The single most-important thing you CAN do, is understand yourself as profoundly as you can.

Read John Truby’s book “The Anatomy of Genres”, which is on the 14 story-genres that we form our own meanings of.

He’s got a few details wrong

( like mistaking the Wild West village for what Village-archetype is, when real Village-archetype is the Tribal Mother Village,

and he misunderstands humor, as well, believing that the US-culture “drop” ( related to put-down ) is the core of humor, but the entire category of creative-misinterpretation is humor that isn’t dependent on “the drop”.

Hofstadter, in his “Godel Escher Bach” book, identified that the real shape of humor is the moebius strip: a strange loop.

You walk around in a “circle”, and … discover you’re now somehow upside-down??

Surprised-by-improbability, would be near-the-heart of it.

Anyways )

Truby’s book is CRAMMED with psychology insights into our forming, our growing-up, etc.

I’d require it of all high-schoolers, planetwide, for their HS diploma:

simply by making people encounter considering how they’re forming the meaning that they, themselves, are, would lever humanity up into much greater global understanding/competence, though it’d take a generation or 2 for the effects to become visible…

---

Lanier’s “Foreign to Familiar” & Hofstede’s “Exploring Culture” are both important, too, because if you know that some of the dimensions of culture they identify work a particular way for you ( ie doesn’t-work or you-need-this ), then suddenly, that spotlights something in your nature that has harmony in a specific subset of cultures, and shows you why that is doing this, in you…

( libraries exist: you don’t need to buy those, but the Truby books, you’ll probably fill with notes… )

_ /\ _