There was a time in my life where I thought I was unlucky.

I got injured and had to get an operation when I was 16. My only serious passion at the time was sport. My knee was repaired and I was put in a hospital bed with no Wi-Fi for two weeks. There, I struggled with the idea that my life might only get worse and that I was so unlucky to be in this situation when sports meant so much to me.

I felt powerless and my future didn’t excite me. At 16. I thought a lot about this. Then I remembered this real life story. Hirotada Ototake, I knew him as a Japanese school teacher, famous for his infectious positivity. Thing is, he had no legs and no arms. How could he possibly be happy?

This man represented a direct challenge to my understanding and experience at the time, which was if you have shitty life circumstances you have a shitty life. In fact he was proving to me the opposite can be true: shitty life circumstances but a great life. So if it’s not life circumstances that determine your quality of life then what is it?

That’s when it became very clear to me that how you think plays a big role in how you experience life. In fact, how you think is the only thing in between the world and your life. If you can change how you think, you can change your life. That was the first time I became fascinated with how people think. That was over 10 years ago.

If you wanted to understand how you think how would you go about it? Personally, I studied cognition in my Bachelor’s and Neuroscience in my Master’s. My research focused on human flourishment. Then, I turned to flow state coaching, meditation, and Ayurveda. The pieces are everywhere. We all want a better life but the problem is that our knowledge on how we think is spread out. And we don’t have a map to navigate the maze.

Many of us know our thinking matters. We know we can change. But we're not very good at doing it. This is because we’re not given a map to understand ourselves. Instead, we’re left figuring it out over our entire lives, essentially improvising, the whole way through.

Without a map, we run into several problems:

The Symptom Problem. We believe that the symptoms are the problems. When in fact, the symptoms are what tell us there is a problem. We’re so used to this that we often ignore symptoms until they get so bad that we have to treat them. That’s when we look for a painkiller without fixing what was causing the pain.

The Diagnostic Problem. Because we don’t understand the cause, we spend most of our energy solving the wrong problem. We feel insecure so we put on a performance. We feel bad about work so we overeat. We feel stupid so we avoid the topic. Temporary relief, long-term cost.

The Low Agency Move. Eventually, when the solutions don’t work, we draw a logical but incorrect conclusion: this is just who I am. Owning the problem means doing something about it — and that takes work. Evolution hasn’t designed us to be happy. It’s designed us so we survive.

So I built the Map to You.

The idea is, once you understand how you think you can be intentional about how you think. How you think will affect how you feel and how you behave, giving you more agency to live the life you want.

The Map to You

1. The Human OS — how you actually work.
Who am I, really? Why does my mind work this way? The inner workings underneath everything you do: motivation, attention, identity, emotion, the unconscious. This is where you gain understanding. You can’t engineer what you don’t understand.

2. Systems Engineering for Life — designing the conditions.
How do I get good at things on purpose? How do I live well with other people? Now that you have more control over your inner workings you’ll learn to see yourself as a system. A system that sits within an environment — the people around you, the spaces you’re in, the conditions that surround you. This is how you design yourself from the outside-in.

3. Looking for Leverage — the few inputs that compound.
How do I go faster? How can my effort compound exponentially? We all want to change faster, be better quicker, have the best life not just a great one. Not all effort is equal. Some inputs compound non-linearly across years; most don’t. Looking for leverage across what you do is how you multiply your efforts. It’s where exponential returns live.

If you feel capable but stuck — and you’ve started wondering whether the problem is you — it isn’t. You just don’t have a map.