Actually Useful Personal User Manuals

Three years ago, I sent a “Consider This” newsletter about making yourself easier to get along with by sharing your personal user manual. And I shared my example. That post attracted quite a few responses and inspired others to try their own.

But the honest truth about that user manual?

It wasn’t actually that useful. I sent it to a few people, then let it collect e-dust in my Google Drive.

Looking back at myself three years ago, the most obvious issue is that I didn’t know myself well enough to create a user manual for myself. It was more like a glorified dating profile. Maybe if I were single and mingling, I’d have found some use for it?

Well, I remain married, but a lot else has changed in the last three years. And while I will never pretend to know myself well enough to write my definitive user manual, I certainly know myself better than I did in 2022. I also certainly know myself better than anybody else. And I certainly have some new, especially useful uses for a user manual.

So I made a new user manual too. A truly useful one.

One that actually helps me and my board of directors (including my 95-year-old self) make decisions. One that translates why my wife and I drive each other crazy. And one that filters opportunities through who I actually am, not who I think I should be.

Some might think it is naive, navel-gazing, or narcissistic to create a user manual for yourself. I argue that those people are even more head-buried-in-the-sand than I am.

Because everyone, you included, is optimizing for something.

If you choose not to optimize for X, you’re making a choice to optimize for some other Y. “What if I don’t want to optimize for anything?” I’ve heard this many times. My response: “Ok. So what do you hope to get out of not optimizing for anything? Isn’t that optimizing for something?” “Ugh. You’re wrong.” And there goes their head back in the sand.

Own what you’re optimizing for. And take it life-and-death seriously, because, well, it is your life.

I used to believe my life’s Y-axis was growth, but that plateaued. So I shifted toward a new focus:

Clarity.

The more clarity you have on who you truly are and how you fit in (or don’t) with the world around you, the better you can make decisions. Growth (and energy, and anti-regrets, and deeply fulfilled 95-year-old selves) flow as downstream benefits.

So yeah, I can live with the extreme selfishness of studying my “inner species.” And I’ll do my best to distill it into a document because writing forces unfuzzy thinking. Better a solid attempt at self understanding than be naive, nihilistic, or optimizing for someone else’s game.

Self-understanding isn’t eating, praying, and loving on mushrooms in Bali. It’s science. “Self-concept clarity,” psychologists call it.

Think of science more broadly. It may be hubristic to think that we simple humans can understand the whole universe, let alone our dinky little selves. But the more we manage to understand, the more extraordinary things we can accomplish. I for one don’t want to go back to bloodletting and drilling holes in skulls to let the demons out.

Sure, my “science” might deserve those quotation marks more than a capital S. But hey, I’m doing my darnedest with the rinky-dink brain I’ve been bestowed (and AI’s pattern-matching assistance).

My user manual is a distillation of the most reputable psychological assessments and frameworks I’ve found and, most importantly, nearly 40 years of real-world trial and error. If you know of anybody in the world who has put as much effort as I have into trying to systematically reverse engineer an individual’s user manual, please tell me who. I will go banging at their door (aka, email inbox) to learn from them—and maybe even teach them a thing or two.

Anyway, no further ado:

Here’s my user manual.

I don’t expect you to open or read it. It’s comprehensive, perhaps obsessively so. Here’s the Table of Contents:

A. About This Manual
B. At-a-Glance
C. Narrative & Receipts
D. Focus Line
E. Identity Card
F. Vision & North Star
G. Psychological Profile
H. Shadow & Integration
I. Operating System (OS)
J. Collaboration & Advising
K. Growth & Development
L. Appendices

You may now be wondering, how has this user manual proved to be useful for me so far?

1. First of all, creating it has given me deep confidence and clarity about who I am and how to work with rather than resist my weirdness. Rather than just thinking it or feeling it, I have articulated it and mapped it out. That helps. A lot.
2. I also helps me make decisions. An LLM can internalize this user manual even better than I can and apply it as a filter to help me calibrate my next stepping stone experiment will be. I upload it alongside my extensive ARC Methodology Overview and my monthly reviews to give me as objective an analysis as I can get of where I am spinning my wheels outside of my sweet spot and how I can redirect in more aligned directions. I’ve created a board of directors approach where I convene my 95-year-old GOAT (greatest of all timelines) self, a devil’s advocate, and a CEO of Humanity to critically review my situation and debate my next challenging, compelling, congruent, coherent, and contact-seeking stepping stone. Sure, LLMs are far from perfect alternatives to real people, but they are available, patient, and keep on getting better and better. Compared to how I used to make decisions, which mostly amounted to “follow the inertia,” my simulated board of directors challenges my defaults more, enhances my creativity, and gives me more confidence.
3. Thirdly, my user manual has been useful for comparing with others. My wife, for instance. When she acts “crazy” by worrying about this and that, getting mad at me for being too rational, and complaining rather than problem solving, I upload our two user manuals, share the details of the situation, and ask the LLM to help me understand what’s causing our wires to cross. It’s like a modern she’s from Venus, I’m from Mars translator. I look forward to doing something similar for collaborating with others who get user manuals as the outcome of my ARC program, too. Eventually, with people who have no idea what ARC is, too, but have made their own. Because I would love it if this user manual concept could finally catch on. This time, it really is useful.

My challenge to you:

If you care enough to work on your life, not in it, start drafting your user manual.

Where do you want to be three years from now? Or thirty? Still sticking to the basic settings of your fancy machine because you’re too complacent to figure out the advanced functions? Burnt out and bored of life from forcing yourself into applications you weren’t designed for? Or finally humming at near max capacity because you took care to figure out the damn manual?