Optional Add-ons

Skip these freely. Nothing in the one-page anchor, the 5-day workbook, or the rigorous track depends on anything here. The core of every process is solo desk work you can finish in a few days.

These two add-ons are separated out because they’re the only parts that reach beyond that: one asks for input from other people, the other asks for a small piece of real-world action. They’re genuinely valuable — but they’re also the most likely to stall a process, so they’re opt-in, not load-bearing. Add them only if and when you want them.

Add-on A — Outside input

Why it exists: every reflective process has one unavoidable flaw — you are the most biased possible witness to yourself. Outside input is the only correction for it. Others often see your patterns more clearly than you do, especially your strengths, which feel so native to you that you’ve stopped noticing them.

Two versions, lightest first. The light one needs no one but you.

A1 — From memory, no outreach (2 min, zero friction)

Don’t ask anyone anything. Just recall:

• What do people consistently come to you for? (advice, a specific kind of help, a perspective) → __
• What compliment do you brush off because it feels too easy to be worth anything? That’s usually a real strength hiding behind how effortless it feels. → __

This captures most of the value of a full survey with none of the social cost. If the add-on makes you hesitate, do only this and move on.

A2 — Ask 3–5 people (needs lead time)

If you want the fuller version, text or email a few people who know you across different parts of your life (not all coworkers, not all family). Ask exactly two questions:

1. “When have you seen me most alive or most myself?”
2. “What do you think I’m genuinely good at — or see clearly — that I might not notice in myself?”

Keep replies in a gitignored file (answers/360.md). Start this several days early — it needs other people’s time, not just yours.

How to use either version: when you do the values/passions/purpose work, flag anything others saw that you didn’t write down yourself as “external.” Where their read contradicts yours, don’t dismiss it — that gap is exactly the blind spot the add-on exists to surface.

Add-on B — One small next action

Why it exists: reflection mines the past — it’s excellent at clarifying what you already are, and poor at revealing directions you haven’t lived yet. Only action generates genuinely new information. You can’t think your way into knowing how a path feels from the inside; you have to take one real step and watch what it tells you.

The catch, and the rule: open-ended “experiments” are the single most-abandoned part of any direction-finding process. So this is deliberately tiny.

Pick one small, cheap, reversible step you could finish in a single afternoon — one email, one conversation with someone already doing the thing, one evening building a rough version, one class signed up for.

• The step: __
• By when (pick a date): __
• Done = __

The only rule that matters: it has to be small enough that it will happen. If you doubt it will, cut it in half. A trivial step you actually take beats an ambitious one you don’t — and a single completed step teaches you more about a direction than another page of journaling ever will.

Then, at your next review date, ask only: Did I do it? What did it teach me? What’s the next one small step? That loop — not any document — is what actually moves you over a few years.