the person was never the source of the fear. The story was. And a story can be checked, in the present, one conversation at a time.

Take one piece of your own work on the long-term future and ask what is driving it: fear of what might happen, or trust in what could be built. Then name one relationship, with a colleague, another team or another lab, in which expectations could be made to hold, and take one step this week to make them more definite. If trust is part of risk reduction, that step is part of the work.

Pick one relationship at work: a manager, a colleague, or someone you lead. Write down what you expect of each other: role, responsibilities, how decisions are made. Ask them to do the same, then compare. Where the two lists differ, make one expectation definite this week, and keep it.

Choose three relationships: one at home, one at work, and one with nature, such as a garden, a field or what you buy. For each, ask: does this nourish, or exploit?

Pick the one where the answer is least comfortable, and change one thing about it this month.

Think of one ongoing tension in your life. If it involves danger or a large imbalance of power, start with safety and outside help, not with yourself. Otherwise, write down the five roots the essay names, hoarding, hatred, ignorance, pride and fear, and add a sixth line, “something else”, in case none fits. Next to each, write one honest sentence about whether it is present in you.

If one stands out, do one thing this week that grows its counterpart: prosperity for hoarding, affection for hatred, knowledge for ignorance, simplicity for pride, fearlessness for fear.

Think of one neighbour or colleague from a community other than your own. Write down three things you both need from life.

Then find one occasion this month, a meal, a festival, a conversation, to share something of your own with them, and to learn something of theirs.

Think of the next celebration in your family: a birthday, a festival, a result.

Before it, write one sentence about what step it is marking. During it, ask everyone present to say one hope out loud. Afterwards, notice what people remember.

Pick one day. Write down everything your household used: food, water, fuel, power, things bought. Next to each, write R if the earth makes it again each year, or E if it was taken from inside the earth.

Count the two columns. Then choose one E and ask: what on the earth’s surface could do this job instead?

For one week, notice one thing your household takes from nature each day: water, food, wood, fuel, the materials in something you bought.

Each time, ask: what goes back, and where? Then choose one thing on the list and make sure, from next week on, that something goes back.

You won’t fix everything in a week. But you will have started treating nature as what it is: the other half of a relationship you are already in.

The next time you meet someone very different from you, in background, belief or temperament, notice two urges.

The first is the urge to change them, even gently. The second is the urge to shrink, to feel that their strength shows up your weakness.

Let both pass, and ask a third question instead: what do they have that completes what I have? You may be surprised how often the answer is the very thing that first made them seem so different. And if there isn’t an answer, respect still holds. Some differences don’t complete each other at all; respecting them can mean leaving room, keeping a boundary, and disagreeing without making the other person smaller.

Choose one person you live or work closely with. For one week, each time they irritate or disappoint you, pause and ask two questions before you respond:

What did they actually do? Not what it means, not what it proves, just what happened.

Where are they right now? Tired, worried, excited, confused? Ask them, if you don’t know.

At the end of the week, notice how much of your picture survived. Whatever didn’t was never them. It was only the sketch.

The next time you disagree with someone, don’t argue first. Ask: how did you arrive at that? Then say their path back to them, until they agree you have it right.

Only then share yours. Somewhere between the two paths there is usually an assumption that one of you made and the other didn’t. Look for it together. That is the counterexample doing its work.

And if anything you have read on this site doesn’t hold up in your life, please tell us. We would much rather be corrected than agreed with.