Mythos

My Glossary is a collection of the words and phrases 📝John Zdanowski has coined to think with — from 📝Philosofathergizer to 📝Inevitable Unicorn to the Not-a-Book.

Glossary

0-9

  • 📝8-1-1 — the process of turning an 8-hour-a-day job into a 1-hour-a-day job, then a 1-hour-a-week job, by applying The Process iteratively.

A

  • 📝Activity Spectrum Analysis — the name John gave to examining where a person spends their attention, how it feels, and how they would like to spend it, as a step toward defining their 📝Best Day Ever.
  • 📝Augmented Human — a person made greater by good training, good process, a well-connected system, and visibility into performance.

B

  • 📝Best Day Ever — "Today is the Best Day Ever," the opening line of the 📝Boot Sequence, an affirmation that tends to draw incredulous responses from friends and colleagues.
  • 📝Big Vision — a company's mission-scale purpose, which John pairs with positive 📝Unit Economics as the combination that can change the world.
  • 📝Boot Sequence — the story a person tells themselves on waking, named for the routine an electronic system runs at startup to tell it who it is, and rewritten on purpose to reclaim the authority to narrate their own epic story.
  • 📝Brand Halo — a parent brand that serves as a container for a story, holding a family of ventures under one narrative.
  • Brujo — John's word for the crazy person, or the crazy person's idea, that it usually takes to change a status quo, such as the first skiers who wore helmets.

C

  • 📝CFO System — an integrated set of processes and tools to collect business data and transform it into actionable metrics that drive better, more reliable results.
  • 📝Community Sharecropping — growing cloned plants labeled with friends' names and giving each friend the whole harvest.
  • 📝Configure don't code — the Weekly Accounting build principle of assembling a company's systems by configuring existing software rather than writing custom code.
  • Contents of Consciousness — John's 2x2 of Breath, Breeze, Thought, and Stories, arranged across inside and outside the body and before and after words.
  • 📝Cooperative Data Service License — a license that lets companies in an industry share financials and key operating metrics without disclosing personally identifiable information, with the data held by 📝One Inc Cooperative for its Citizens and clients.
  • 📝Credit Box — the set of criteria a lender uses to decide which borrowers and deals it will finance.

D

  • 📝Don’t blame — the maxim that you shouldn't blame other people for the road you are on, because that's your own asphalt.

E

  • 📝Empathy Disclaimer — acknowledging that everything in a business happens to, because of, and for people, while putting the human issues in brackets to be considered separately from what is right for the business.
  • 📝Endo-fundic — a word-set John and his college friends invented, modeled on endothermic and exothermic reactions: an endofundic person sucks the fun out of a gathering and an exofundic person contributes fun to it.
  • 📝Enough — recognizing that what you have right now is enough, measured by how much financial capital your current lifestyle actually requires.
  • epic story — the life narrative a person authors on purpose, as in "the narrator of my own epic story" from the 📝Boot Sequence.

F

G

  • 📝Gamma moment of Insight — the instant a massive new insight lands, named for the gamma brain waves such an insight is said to stimulate.
  • Garden of zEden — John's name for his family farm in San Diego.
  • Generational Storytelling — John's view of philosophy, in which books, bibles, laws, governments, companies, and families carry a culture's branded system of values from one generation to the next.
  • 📝Gilded Path — the course people start down when excitement about a big vision leads them to a vague agreement to build toward it before anyone has shown it can produce positive unit economics.
  • 📝Give What You Grow — a cooperative answer to "eat what you kill," in which people who cultivate an opportunity get a voice in how its proceeds are reinvested in the community and its members, themselves included.
  • Good Life — the path John was told would lead to A Good Life, from good grades and a good college to working until retirement and church every Sunday, which he later saw as a story handed to him rather than one he chose.

I

J

  • 📝Jeff Psychology — the idea that whatever motivation or intention you imagine another person has is coming from you.
  • 📝Job — regular paid work, which John defines three ways: the way we make a living, our small place in the universe where we can best contribute, and a mistake if it's not a vacation.

L

M

  • 📝Magic Cohort — the subsegment of customers with the highest 📝LTV:CAC ratio, which is a fallacy to look at alone because you also pay to acquire and serve everyone else.
  • 📝Meditative Experience — a state in which the whole body is immersed in an activity and the mind seems to resonate along with it.
  • 📝Monday Morning Metrics (MMM) — a clear, customized picture of a business's key metrics, integrated from all its systems and presented every Monday morning.
  • 📝Multi-Dimensional Rationalization — a methodology for justifying the returns of projects that benefit humanity, measured in multiple 📝Types of Capital.
  • 📝Mythos Nirvana — the moment previously captured thoughts appear on demand, like trusted functions while coding, and more broadly trusted people joined by a trusted way of communicating.

N

  • the naught — consciousness itself, the vast, unchanging ground that thoughts bubble up from.
  • A New Story — a story about oneself and one's place in the world that a person installs on purpose, as John and Jeff did when they asked how they wanted their days to be and built a system until their days and nights were free.
  • Not a Bible — John's poem and idea that a book becomes a "bible" only through longevity, that everyone carries a bible of their own as their mind, map, and judge, and that any book can become one's bible by writing what one thinks is true.
  • Not-a-Book — part book, part notebook, with blank pages for the reader's own story.
  • Not-a-Poem — a poem made of bullet points.

O

  • 📝One Economy — an economy composed of a community of 📝Citizens, a collection of agreements, and a ledger of exchanges.
  • 📝Our Ethos — the beliefs John and Jeff developed when they started 📝BrightZen Systems, opening with "the stories we tell create the reality we see" and closing with "Today is the Best Day Ever."
  • Our Premise — the IF/THEN at the root of Zen and the Art of [nothing]: if the stories we tell create the reality we see and 📝systems work better than goals, then build a system to build systems and practice better storytelling.

P

R

S

  • 📝Scheduling Therapy as a Therapeutic Method — scheduling an appointment with a therapist as a way to say "I'm ready to have a healthy conversation when you are."
  • 📝Signal and Noise — the idea that every data signal in a business is some part signal and some part noise, and the work is separating the two.
  • 📝Specialized Digital Micro Tasks — the small, tool-specific tasks that make up many jobs today, each requiring some mix of education, training, and problem-solving experience.
  • 📝Startup Witness Protection Program — John's name for the two decades his family spent moving up and down the West Coast from one startup to the next.
  • Stories We Are Told — the inherited stories of family, school, religion, and culture that shape a person before they write their own, the subject of Section 2 of Zen and the Art of [nothing].
  • Stories We Tell — the stories a person intentionally tells about themselves and their place in the world, which in John's view create the reality they see, the subject of Section 3 of Zen and the Art of [nothing].
  • 📝Storyteller Consciousness — the recognition that the stories we tell create the reality we see, an idea John learned from Charles Eisenstein's The Ascent of Humanity and made part of 📝Our Ethos.
  • 📝Symposium Fractal — the way 📝One Gatherings repeat endlessly like a fractal, with each space held drawing more people in to hold space.

T

  • Top Ten Ways to Turn Time Into Money — John's countdown of the career ladder, ending in a system that pays you.
  • 📝Transaction Engine — the engine John places at the core of every process.

V

W

  • 📝Weekly Accounting — the practice of closing the books and reading a business's numbers every week instead of once a month.
  • 📝Weekly Philosophy — "If you're not managing your business weekly, you're managing your business weakly," the belief that an empowered team that understands its metrics weekly is the fastest way to improve a process.
  • 📝What If — a process of exploring extremes separate from the reality of the present moment.
  • What You Speak Is What You See — John's refrain "What you speak is what you see, it must be true, it's poetry," for the way intentions put into words tend to come true.

Z

  • 📝Z as the dimension of time — the signal-processing convention of putting time on a third axis, which John applies to business data through Z Axis Labeling.
  • 📝Z Axis Labeling — borrowing the Z axis of digital signal processing as time, the practice of appending End of Week, End of Month, and similar labels to transactional data from business applications.

Contexts

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