If you lined up all the cycles in your life by the amount of reward they brought you, you might represent them like this. The low bar on the left might represent something you can never get right — like feeling helpless about your weight if you’re overweight or about a big debt you have to repay. The high bar on the right might represent the joy you feel for your favorite hobby or spending time with your best friend.

I’m only casually representing things. I don’t know how objectively you can measure the amount of reward, but in general we know some parts of our lives bring us great joy, others misery, and others in between. I think the graph above illustrates that.

According to the Model, emotions and reward come in a range of characteristics — pleasure, intensity, richness, and duration, for example — so I could make a chart like the one above for each characteristic.

Applying the Method to different parts of your life makes unrewarding parts less unrewarding or even rewarding, and rewarding parts yet more so. The animation below shows how your reward would change as you apply the Method in each characteristic. (The physicist in me wants to represent at least two dimensions in this chart, each representing a characteristic, but I’ll leave it at one for simplicity).

As each cycle rewards you more, you come to life the life you want. You don’t become just fat, dumb, and happy. You live a lifestyle consistent with your values, meaning, purpose, etc. You achieve what is important to you.

Others recognize this. People follow people who know what brings them reward and create it.

• ← The Method: improving your life as much as you want is all based on one cycle
• The Method: exercise in knowing yourself →