I believe everything we do in life should serve a tree of simple questions, asking the “why"s of everything. Why do you want to do the thing you want? Why do you want to have a job? Rather than the easier answers like “Well I need money”, go deeper and build this tree defining who you really are. Why do you need money? What is your dream, why do you want that?

When you figure out how to build this tree and do it, everything or most of the things in your life will just start sticking into a bigger more structured picture, like pieces of a puzzle. The things that won’t fit will let you grow and improve your tree, as you’ll understand that something is wrong, so maybe somewhere in your whys tree you missed something.

Also, worth mentioning that not everyone should have this model. I follow the Life Task definition of Robert Greene, hence your life’s task might be very different and the paths you need to take might be completely different from mine. But if you like aggregating knowledge, finding deep and hard answers once, then keeping the findings with you, looking for the next challenges, this approach might be a good fit for you.

What is at the bottom of the “why"s tree?

This is a challenging part. I think here at some point, no matter how persuasive you are, you need to decide to just stop and be satisfied with the depth you go. Because on the other end is the meaninglessness. So here we define some of the values that should align with our fundamental inner forces, culture, beliefs and goals. We can have some values that might be shared with more people, like “Continuing the development of humanity, while preserving and enriching the nature around us.”, but certainly there will be people with exact opposite goals, and that might be inevitable.