Inner Growth

The six logical levels split a person's situation into: mission (relation to the world), identity (who I am), beliefs and values (what I hold true), capability, behaviour, and environment. The upper three run on the subconscious and answer "willing or not"; the lower three answer "able or not" and "supported or not". The upper three determine the lower three — will outweighs skill, so align it first. Most people grind only on capability and behaviour, which is treating symptoms.

The academy's seven disciplines are laid out along exactly these six levels: Inner Growth sits at mission, Cognition & Talent at identity, Classical Chinese Statecraft at beliefs and values, Decision Science at capability, Organisation & Governance at behaviour, and AI & Infrastructure at environment and resources. Pharma Trade in Practice belongs to no single level — it is the proving ground where all six are tested against real business. The upper levels set direction; the lower ones make it real. Both directions must be walked: top-down for direction, bottom-up for verification.

The model is isomorphic to 5W2H and to the Golden Circle: ask why first, then how, then what. Operationally: set goals the SMART way, iterate on a PDCA loop, and when results fall short, look inward first. When direction and energy align, capability and external support begin to resonate.

The ten questions form one causal chain: what value would the ultimate version of my work create? What do I truly want? What kind of person attains that value? Where do my talents meet the world's needs? What beliefs would support that mission and identity? What do I profess? Which capabilities are indispensable? What must I do, repeatedly, to build them? Which resources exist, which are missing, how to obtain them? And finally, back to felt sense: is this truly what I want?

Questions one to four work backwards from value to mission and identity; five to eight turn belief into capability and action; nine and ten close with a resource audit and a gut check. It is a routine worth re-running yearly — the answers change; the order (end first, step by step, present-minded, integrated) should not.

David Hawkins' Power vs. Force maps consciousness onto a scale: 20–30 shame, 50 apathy, 75 grief, 100 fear, 125 desire, 150 anger, 175 pride, 200 courage, 250 neutrality, 310 willingness, 350 acceptance, 400 reason, 500 love, 540 joy, 600 peace, 700 enlightenment. Two reminders: emotions have no moral polarity — grief, once faced, begins to transform; and the scale is for looking at yourself, never for measuring others.

Mapped onto organisations it becomes a sobering model: founders at 350–400, executives at 310+, middle managers at 250+ (unshaken under pressure), staff at 200+ (persistent). An outfit that strains past thirty people, or stalls at two hundred for years, usually has a strategy problem only in appearance — in substance, it has an energy-ceiling problem: organisations never outgrow the level of their key people.

Water has three states, and so does life. Below 0°C there is ice: for someone who has lost warmth toward life, the whole world is no bigger than the ground beneath their feet — everything is a threat to be defended against. At ordinary temperature there is water: it flows, it nourishes, it gets things done, yet remains bound to the earth — duties fulfilled, direction still following the terrain. This is the state of most people. At 100°C there is steam: with a hundred degrees of passion for life, one boils into cloud and flies — owning not only the earth but the sky, the world as vast as the universe.

The difference between the three states is not temperament but two adjustable dials: where attention goes, and how events are read (the causes and conditions of emotion — thought is the cause, other people merely the condition). Ruminating on the past and catastrophising the future drops the temperature below freezing; attention fixed on the 'have-tos' keeps water merely taking the shape of its container; returning attention to meaning and the next controllable step starts to raise the heat. On Hawkins' scale, ice roughly matches the contracting states below 200 (shame, apathy, fear, pride); water sits around the 200 threshold (courage to neutrality); steam corresponds to the open states above 310 (willingness, acceptance, reason, love). The six-level model draws the same map: environment is ice's predicament, capability and behaviour are water's daily round — mission and identity are the fire that makes steam. Eastern wisdom adds another dimension: the Tao Te Ching's 'the highest good is like water' — water's worth lies not in temperature but in benefiting all things without contention; Zhuangzi's 'empty boat' — freezing emotions usually come from reading others' acts as insults, and a change of interpretation melts the ice; Confucius' 'cultivating the self as root' — the fire is found inward, not begged from the environment.

Three ways to raise the temperature: leave people and information streams that keep cooling you — energy levels are dragged by surroundings; stay with people, books and work of higher levels — positive energy is contagious; and manage the denominator of desire while investing attention where it compounds (the happiness formula). Each evening ask one question: how big was my world today — the ground beneath my feet, the earth, or the sky? The question demands no instant boiling; it only insists that the water does not freeze.

Six mirrors: Maslow's hierarchy illuminates real needs; the six logical levels illuminate where you are thinking from; the growth-circle model locates you inside comfort, fear, learning, growth or freedom; the iceberg model exposes feelings, beliefs and yearnings beneath behaviour; the Dunning–Kruger effect marks what you don't know you don't know; and the personal business canvas treats you as a company — customers, value proposition, cost and revenue.

Any single mirror can flatter you: needs alone rationalise desire, strengths alone hide blind spots. Run all six and cross-check — self-knowledge is not a single epiphany but a repeatable examination programme.

Emotion ABC: A is the event, B the belief, C the emotional consequence. Most people write the causality backwards — "he did that, so I am angry." Three moves expose it. First, separate fact from thought: rain is a fact, "what awful luck" is a thought; facts do not vary by person, thoughts do. Second, trace thoughts to mental models: given the same material, everyone reads it from a different angle, because the deep, unexamined assumptions differ. Third, distinguish cause, condition and consequence: the seed in one's mental model is the cause; the other person's act is merely the condition; the emotion is the fruit. Mistaking condition for cause is the cardinal error.

Once seen, two practices follow. Inquire inward: "I am angry at X because..." — is that causal claim actually true? Could the other person have been under crushing pressure? Reverse it: flip subject and object, swap the emotion word — not to console yourself, but to break the fixed neural pathway and widen the space of possibilities, until one truth stands clear: only by turning attention to one's own thoughts does command of one's fate return.

Two therapies, one ancestry, different doors. REBT (Ellis) enters at belief: negative emotion follows irrational beliefs with three signatures — demandingness (must, should), overgeneralisation, and awfulising. CBT (Beck) enters at automatic thoughts: emotion, behaviour and cognition form a continuum, and cognition has three strata — automatic thoughts (fleeting), intermediate beliefs (attitudes, rules, assumptions) and core beliefs (ultimately: am I lovable? am I capable?). Automatic thoughts are generated by the strata beneath, so the fleeting is easiest to fix and the core hardest.

The practical tool is ABCDE: catch the reflexive interpretation (B) after the event (A), observe consequence (C), dispute it (D) — what other evidence, what other angle; accept the unchangeable, change the changeable — then energise new action (E). Useful substitutions: "must" becomes "prefer", "always/never" becomes "this time".

Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow: System 1 is fast, automatic and always on; System 2 is slow, effortful and only roused when System 1 stalls. The division of labour is usually efficient — but System 1's outputs (impressions, intuitions) do not always reflect reality, and the lazy System 2 often rubber-stamps them. Hence a stable catalogue of biases: mere-exposure (familiarity mistaken for truth), confirmation, halo, framing ("90% survival" equals "10% mortality"), anchoring, small-sample overconfidence, availability, loss aversion, endowment, peak-end.

Three workable counters: slow down at high-stakes moments and summon System 2 deliberately; bring in outside views — spotting others' errors is far easier than spotting one's own; and run the premortem — assume the plan failed a year from now and spend ten minutes writing the post-mortem. Intuition is not the enemy; unexamined intuition is.

MECE is two rules: no overlap, no gaps. Real exhaustiveness comes from completeness thinking — if success needs A+B+C+D, missing one means no success. Example: sustained success = strategy × organisational capability; capability splits into willingness × ability × permission — mindset (culture, pay), ability (grow, hire, retain, exit, borrow) and governance (structure, systems, resources), each layer exhaustive.

One pocket frame covers most ground: the cognition circle — what it is, why it matters, how to do it, what to watch out for. Answer all four for any new topic and you are already ahead. A frame is not a cage; it is the skeleton on which scattered points become a system instead of a list.

One can write HI = Σ(Px/Dx × SMx) × Mx × 1/(1+Rx) × g(Px): possession over desire, weighted by social meaning, moderated by satisfaction and risk, clipped by a threshold function. Three evidence-backed insights: the Easterlin paradox — income growth matched by growing desire leaves happiness flat or falling; the threshold effect — beyond a point, marginal utility turns negative (work past the critical hours corrodes health and relationships); and social meaning is the undervalued lever — altruistic behaviour durably raises satisfaction. Ma Kah-wai's line nails the denominator: one yuan of desire below your income is financial freedom.

The formula itself is a frame-thinking exercise in iteration: from weighted factors, through ratio structure and risk adjustment, to a layered dynamic model. Its practical conclusion is plain: shrink the denominator (desire management), raise the meaning terms (invest time in skills and legacy), and respect the thresholds (do not overload).

Sort the twelve by controllability. The given (birth, luck): endowment and the window of the times — high weight, near-zero control; the right attitude is reverence and identification: know your starting point and cycle position, and do not bet heavily against the wind. The environmental (place, name, bearing, mentors, reverence): living and working surroundings, reputation, and the inner circle of five — all optimisable, all leveraged investments. The earned (deeds, study, health, choices): good deeds compound into trust capital, study compounds into cognition — the sustained learner's mental capacity overtakes the non-learner's with age; and choice (career, spouse, risk avoidance) carries the highest return per unit of effort.

The dynamics matter more than the static weights: early life is dominated by the given; mid-life by the earned (deeds, study, image compounding); later life by strategy (health and choices rising). The framework's value is not fortune-telling but resource allocation — a standing reminder to keep investing finite time and attention in the factors that appreciate.

Strip love down and the answer is uncomfortably plain: it carries exchange, causation and nature; at the human level it compounds interest exchange, the seeking of security and reproduction; love is the experience the other gives you, and the ability to meet your needs. Clarity here is not cynicism — it stops imagination from extorting reality.

Drift can therefore be modelled as a game between changing needs and moral baseline. Changing needs are the pull — people change, needs migrate, the old balance loosens; the baseline is the anchor — moral sense and responsibility decide whether one adjusts through communication or simply walks. When pull exceeds anchor, drift happens; with a thick anchor, a relationship survives the migration of needs. Oaths are paper-thin against structure: what retains people is needs being seen and the baseline holding.

The same model governs every separation — a key employee leaving, a client drifting, a channel churning. Before asking who changed, read the two axes: what need shifted, did our response follow, which side loosened first — baseline or structure? Translate the emotional question into a structural one, and the next action appears.

This is about where resources come from. Most people work it backwards — stare at resources first, then scheme to grab them — and the movement deforms. The forward chain: intent sets energy, energy sets resources. With right intent, the matching energy arises; with the right energy, the resources within reach are the ones one can actually steward. What one cannot obtain was never one's to hold; what one holds, use well without anxiety.

The whole practice is watching the mind: observe your own intent, not others' gains. A one-degree deviation in intent muddies the energy, and the resources that arrive skew with it. Make it a daily discipline — at the arising of intent, glance once: altruism or calculation, long term or quick fix. Watch the mind, again and again.

It is isomorphic with the claim that aspiration outweighs ability: in the six-level planning frame the upper three govern the lower three, and intent is the force at the top. It also explains the paired maxim — in favourable times cultivate compassion to keep energy from scattering, in adverse times cultivate wisdom to keep it from turning muddy. Not asking about the future is not neglecting results; it is knowing that asking consumes while doing accumulates.