Imagine becoming healthier, stronger, and smarter every day.

It’s possible, if you know the right secrets.

Now imagine you had an amazing super power. It’s this: everything you tell yourself you want to do, you will do! You set your mind on something—a goal, a task, an adventure—and as your fears and insecurities melt away, you plunge ahead with a glad heart. Life would be pretty exciting, wouldn’t it?

With the secrets and life lessons revealed in Scivive, you’re on your way to having that power and much more.

This book can and will change your life. You’re about to see the world in a new light—one that you can perceive while everyone else is blind to it. The path to finding the meaning of your own life, love, health, and fortune awaits you in these pages.

The strategies you discover in Scivive will start benefitting your life immediately, and continue for as long as you use them. Scivive gives you a belief system, a team, and a style of being that feels great and pays dividends.

Being a Scivivor will be deeply rewarding and something you can feel good about, because we really are living life to its fullest.

Have you ever wondered why some people can attain so much, while others can only seem to achieve so little? How is it possible that such a vast difference exists among people in this modern time? This is not an accident. The paths to greatness have followed a similar form for thousands of years. Great things happen to average people every day, and by slightly stacking the odds in your favor, one day people will look up to you, and wonder how you became so lucky.

Here is a little secret: “luck” is simply a combination of preparedness and opportunity.

What else might you say to yourself? Eat healthy, sleep well, love yourself, your family, and your fellow man—you’re off to a good start. The first step is to know that you can give yourself great advice, and more importantly, you can follow through on it.

The world of happier, healthier people starts today... with you.

If you are reading these words, there is already something great about you. You’re that rare person who knows the future can be brighter. Your future can be shimmering. You believe in yourself. You know there are better and worse methods to doing and achieving things, and you prefer the better. You like to learn new things, particularly things you’ll be able to use effectively. Your entire life has led up to this moment, this turning point, where you found the book that will change your life forever. Today is that day. You will dream the dream, and then you will learn to live it! Your life can and will exceed your wildest dreams.

Is there anything more precious than human life? Than your life?

The answer is no. Humans—the Homo sapiens species—are the crown of creation, at least here on earth. Therefore, should we not make our number one priority investing in extending human life? Scivive’s talking about real dollars and real investment choices that have been proven to be two things:

1. Beneficial in the quest to extend human life.

2. A good investment that can make you very wealthy.

Imagine that! Socially responsible investing—no, make it socially imperative investing—in medical and healthcare technology can bring positive returns in both prolonging human life and making stakeholders very wealthy. How much better can it get?

More people make more progress more quickly. Aren’t you glad your parents didn’t decide the world would be prettier or work better without you in it? If great minds like Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Leonardo Da Vinci, and others were still alive and productive today, the world would be a better place.

You’re literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we’ll know a century from now and decide then.

We need a longevity stock index. A subset of biotech index, weighted by the high likelihood you might be saved by health technology. Make a profit on the companies that are most likely to be there to save you when you need to be saved. Get rich in the meantime.

Don’t overweight on tech that is likely to save others dissimilar to you. This assumes you value your life over others. If you don’t, then you should side with Bill Gates, and take the easy saved lives of clean water and mosquito nets.

It’s hard to get peoples’ money into missions oriented towards longevity, because the time horizon to profit is too far out. It’s also hard to get peoples’ money into charitable causes, because charities are so often inefficient. Offering people the ability to profit in the short term while enhancing the likelihood the health tech is there when they need it is the only way to mobilize the funds of the masses into saving their mortal selves.

Knowledge alone isn’t power. Intelligent action and using your knowledge equals power.

Let’s be serious, if reading a book on how to get what you wanted was all you needed to do, well, by golly, you’d see a world full of fulfilled, satisfied people.

Knowledge is but the first step. The habits built by taking correct action facilitate the heavy lifting of change. Knowledge without action is like a car with an empty gas tank. It could theoretically get you where you want to go and it’s nice that you have a car in the first place, but you also need the fuel to propel it forward. The same rings true in life; knowledge is the stationary car, but action is the fuel.

“What is the meaning of life?” is a bit of a malformed question. Life could be described in terms of quality multiplied by quantity of years, and nearly everything that increases time also increases the quality, so lucky us!

Also, the question regarding the meaning of life is typically oversimplified and incomplete. You might as well ask, “What is the meaning of bread?”

How do you answer that? “Am I hungry? Am I choking on it? Did I steal it, is it moldy?” There is no such thing as meaning except what you give it, and perhaps what other entities with power over you give it. Even that changes; what you think about things changes with age, how you’ve been treated, and how the world has changed.

Why does Scivive feel so compelled to venture down the rabbit hole of intuition, superstition and the occult? It’s becauser they waste everyone’s time. So many people waste so much time in unenjoyable ways when they could be wasting it in more fun and thought-provoking ways.

The emptiness of searching for meaning externally is trivial, as the meaning of anything is an individually conceived idea, based on your personal perceptions, needs, circumstances, and mindset.

Among humans there is great diversity. We are supposed to be different. It’s the reason we have sexual reproduction. In this world, during the course of life’s existence, there have always been living things that can clone themselves. They include sea sponges, tapeworms, aphids, jellyfish, and others. The problem with just making a copy of yourself is that, except for gene mutation and natural selection, it doesn’t facilitate the next generation to be better than the one before it. When male-female sex came along, the world rejoiced. Sex is the best way to get offspring that are genetically stronger than what came before them. In fact, many species risk their very lives in order to procreate in this way, such as black widow spiders and praying mantises. They are willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the species.

This way of reproducing facilitates rapid and effective change, because you’re quite literally mixing the blueprints of two unrelated individuals of the same species. Genetic inheritance has its own impulse to be mixed up randomly. We know that in the case of humans, genetics has determined that if you mate with someone closely biologically related to you, it often leads to bad health outcomes for the offspring, and consequently in many places it’s illegal.

With reproduction between unrelated partners, you also get this great effect of both (hopefully) of the partners consciously choosing the traits that they like the most out of a large pool of potential partners. This is how future generations gradually become faster and faster, smarter and smarter, prettier and prettier, a direct result of thousands of years of everyone choosing their favorites and mixing it up.

Why does Scivive talk about reproduction in the introduction? Because we’re all supposed to be different, and species such as humans with wide variations in abilities, desires, and behaviors are vastly superior in survival to “one trick ponies,” where if the situation changes only a small bit, everyone can get wiped out. If you don’t have variation in your species, you are not durable.

The world is constantly changing, it’s good to be durable, because durability equals a higher quality of life, as well as quantity; and being an omnivore is fun.

So, if it’s good that we are all different, if it’s good that we are continually more different than what came before us, then it’s also good that we don’t all have the same needs in the same priority. Therefore, all of the standard hierarchies of the needs of humans, such as Maslow’s, are deeply flawed from the start, because they assume that individuals are similar and have the same needs in the same orders as everyone else.

Scivive can assure you we do not, which is good news for humanity.

If we spent time analyzing how wrong everyone is and has been on every subject, we would be here forever. Much better that we use our short and valuable time together focusing on what works and eliminating what doesn’t work. Thus, your meaning of life should be slightly different from that of many other people. There is robustness for the system through diversity of opinion and behavior.

Scivivors are people who are at such a high level of fulfillment that they have the time, money, and desire to invest in their families’ survival. They leverage science to survive.

In that regard, among all life forms on earth, we are unique. No other species but Homo sapiens can do that.

There are nine core principles of Scivive. They are:

1. Mind

2. Body

3. Spirit

These first three are “you.” You are your physical body, but also what you think and what you feel. You will inherently become what you do, what surrounds you, and the experiences you have.

4. Money

5. Power

6. Respect

These next three are “amplifiers.” How fast and how well you become your future self are amplified by the money, power, and respect you build.

7. Time

8. Space

9. Experience

These three are what you are in the world.

We know that advancements in medicine have the greatest benefits for our loved ones and ourselves. Science is the best tool we have to take mankind to the next level. Strong-minded individuals fight the Grim Reaper standing up, while cowards kneel and pretend that nothing can be done. When the genie grants us wishes, we wish for more wishes.

A life well lived is one of balance, enjoying today to its fullest while also preparing for tomorrow. Lucky are we that being happier, healthier, and unconditionally loved can add not only joy to our years, but years to our joy.

Life is quality multiplied by quantity. The quantity factor is simply defined by how many years of life you compile. Quality, however, is being the best you, having more fulfilling relationships and experiences. A great life cut short is tragic, and a long life of mediocrity is tragic just the same.

The systems that helped you into this world and that you may still operate in include education, finance, politics, and these things all affect you on a day-to-day basis. Their scope is usually so large and they have so much momentum that they should be focused on separately from the things you can affect quickly and easily in your daily life. Understanding these larger systems becomes more important as your sphere of influence becomes larger and larger. Much like on giant ships, there’s one helmsman who turns the wheel to change direction. You may be that helmsman or, at the very least, have his or her ear one day.

A pure white light makes it easier to see everything properly. If you want your personality to shine a pure white light, you need to have all of the colors in balance. When you’re out of balance, you will have a tendency to tint everything you look at. Without the correct wavelength balance, you will not see things, or people, for what they really are.

The Magic Lens of Scivival splits the light of life into nine different wavelengths you can tune into. This is one of many gifts that living as a Scivivalist will give you. You’ll be able to see and understand things in a way that most people cannot, a much more pure and authentic view.

[This doesn’t match a real color wheel, which has 3, 6, or 12 colors.]

You can only focus on so much stuff at one time (chunking). Our brains are a little like our mouths, in that when you want to eat a sandwich, you do it in bites, and if you try to capture too much sandwich in a single bite, the chewing stops working and you just lock up. Your brain is a little bit like that, as it works most effectively when it’s given just the right amount of information to digest. That’s why splitting quality of life into groups of three is so useful.

Three is a magical number. Think of how many things come in threes.

We all know height, width and depth. We see color with red, yellow, and blue light sensing cells in our eyes.

We describe sound as the highs, mids, and lows.

We describe sizes as small, medium, and large.

It’s also the least number of walls you need to enclose a space, best sub positioning, seating position, speaker height, and seating height in room.

Proper sentences contain subject, verb, and object. And plotting vectors require a point, direction, speed.

Let’s not forget the rule of threes for photography, and that three points are needed to triangulate a signal in any given space. Additionally, we often see layered items as top, middle, and bottom, and the minimum number of legs required to stand something up with any stability is three.

Hendiatris (Greek, meaning “one through three”) is a way of using emphasis (in writing or speech) to describe something by means of including three words to describe a single idea. Input, process, output.

The appeal of the three-fold pattern is illustrated by the transformation of Winston Churchill‘s reference to “blood, toil, tears and sweat” (echoing Garibaldi and Theodore Roosevelt) in popular recollection to “blood, sweat, and tears.” Similarly, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan describes the importance of community, without which life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. This has been reduced to the commonly heard triad, “nasty, brutish and short.”

Another example of threes is illustrated when a testimonial oath by a witness in a US court proceeding is asked to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

The list of examples goes on and on: inch, foot, yard; past, present, future; Earth, Sun, and Moon; morning, noon, and night.

Additionally, the Greek number Pi is basically equal to three.

The government of the United States has three branches: executive, legislative, judiciary.

One could say that all this 3 magic is a natural consequence of counting, starting with 1, which isn’t exciting; and then 2, which one could find many examples of cool, memorable pairs (Lennon/McCartney, the Wright Brothers), but pairs contain much less information than triplets. And so 3 is the lowest countable number where more complicated effects start happening, because the pairs can only be so exciting. “Rock, paper, scissors” is more fun than just “rock, paper.” Because they’re so effective in communicating, math, and building, it’s worth knowing the power of threes.

Scivive is a great name for a movement. It’s an action, and all movements require such.

The title Scivive is interesting because it invokes the thought of life and mortality. Then when you make it Scivival, the “vival” part clues you in to something that’s coming to kill you, whether it’s someone who doesn’t like you, a hereditary disease, or the simple passage of time. Some think it’s important to differentiate a belief in survival through scientific advancement, and more than just survival we really want to achieve a better quality of life (not just quantity). You don’t want to just have a life that’s devoid of happiness to last longer, you want a life that is fulfilling and healthy that lasts longer.

Some self-help books are afraid to give you specific advice, as they like to leave their market appeal broad by being vague in what they tell you. Scivive would prefer to tell you the truth. Scivive will tell you what’s good for you where it can, and when it can be most effective to you, at the cost of cool points and broader vagaries.

It can be difficult to overcome this initial bias if you do not maintain an open mind. As a newborn, you come in to this world being influenced from all angles. You don’t initially get to pick and choose where these biases come from. As you gain more experience and wisdom, however, this begins to change. You can train yourself to follow or seek out more positive influences, and subdue the negative ones, while overcoming hardships and difficult circumstances.

Many great people have been forced into greatness because of harsh circumstances. Life is a splendored thing. Often times what you thought was a curse turns out to be a blessing. All of us have the fortune of misfortune. You never know when your turn of bad luck has actually saved you from an episode of worse luck. The most respected and successful people in this world have always had one or more hardships early in life. If you were to find someone who you thought had no hardship, upon questioning them, you’d likely learn they found discomfort in an area you may never have thought of, or may not even approve of, but it was definitely real for them.

We speak languages we didn’t invent, and travel on roads we didn’t pave. So too are most of the thoughts we have handed down to us, without needing to invent them ourselves. Ism’s and ity’s give us paths to follow, and billions of people do. However, the number of available playbooks and perspectives of organizing the world into parts, and suggested actions on those parts, are quite few really. Philosophy, and communism, capitalism, Marxism, are all interesting ways to see the world, but ultimately not very useful to you, as they don’t really answer the more important questions: What do you do? What can you do better to get what you want out of life?

Inside of all of us there is a circuitry, which has served our ancestors for thousands upon thousands of years. It is with you today because it works. Nature tends to get rid of things that don’t work. Oddly, nature tends to get rid of everything over time. Scivive could expand on this using a whole series of books called “99 percent of everything that has ever existed is permanently extinct.” It’s an amazing fact, really. But for now, focus on the circuitry.

As you come into the world, you are influenced from all angles. Those angles are not only external. They are internal to you as well, both mental and chemical. The influence of heredity, customs, location—it all leaves an imprint. When an American travels the world, people easily determine they are from America by the way that they speak. These observers may have preconceived notions about what it means to be American, how Americans act, and of what use they are. If you wanted to ask someone how to make great tea, you’d likely rather ask an Englishman as it’s much more popular there. Conversely, if you wanted to know how to throw a forward pass in football, you’d be better off asking an American.

The influence of your parents, geographical location, language, skin color, education, natural abilities, and talents all play a role on how you turn out in life.

Here’s an interesting lesson, arguably the most interesting one of all: Not all of those things combined, the entire mass of all of it, will ever compare to your drive. A highly driven person can overcome great adversity and sometimes even become a hero, despite any of the hardships or factors aforementioned.

There is a special place in our souls for the role of hero. When we see someone do something amazing, in the Olympics, on the battlefield, or at home, there’s a calling to some part of us that wants to greatly reward them and rejoice, because they brought something into reality we’ve so often dreamt of. Even if not conscious, some part of us knows that what they did was great and we should smile and stand tall in admiration.

As it stands, a Scivivalist’s favorite quote of all time could be from Calvin Coolidge:

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, ‘Press on!’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

Many people that haven’t read The Art of War like to denounce it, because they think that everyone that reads it tries to turn everything else into war so the learning of the book can be applied. If people that read it are improperly applying it, then it may be the case. In reality, what you will find is that the conflicts that exist in war also exist outside of war. Just as Shakespeare might say something along the lines of “to thy own self be true,” may be biblical as well. If you Google the phrase “Know thy enemy,” you will come up with The Art of War, written by Sun Tzu over 2,500 years ago. That phrase has been adapted through the centuries in countless works of literature. Originally the premise was in three parts:

1. If you know only thyself, with every battle you will also have a loss.

2. If you know the enemy but not thyself, you will also lose a fair amount of your battles.

3. If you know thyself and your enemy, you can fight a hundred battles without a loss.

Knowing yourself and your enemy does applies not only to conducting warfare. Knowing yourself can exist in all areas of life. You need knowledge of the other thing that which is the struggle you are pushing against, which might not be another conscious actor. It might be cold temperatures, it might be laziness, it might be cooking food properly. Such knowledge grants you huge a huge advantage against it. Every good story is pushed against some weight. Therefore the statement “Know thyself and thy enemy” is useful in all contexts, particularly those outside of war.

The reason the book has remained relevant for over twenty-five centuries isn’t because we are all warriors and generals, it’s because it’s universally powerful advice in many areas that are not related to war. Conflict and strategy and effort are required in many important areas of life.

Maybe what’s actually most important to you isn’t the cool novel ideas included in Scivive that give it validity. Maybe what you need is the more basic stuff that influenced the author and the writing of this book. Perhaps those same basic ideas bring you to a position where you can build and give back. Don’t be so in love with the concepts you built after you achieved, without paying homage to those that allowed you begin building in the first place. The precedent ideas of others are equally as important as your expansion on them. Don’t allow the precedent generic useful ideas become forgotten because you internally value more all the “new to you,” or “generated by you” ideas.

Every path gets taken. People will follow all the paths, and advertise more good paths to outcompete the bad ones. When you understand the whole system, when you see the earth as a spinning blue marble, you can play in the game when you want, and you can also be satisfied with not playing the game, because you know what all the endings of the game look like. This is futility at its finest. All paths shall be followed, even fake ones you made up for fun, so spamming good ones is a great idea, and it’s a contact sport.

Survivalists and doomsayers spend lots of time and money on things that rarely pay off. The survivalists of the 1950s prepared for a Russian nuke attack, and then got killed by the same boring stuff that killed most of their ancestors—cancer and heart attacks, mostly. You’re much more likely to die with a whimper than a bang these days.

Artful beats accurate. It can be interesting when you decide to do things less accurately but end up with a better effect. For instance, Scivive includes “Spirit” as a section, although some may find it an inaccurate description. The way most people would understand spirit is as something that is beyond them, past them, deeper than them. It’s beyond personality, it’s beyond behavior. Scivive tends not to believe in that, but since everyone else does to such a great degree, it’s useful to be inaccurate and use “spirit.” But this book is going to use it differently from the way that most people do. That is to say that “spirit” could be defined as the emotions and drives that compel you into action, which most people would probably put under “mind,” but it’s close enough to the ephemeral and ghostlike that they’ll probably also accept it under “spirit.”

Scivive made the decision to choose “feels good, is emotionally compelling and easier to digest” over “more accurate, alien, off-putting, and less likely to execute and do.” It was a logical decision. If you must choose between “accuracy” and “feels good,” and the “feels good” is about 80% as accurate as the super-accurate, you should definitely go with the “feels good” because in the grand scheme of things, these are not recipes that will be followed to the letter. People will only perform a very small—less than 1% subset—of the self-help advice that you provide to them.

If you make a small adjustment for the sake of being able to remember, transmit, or be sticky or feel better about it, or address or synchronize with a common parable that people believe in, such as “there’s no free lunch” or “time heals all wounds”—euphemisms like that—then you’re better off doing it, because people are unlikely to execute the specific thing that you weren’t 100% accurate on. Therefore, the things that they’re more likely to execute on are the stuff you’re enhancing by not alienating with unspecific language or overly specific language that has no heart and no feel, and stops them and makes them think for a long time instead of just continuing the digestion train, the “yes” train, the rapport. Breaking rapport for no good reason is a bad strategy.

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough. Simplicity is power.

It is very likely that most people haven’t completed reading any self-help material, let alone most of the classics in it, so let’s not just assume they are where you are, and that they don’t need to know what you already take for granted. Most people don’t follow their own advice, let alone what they read in literature. If this book simply said, “eat healthy, brush your teeth, and exercise,” (which is great advice), no one would read it.

People want to read something they have not already heard a million times. The ideas that you have to hear about are novel, unique, outrageous, and thus make a book worth reading.

The most important part of writing a book isn’t to present all the data you have on a thing, but to invoke the reader, and give them a better ability to analyze that data further, and dig deeper. In an ideal world, where one has a ton of memory and an Internet connection, they already have access to everything in the world. What they need from you is less, not more. They don’t need more data, they need better data. You need to refine and hone their limited attention span on something that is truly beneficial to them, rather than illustrating a million things to confuse the issue. Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” Again, simplicity is power if practiced and focused properly.

Demand results from your study of this work. Get more out of the book, maintain an open mind, and focus on results. Demand results from your study of this work. Scivive is only as good as the actions you take from it, and, by proxy, the actions others may take from it from the ideas passing through you. If a book told you to follow a set of instructions without providing convincing proof, would it be a useful book? No. Demand more from your life. Low expectations are the father of regret. If all your dreams came true instantly, what would your life look like? Specifically, set a new standard. Dream the dream. Live the dream. In this world, you’re either making your dreams come true, or you are a part of someone else’s.

This book is meant to improve the actions you take and change your life. This is not meant to add to the long list of things you already know you should do, and which you know you’re not doing.

You’re only awake 16 hours a day. Now subtract out all the hours where you have to be doing something. How many hours are left? Three? This is your free time. Choose wisely how you spend these precious few hours.

If your schedule hasn’t changed when you finish Scivive, read it again, because you’re only going to get the improvement you want in your life when it’s scheduled full of more action.

You never step in the same river twice. It changes, and over time, so do you. When you read with a result in mind, you notice and remember the parts that are most important for you to remember. Scivive offers something different to each person who reads it. Everyone is at a different place in their personal journey. As you progress, you’ll see that it adds new meaning to parts that didn’t seem so special to you the first time around.

A real conversation is the highest aspiration of a well-written book. Most books are nothing like a conversation. In a conversation of equals, you listen at least as much as you speak. The dazed look on one of your audience’s faces easily lets you know when you need to spend more time explaining something. Sometimes you can feel what’s going on inside your conversational partner’s mind. You notice when a person’s mouth is eager and waiting for a pause, any pause will do, to add to the conversation. A conversation where everyone is learning and building is a beautiful thing. Scivive is a mere two dimensional representation of such a glorious event, and three dimensions are much better as they add a great deal of complexity, interaction, and exploration of a subject.

If what you have to say is important enough to make into a book, then it is surely important enough to be written in a language your audience understands. If you want to have a good time speaking with teenagers, the elderly, hippies, and CEOs, you’d better learn to speak a few different languages. It is believed that if you speak to a person as a friend, and are interested in similar things, you can form a greater and longer lasting bond.

Since a book cannot converse with you directly to ask you personally about the things you care about, Scivive is going to have to settle for you choosing your own adventure. You can leave the parts of this conversation that are least important to you for last. The topics covered in Scivive are broad and touch so many people in many places that they can be seen from hundreds of perspectives. Where one person finds an idea exciting, another will be enraged. What could be more fun!

We deal in controversial things, for those are the things that have the most profit. The more people that are doing a thing wrong, the more profit there is in changing to doing it right. Sadly, people doing things wrong usually think they’re doing them right, and perhaps better than everyone else. Telling people what they’re doing wrong, and how to do it better, usually pisses them off.

Find freedom by not becoming the devil’s advocate.

Don’t be a slave to someone else’s position.

We’re lucky when we meet someone who is not only passionate about that which they speak but perhaps even knowledgeable as well. We would obviously want to impress such a person speaking to us, so as to be worthy of the conversation. What are the most common ways you’ve seen this happen yourself? You can’t very well repeat back the same ideas that were just given to you. You might come up with a novel idea that could add to another’s; however that person is likely more knowledgeable and has been thinking about it for longer, which may be why the topic was brought up in the first place. It would be most impressive if you could construct on top of another person’s idea and make it stronger.

There is an easy way, though, and a shortcut to feeling important: Destruction! Let the idea maker know why it is wrong, why it won’t work, or shouldn’t work, or can’t work. This is great stuff, where in the original conversation, if you only added a small icing on the idea cake, you’d seem only to be an accessory. If instead you disagree with someone’s ideas, you are equal or greater! Screw the quest for truth, which pays off only after many days. Feeling important pays off right now! Think about the last time you tried to explain to someone they were doing something wrong, and remember the mental gymnastics you might have witnessed. It takes a great person to skip the easy route and bide their time in silence, thinking of something great to add. When the gambit pays off, and you can construct with your speaking buddy instead of disagreeing, friendships are made.

There are many different ways to make a judgment about something.

For example, when some people are driving, they absolutely hate cyclists on the road. When a bicycle is so damn close to the car’s side view mirror that it looks like they’ll collide—how stressful! Bikes are the enemy. They are yet another opportunity to ruin a life, and if this flimsy human is nudged with the car, he’ll likely sprawl into a broken heap, and the driver will spend much quality time in prison.

From the bicycler’s perspective, why would someone waste money on a car, and fuel, and car insurance, when people need to exercise for health anyway? Why not help the environment, save money from the wallet, and improve one’s heart by bicycling to work! If a cyclist runs over a pedestrian with the bike instead of a car, it is likely there will be no fatalities or jail time involved.

If two people have two different perspectives, which one is right? Perhaps both people, at different times. Or even at the same time. These kinds of very hard to square, wars of perspective, are happening all the time. Imagine how much easier it is to find disagreement instead of construction on ideas.

We humans are very good at not understanding things when we don’t want to. There are two old sayings that encompass the idea pretty well:

1. You cannot wake a man who’s pretending to sleep. — Navajo Indian proverb.

2. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair.

Why must this be mentioned? Sometimes, we are that person. Anyone who has ever changed his or her mind about something was likely not happy to hear someone disagreeing from the start of the conversation. Once we’ve changed our mind about something, we quickly forget how strongly we previously believed the other direction. No one likes to think that they were ever wrong, and likely even less, that they’ll be wrong again sometime soon.

You’re going to get the most out of this book, and life, if you find ways to squeeze the knowledge out where it’s useful, and focus on learning and becoming more powerful at the expense of the bravado of disagreement. If the need for disagreement becomes too hard to bear, boot up good old YouTube, and comment your anger away, as mostly everyone else does these days.

Are you the type of person who is good at learning new things? What is the maximum amount that you can agree with what Scivive is saying? Think about how much you have actually used or changed based on all the books you have read in your life. Do you think that you should get more out of them? What could you do to get the most out of Scivive for yourself?

In the pages ahead, secrets are revealed and many questions answered. There is only you and these great ideas. Your life is in your hands. Don’t waste a moment—seize the future and make it work for you.

Ready? Let’s get started!