Just finished reading Robin Sloan’s very fun book, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel.

Really curious to explore the idea of a codex vitae.

If you were tasked to put down in writing everything you've learned in life, what would you write? Where would you write it? What format would it be in?

I think your approach of GitHub and Markdown is a solid one. My only question is how best to incorporate rich media into this approach. Tumblr is an option, but doesn't have diff support, which I think is important.

I think putting down your beliefs (even if they are constantly changing), is a great place to start. Knowledge is nothing without perspective, and if the point of a Codex Vitae is to pass on all of your accumulated knowledge, it needs to be accompanied with the belief system that led you to this knowledge. The same thing can certainly be said for experiences and how the decisions you made and things you learned were triggered by certain events.

Github definitely seems like a good place to start. The fact that it is version controlled reflects that both your beliefs and the knowledge you have can constantly change, and we can learn as much from looking at our history as we can from a 'final product'.

Joe, what kind of rich media are you thinking? At the very least, you could link off to anything supplementary that went along with your beliefs.

Thanks, Jason.

If any of you decide to do something like this, please post a link to it here!

My initial idea is to combine some visual life logging (memoto.com or similar) with a daily log of thoughts or reflections. But Jason's point that accumulated knowledge without perspective made me reconsider.

The biggest question in my mind is if the Codex Vitae is something that should added to regularly or as a reflection on the past, similar to most autobiographies.

I just published the first version of my own.

github.com

I've been working on this for a few months now, updating, revising and editing, all in an Evernote note. My intention is to continue updating this for the rest of my life, revisiting every few months with a calendar reminder to re-read, re-evaluate and make changes where appropriate.

I love the idea of having this on GitHub and being able to review each and every change.

Been working on something that, I think, incrementally brings me closer towards writing something akin to the Codex Vitae. I've just been taking a photo a day + writing down thoughts on cowbird.com using tumblr as a backend dumpster.

I like the idea that it must be a deliberate process that requires discipline but also that it is something that must be revisited especially while you're young.

A good mix of quantifiable + qualitative data is what I'm thinking. Met a guy who would track 150 data points about his day every night before he went to sleep on an excel chart with color-coded triggers based on sleeping time/beverage consumption and so on. I thought that was too data-heavy.

Data + soul = Story.
I like that idea.

Thanks, Buster.

I really like this idea about GitHub (much better than tumblr/blog/diary). Though it would be nice to have something like a timeline, something visual. So you can actually see key life events and changes of beliefs.

Like this maybe coolinfographics.com

I wonder what the right length of time is for revisiting a document like this. I'm thinking for me, either twice a year or on my birthday or new years eve would be optimal. Reflect on the last year, add and subtract from the document as I change.

Two or three years ago, I made this:
portfolios.aiga.org

Looking at it now, many of "Principles" seem naive or cliche, but by re-reading them, I'm able to remember what my model of the world looked like and, more importantly, felt like.

The work shown above, was made over a period of 6 months. Finding the right words and seeing how it was all connected was very important to me back then. I think if I were to do this today, I would try to do it after a long day, when my brain is fried, and I would try to get it all on huge pieces of paper as fast possible. I would do it this way in order to let my subconscious mind speak for itself.

With that said, I love the idea of doing something like this on Github so you can see the evolution.

I recently created a codex vitae. I'd been doing something similar for a few months using files stored in Dropbox, along with the journal program DayOne. I didn't have any real organizing principle though so it wasn't that useful. The idea of using Github to see history and diffs tied it together for me. I started with just a Beliefs file like Buster's. That grew over the course of a few days and branched out into an Axioms file and a Questions file. Beliefs are things that I believe to be true, axioms are rules and guidelines and questions are the questions that I find particularly important or interesting right now. I've been keeping a decision to record my thoughts while making major decisions and might add that to the repo as well.

I really like the breakdown of Beliefs, Axioms, Questions. I think I'm going to do the same and see where it ends up.

Interested to hear more about the "major decisions" file too... would you make any of these files public?

Major Decisions sounds pretty interesting because it can turn out two different ways.

1) You're right, those things were major decisions and it can be fun to look back on a very real inflection point in your life
2) It can be a much smaller decision than you ever imagined it would be and you can learn a lot from your behavior as it pertained to that decision.

Whether or not to make things public is something I've been thinking over. I haven't reached a decision yet. I'm not sure if that's just ordinary fear or if there is a legitimate reason to keep it private. The effects of privacy disclosures are hard to anticipate. Oddly I feel more comfortable with the idea of sharing them here with people I've never met than of someone I know stumbling upon it on the internet.

The major decisions file is an idea I took from @mjmauboussin farnamstreetblog.com.

Ok, so in accordance with axiom #2 "You must face your fears. Charge headlong at them without thought." I've posted my beliefs, axioms and questions files at britt.github.com. These are all relatively new and incomplete. In fact the questions file is completely blank since I haven't migrated it over from the many files in Dropbox. I want to take some time and consider what to bring over rather than just copying. I left out he decisions because as currently written there's some personal financial information in there that would be unwise to disclose on the net.

Britt, that was a great read

I'm interested to know what you all hope to get out of an exercise like the Codex Vitae. For me, it's an introspective process where I interrogate and try to understand what I actually believe and why, rather than simply leaving some beliefs unacknowledged and unchallenged. However, based on some of the previous comments I think others probably think about it differently.

Why are you interested in this?

Britt, for me it's the same as you say for yourself. Primarily, it's an exercise in figuring out what I really believe, and also trying to understand when and why my beliefs change. With the recent mass shooting, it was very nice to be able to simply think for a while about what my actual beliefs were about gun control rather than simply reacting and commenting on the event.

Secondarily, I have found that going back and reviewing the list is a great way to remind me about some of the bigger perspective narratives in my life that are important to me.

May probably sound silly to some. YMMV.
What would I put in my codex vitae?
--
Anything worth trying is not worth trying more than thrice. Then, stop trying.
Try to achieve what you can with what you have already, dont count on [any resources which] you dont have right now.
"Double-check is better then re-do."
If you want to enjoy your future make sure you are enjoying your present.
Money talks a language that everyone understands.
Make tools not rules.
--

Growing up, the founder of the school I went to had a short list called "Rules for Living." The importance of those having rules hit me sometime in the last year or so, being something that you believe in so consistently and so strongly that you can cite them at any point to affirm what you're doing. And that those rules can also change at any point given experiences, mistakes, things you've discovered.

I'm very interested to have started this doc when I was 22, publish it online at 23 and see how it evolves five, 10, 20 years from now.