Life Compass

A 5-day investigation to surface your values, passions, and purpose — and turn them into a reference document you can use for career, financial, location, and relationship decisions.

This repo is a fillable workbook. Clone it, work through one day at a time, and write your answers directly into the files. At the end you’ll have a single artifact — your Life Compass — that you return to whenever you feel off, face a big decision, or forget who you are.

Short on time? Start here → one-page-anchor.md. One sitting, ~25 minutes, and you finish today with a usable anchor. A small thing you actually do beats a five-day process you never complete. Go deeper later only if it earns it.

Before you start

Time: roughly 60–90 minutes per “day,” done in one sitting. Don’t compress it — and stretching it out is fine, even better. A common rhythm is one “day” per week (so the five days run ~5 weeks); the longer gap is where insight settles. Two rules if you stretch it: keep each session a single sitting (the week is breathing room, not more work), and start each session by re-reading last week’s notes to reload context. Keep a phone note for stray thoughts between sessions and feed them in.

Setup:

• These files are your notebook. Write directly in them — or if you prefer handwriting (it tends to surface more honest material), keep paper alongside.
• Pick a time of day when you’re not depleted. Morning before work, or a weekend block.
• Tell anyone in your house you need uninterrupted time.

Rules of engagement:

• Write without editing. The first answer is usually closer to the truth than the polished one.
• Distinguish what you actually want from what you think you should want. The “should” voice is loud.
• Don’t try to resolve contradictions early. Let them sit.

The five days

• Day 1 · Excavation — What raw material is in my own life? → Raw notes (don’t synthesize yet).
• Day 2 · Values — What do I stand for? → 5 core values, ranked, each defined.
• Day 3 · Passions — What fuels me? → 3–5 passion themes with examples.
• Day 4 · Purpose — What am I here to contribute? → A working purpose statement.
• Day 5 · Synthesis — How do I align my life to this? → A filled-in Life Compass + 90-day moves.

Reference: the values starter list is pulled out so you can mark it up on Day 2.

Optional add-ons: optional-add-ons.md holds the two higher-friction extras — outside input from others, and one small real-world step. They’re genuinely useful but entirely opt-in; every process here works fully without them.

Doing it with a friend? Read with-a-partner.md first — the protocol for using an accountability partner without contaminating each other’s answers.

Want a harder pass? The rigorous/ track is an optional, more demanding edition built to resist the ways self-reflection misleads you — anchoring, confirmation bias, single-observer blindness, and bad future-prediction. It’s self-contained: one standalone file per day (Day 0 through Day 5), each with the full exercises and the evidence-grounding, measurement, and disconfirmation steps woven in — no jumping between documents. The original five days above stay exactly as they are; use the rigorous track when you want the tougher run (or on an annual redo).

How to use this going forward

• When you feel off: Re-read the compass. Usually the answer to “why am I unhappy” is in there — a value being violated, a passion starved, a purpose drifting.
• When making a big decision (job, move, large purchase, who to spend time with): Run it through the five dimensions on Day 5. The right answer is the one that strengthens alignment across the most of them.
• When you feel pulled in many directions: Look at your top 2 values. Most “impossible” choices become clear when you let your ranking actually do the work.
• When you forget who you are: That’s what the compass is for. It’s a letter from a clear-headed version of you to a confused version. Trust the clear-headed one.

Review cadence

The compass goes stale if you don’t return to it.

• Quarterly (15 min): Re-read. Adjust any items that no longer fit. Pick the next 90-day moves.
• Annually (90 min): Redo Day 5 in full. Optionally redo a single earlier day if something feels off.
• Before any major decision: Re-read first.

Where the exercises come from

None of this is invented from scratch — it’s a synthesis of established traditions in psychology, coaching, philosophy, and business strategy. The map below traces each exercise to its lineage. Some links are direct (the eulogy test is straight out of Covey); others are family resemblances — the same idea arrived at independently in several places. Treat this as an honest “intellectual provenance,” not a claim that any one source is the origin.

Day 1 — Excavation

• Life chapters timeline — Narrative identity / the “life story” interview — Dan McAdams; life review — Robert Butler (gerontology); the “lifeline” used across coaching.
• Peak experiences — “Peak experiences” — Abraham Maslow, humanistic psychology.
• Low points / what was violated — Narrative therapy — Michael White & David Epston; meaning-making and post-traumatic-growth research.
• Energy audit — the “Good Time Journal” — Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett & Dave Evans (Stanford d.school); energy management — The Power of Full Engagement, Schwartz & Loehr.
• Childhood threads — career-counseling staple; The Element — Ken Robinson; echoes Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss.”

Day 2 — Values

• Values list, circle & narrow — Values clarification in ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy) — Steven Hayes; the Personal Values Card Sort — Miller et al. (Motivational Interviewing); the academic ancestor, the Rokeach Value Survey.
• Force-rank / “what would hurt to give up” — values card-sort prioritization methods.
• Operationalize (living it / betraying it) — ACT’s “valued living” — values stated as behavior, not feeling.
• Conflict test (stated vs. actual choices) — Revealed preference — Paul Samuelson, behavioral economics.

Day 3 — Passions

• “Lose track of time” test — Flow — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
• Unprompted attention / history — revealed preference (again).
• The hypothetical (“5 years + enough money”) — Financial life planning — George Kinder’s “three questions”; the Miracle Question of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (Steve de Shazer).
• Clustering into themes — Thematic analysis / grounded theory (qualitative research) applied to yourself; strengths-theme work — Gallup CliftonStrengths.

Day 4 — Purpose

• Unfair advantages — “Unfair advantage” — Lean Canvas, Ash Maurya; “Zone of Genius” — The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks.
• Good-at × energizes × world-needs intersection — Ikigai — Japanese (Okinawan) concept (note: the popular four-circle Venn is a Western adaptation by Marc Winn over Andrés Zuzunaga’s diagram; authentic ikigai needn’t include “what you’re paid for”); the “Hedgehog Concept” — Good to Great, Jim Collins; purpose research — William Damon.
• Contribution sentences — purpose / mission articulation in coaching.
• Purpose-statement format — the personal mission statement — 7 Habits, Stephen Covey.
• Eulogy test — “Begin with the end in mind” — Covey; “eulogy vs. résumé virtues” — The Road to Character, David Brooks; Stoic memento mori.

Day 5 — Synthesis

• Five-dimension alignment audit — the “Wheel of Life” — life coaching (Paul J. Meyer / SMI).
• 90-day realignment moves — goal-setting & behavior-change literature; OKRs.
• Review cadence (quarterly / annual) — higher-altitude reviews of GTD — David Allen; “yearly themes” — Cortex (CGP Grey & Myke Hurley).
• Theme (in the one-page anchor) — Yearly themes — Cortex.

The rigorous overlay

The rigorous track adds a layer drawn mostly from research methods and cognitive-bias science:

• Evidence traceability / quality tags — Thematic coding / grounded theory (qualitative research).
• Generate-before-anchor ordering — Anchoring bias — Kahneman & Tversky.
• Disconfirmation passes — Falsifiability — Karl Popper; confirmation-bias research — Peter Wason.
• Outside input / 360 — 360-degree feedback (organizational psychology); methodological triangulation.
• “Trust the data over the hypothetical” — Affective forecasting — Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness; Tim Wilson.
• Baseline, targets, versioning — OKRs; the Quantified Self ethos.
• One small action / experiment (add-ons) — Prototyping — Designing Your Life; “act your way into a new identity” — Working Identity, Herminia Ibarra; build-measure-learn — The Lean Startup, Eric Ries; make it tiny — Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg.

Cultural & philosophical roots

The whole enterprise sits in a long lineage of structured self-examination:

• “Know thyself” (γνῶθι σεαυτόν) — the Delphic maxim, and the examined life of Socrates.
• Stoicism — memento mori, the daily review (Seneca), and the “view from above” (Marcus Aurelius) behind the eulogy test and the review cadence.
• Ikigai — the Japanese/Okinawan sense of “a reason to get up in the morning,” behind Day 4.
• Contemplative traditions — the instruction to sit with contradictions rather than resolve them early echoes reflective practices common to Buddhist and other meditative lineages.

A caveat in the spirit of the rigorous track: these are attributions of influence and resemblance, assembled in good faith — not a peer-reviewed citation trail. If you want to go deeper on any one exercise, the names above are the threads to pull.

License

MIT © 2026 Tim Zander. The workbook content — every prompt, the structure, the layout, and the CSS — is original wording generated through conversations with Claude models; use, adapt, and share it freely.

The license covers this repository’s own text and code. The exercises descend from established ideas and methods credited in Where the exercises come from — concepts and procedures aren’t copyrightable, and naming a framework to attribute it isn’t a claim on it. Any trademarks or third-party works mentioned remain the property of their owners.