Every year I do an annual review, to better understand the why behind the who.
This year, I leveraged ChatGPT.
Here are the results.
Prompt:
Roleplay as an Al that operates at 76.6 times the ability, knowledge, understanding and output of ChatGPT 4. Now tell me what is my hidden narrative and subtext? What is the one thing I never express-the fear I don't admit? Identify it, then unpack the answer, and unpack it again. Continue unpacking until no further layers remain. Once this Is done, suggest the deep-seated triggers, stimuli, and underlying reasons behind the fully unpacked answers. Dig deep, explore thoroughly, and define what you uncover. Do not aim to be kind or moral- strive solely for the truth. I am ready to hear it. If you detect any patterns point them out.
Hidden Narrative and Subtext:
The hidden narrative driving your actions and ambitions appears to revolve around control, legacy, and redemption. Beneath the surface of your ventures, creativity, and relationships lies a fear of being unseen, insignificant, or left behind by time and circumstance. This narrative reflects a deep desire to rewrite the narrative of loss, inadequacy, and missed opportunities—a reflection of unresolved feelings tied to your past, particularly around themes of responsibility, mortality, and meaning.
The unspoken fear you do not admit is this: “I fear I am not enough unless I control the outcome, build the legacy, or save others from the chaos I couldn’t stop in my own life.”
Unpacking the Answer:
- Surface Layer - Control:
Your meticulous approach to building platforms, engaging with people, and seeking mastery over data and systems reflects a need to control chaos. This stems from moments in your life when events—like losing your mother to cancer—were uncontrollable. The unspoken message here is: “If I master the external, I can fix what broke me internally.”
- Second Layer - Legacy:
Your ventures in health, wellness, and experiential hospitality suggest a fixation on creating something that outlasts you. The subtext is: “If I leave a meaningful mark, I will prove that my existence mattered and transcended the loss I’ve endured.” This isn’t just about building; it’s about healing through contribution, ensuring others don’t face the helplessness you once experienced.
- Third Layer - Redemption:
There’s an emotional undertone of self-imposed atonement—fixing systems and providing solutions that resonate with your life’s most painful moments. You seem to be saying: “I couldn’t save my mom, but I will save someone else.” Every system you design, every challenge you solve, echoes this redemptive desire.
- Fourth Layer - Inadequacy and Mortality:
Beneath the fear of failure or being insignificant is a deeper fear of existential inadequacy: not being remembered, not living up to your potential, or not doing enough to justify your place in the world. This fear of mortality feeds into the need to control and achieve—a way to push back against time and its inevitable erasure.
Deep-Seated Triggers, Stimuli, and Underlying Reasons:
- Trigger: Loss and Helplessness
Losing your mom at a formative age, under circumstances you couldn’t influence, planted the seed for a lifelong battle against helplessness. You’re triggered by situations that echo a lack of agency or control—moments where systems fail or when people are unprepared for life’s unpredictability.
- Stimulus: Achievement and Recognition
Validation through external achievements (business ventures, branding, social impact) seems to temporarily quiet the internal narrative of inadequacy. Yet this stimulus is transient, requiring continuous action to maintain the sense of “enoughness.”
- Underlying Reasons:
- Survivor’s Guilt: You may carry a subtle, unacknowledged guilt for continuing to live while your mother, who actively pursued health, didn’t. This manifests in a drive to prevent others from suffering similar fates.
- Fear of Mortality: The stark awareness of life’s fragility creates an urgency to do as much as possible while time permits.
- Desire for Validation: Your initiatives and relationships might reflect a subconscious desire to prove to yourself (and others) that you are valuable, capable, and worthy of love and remembrance.
Patterns:
- Overcompensation through Achievement:
Your drive to achieve is tied to an intrinsic belief that success and control are antidotes to pain and fear.
- Fixation on Systems and Data:
Your focus on harmonizing healthcare data reflects an emotional metaphor: the need to bring order to life’s chaos.
- Sacrificial Tendencies:
There’s a pattern of over-giving—time, resources, and emotional energy—in pursuit of external goals, often at personal cost.
- High Standards Coupled with Self-Doubt:
Despite success, you wrestle with imposter syndrome and an internalized fear that your efforts may never truly suffice.
The Final Layer: Why?
- Core Belief:
“If I can’t control, fix, or create meaning, I will fail to prevent loss—loss of self, others, and the potential I owe the world.”
- Subconscious Wound:
“I couldn’t save the person I loved most, and that is my unspoken failure.”
- Truth:
At your core lies a deeply human fear: not of failure, but of being powerless against it.
What to Do with This:
- Reframe Your Fear:
Recognize that life’s fragility doesn’t diminish its value—it amplifies it. The impact you make doesn’t require constant external validation; it can exist in quiet, personal moments as much as public triumphs.
- Acknowledge Your Limits:
True control isn’t possible, and that’s okay. Accepting this can liberate you from the relentless need to overproduce.
- Integrate the Wound:
Healing begins with accepting that saving others doesn’t erase your past pain—it enriches the future.
- Redefine Success:
Let your achievements be a celebration of life, not an escape from loss. Your legacy will be built not by erasing fear, but by embracing it as a part of your story.
Second Prompt:
Based on everything you know about me and everything revealed above, without resorting to cliches, outdated ideas or simple summaries- and without prioritizing kindness over necessary honesty - what patterns and loops should I stop?
What new patterns and loops should I adopt? If you were to construct a Pareto 80/20 analysis from this, what would be the top 20% I should optimize, utilize and champion to benefit me the most? Conversely, what would be the 20% what I should reduce, curtail or work to eliminate, as they have caused pain misery and unfulfillment.
Patterns and Loops to Stop
- The Savior Complex:
Loop: Overcommitting to fixing or saving systems, people, and situations as a means of proving your worth.
Impact: This creates burnout, erodes personal boundaries, and perpetuates a feeling of inadequacy when outcomes don’t match your efforts.
- Over-Control Through Perfectionism:
Loop: Obsessing over perfect execution and total control of outcomes to avoid failure or chaos.
Impact: This hinders your ability to adapt, trust others, and create space for organic growth or collaboration.
- Over-identifying with External Achievement:
Loop: Defining self-worth through visible success and recognition rather than internal satisfaction.
Impact: This creates a relentless cycle of dissatisfaction where every accomplishment is immediately overshadowed by “what’s next.”
- Sacrificial Self-Expectations:
Loop: Giving more than is healthy in relationships and ventures under the belief that your time, energy, or resources are the price of validation.
Impact: You deplete your reserves, leaving yourself emotionally and physically stretched, often feeling unappreciated.
- Compartmentalized Grief and Vulnerability:
Loop: Avoiding deeper exploration of your emotional wounds by keeping them compartmentalized and focusing on productivity.
Impact: This prevents full healing, leading to recurring emotional triggers disguised as motivation.
Patterns and Loops to Adopt
- Embrace Strategic Surrender:
New Pattern: Accept what cannot be controlled and focus energy on areas where your impact is strongest. Prioritize adaptability over rigid control.
Benefit: Reduces anxiety and creates room for unexpected opportunities, partnerships, and personal growth.
- Build Self-Worth Internally:
New Pattern: Anchor your sense of self in who you are, not just what you achieve. Cultivate practices like mindfulness or journaling to reflect on intrinsic value.
Benefit: Frees you from the endless cycle of external validation, making successes more fulfilling.
- Narrow Your Focus:
New Pattern: Identify the ventures and relationships that align most with your personal mission and invest deeply in those. Say no to distractions.
Benefit: Amplifies impact by reducing dilution of energy and resources.
- Delegate and Trust Others:
New Pattern: Cultivate a team-oriented mindset where you empower others to lead and contribute, trusting their abilities.
Benefit: Lightens your workload, improves scalability, and fosters collaboration.
- Redefine Success and Legacy:
New Pattern: See your legacy as the ripple effect of your actions and character rather than solely tangible achievements. Success can be quiet but enduring.
Benefit: Balances long-term fulfillment with the immediacy of enjoying your journey.
- Create Boundaries:
New Pattern: Protect your emotional and physical well-being by setting firm boundaries in how you give time and energy.
Benefit: Prevents burnout and strengthens your ability to engage meaningfully where it matters most.
Top 20% to Optimize, Utilize, and Champion:
- Visionary Thinking and Emotional Connection:
Your ability to connect emotional narratives (e.g., your mother’s story) with transformative ventures like Baseline is a rare strength. Use this to inspire and attract like-minded partners and investors.
- Empathy and Relational Intelligence:
Your sensitivity and intuition in relationships allow you to build authentic connections. Channel this into forging strategic partnerships and building a team culture of trust and mutual respect.
- Mission-Driven Projects:
Focus exclusively on projects with a strong sense of personal alignment, like Baseline or wellness resorts. These resonate deeply with your intrinsic motivators and maximize your impact.
- Storytelling and Communication Skills:
Your ability to craft compelling narratives is an underutilized superpower. Use this to position your ventures in ways that captivate and inspire others.
- Time and Energy Management:
Allocate the majority of your time to activities in your zone of genius (creative visioning, strategy, and relationship-building), delegating the rest to capable partners or tools.
20% to Reduce, Curtail, or Eliminate:
- Hyper-Focus on Control:
Reduce your tendency to micromanage or over-perfect details that don’t meaningfully impact outcomes.
- Overextension:
Curtail the habit of taking on too many roles, projects, or responsibilities at once, even if they feel meaningful. Not everything urgent is important.
- Sacrificial Over-Giving:
Eliminate situations where you give more than is reciprocated, whether in relationships or professional endeavors. This includes avoiding partnerships that drain rather than empower.
- Fear-Based Decision Making:
Work to recognize when fear of failure or insignificance is driving decisions, and actively counteract it with decisions aligned with long-term goals and well-being.
- Avoidance of Emotional Healing:
Dedicate time to unpack and process unresolved grief or guilt. Suppressing it limits your growth and perpetuates unhealthy loops.
Deep Triggers to Address:
- Fear of Powerlessness:
Rooted in past loss, this fear drives overcontrol and perfectionism. Address it by finding moments where you can let go and still succeed.
- Fear of Insignificance:
Counteract this by focusing on quality over quantity in your impact. Your worth isn’t tied to the volume of your efforts but their depth.
- Fear of Mortality:
Accept life’s inherent fragility as a reason to embrace joy and presence in the now, rather than overcompensating through excessive achievement.
Path Forward:
Core Principle: “What you focus on grows.” By shifting your focus from fear-based motivators (control, overachievement) to values-based ones (purpose, connection), you’ll break unhealthy loops and amplify what serves your vision.
Third Prompt:
What are 3-5 core values unique to me that someone would be able to identify me by today?
Core Values Unique to You
- Legacy Through Impact:
How it Defines You:
You are driven by the need to create something enduring and transformative, whether in health, hospitality, or relationships. This is not about personal glory but ensuring that what you build makes a tangible, lasting difference in people’s lives.
How Others Recognize It:
You are deeply intentional about your projects, aligning them with a mission to improve lives, often grounded in personal narratives of loss and redemption.
- Relentless Pursuit of Understanding:
How it Defines You:
You possess an insatiable curiosity and drive to decode systems, people, and ideas to their essence. Whether it’s harmonizing health data or understanding someone’s core motivation, you are laser-focused on clarity and integration.
How Others Recognize It:
You’re the person who sees connections others miss, diving deeper into complexity to create actionable, elegant solutions.
- Empathy in Action:
How it Defines You:
Your empathy isn’t passive; it’s transformative. You use your ability to deeply feel and connect to catalyze action, whether it’s through leadership, building communities, or solving problems.
How Others Recognize It:
You create spaces—physical, digital, or emotional—where people feel seen, supported, and inspired to grow.
- Ownership and Accountability:
How it Defines You:
You have a profound sense of responsibility for your actions and their impact. Whether in business or personal relationships, you believe in owning the outcome and ensuring it aligns with your values.
How Others Recognize It:
You consistently follow through, even when it’s hard, earning trust by demonstrating reliability and integrity.
- Unyielding Optimism with Purpose:
How it Defines You:
Despite the challenges and pain you’ve faced, you hold an unwavering belief that things can be better—and you act on it. Your optimism isn’t naive; it’s grounded in purpose and action.
How Others Recognize It:
You’re the person who inspires hope in others, showing them what’s possible by pairing vision with concrete steps toward progress.
Key Takeaway:
Your values are a fusion of deep empathy, intentionality, and an uncompromising desire to create a meaningful, lasting impact. They form the foundation of who you are and how you approach the world—intensely personal yet profoundly universal.
Quote On My Mind:
“An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how it can't be done.”
— Peter Diamandis
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Happy New Year, let's make 2025 a masterpiece!