How To Build Your Own Philosophy

A Beginner's Guide To Building Your Own Philosophy Of Life

In this article, I provide a general overview of the exact system I teach in order to help people build their own personal philosophy of life — what I call a micro-philosophy.

While I can’t go into all of the details here, I wanted to provide you with a general framework for getting started. I often find that what people struggle with the most is simply knowing where to start and what questions to ask.

This is especially true with philosophy.

A lot of people think that they need to master the entire history of philosophy before they are allowed to begin developing their own thoughts.

Everything I write on Substack is pretty much aimed at rejecting this idea and empowering ordinary people to think philosophically about their life.

Philosophy is like any other skill.

You can just start doing it.

Consider music.

You don’t need to get a PhD in music and master the works of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach before you are allowed to start making your own music.

You can just start making music.

In fact, this is often how the best music is made.

Why would things be any different when it comes to writing down your beliefs and values about life’s most important questions and organizing them into a digestible system?

What I will give you in this article is a general framework you can follow to do just this.

If you want to go deeper after you get started, I recently released a complete course called Micro-Philosophy: Foundations that provides a step-by-step guide for building your own micro-philosophy in just 28 days.

The first cohort of the Micro-Philosophy: Foundations recently concluded and the results were incredible.

For some students, the course gave them the concepts, frameworks, and community they needed to systematize decades of deep thinking and reflection they performed on their own prior to taking the course.

For other students, the course was an opportunity to develop answers to important questions that they have either avoided for years (because life just gets in the way), or struggled to ask in the first place. It helped them discover surprising insights about who they are, what they want to accomplish in life, and how to go about doing it.

During the final week, each student produces a first draft of their own micro-philosophy — which is a systematic, yet concise, statement of their most fundamental beliefs about the world, value, morality, and action.

(If you were curious about what the first draft of a micro-philosophy looks like, some students volunteered to publish their micro-philosophies in our private community. I created a library of these micro-philosophies that you can access for free if you join the private community on Circle here. One of my dreams is to have this library full of hundreds of different micro-philosophies created by real individuals).

What Does It Mean To Build Your Own Philosophy?

Building your own philosophy is not like building a house, or building your body.

It is not a physical activity, but a mental activity.

It primarily involves writing, reading, thinking, questioning, and creating.

While building a philosophy is a kind of mental activity, it is not disconnected from the physical world.

First of all, as anyone who has tried to sit down and write for an hour knows well, it takes effort and can be incredibly draining.

Second, the physical actions we take, the emotions and desires we feel in our bodies, and the material conditions of our physical existence and social environment are all deeply relevant to the task of building (and re-building) a philosophy.

But the activity itself is a mental activity.

And the thing you are building is a mental object — a conceptual structure.

A personal philosophy is a conceptual structure of beliefs, values, and principles that guide, shape, limit, and justify who and what someone is and does.

Building a personal philosophy, then, is going to involve lots of thinking, writing, and reading about these things.

This can be difficult.

But here are two pieces of good news.

1. Committing 10-20 hours to sitting down and writing out your most deeply held beliefs is something that can set you up for years of clarity and success. You don’t need to become obsessed with philosophy and spend all of your free time thinking and reading about difficult subjects. A little deep thinking, done periodically, and with the right questions at hand, goes a long way.

2. I have developed a proven framework to not only help you get started, but also figure out how to revisit and revise your beliefs over time as you gain more life experience. It is not the only way to go about organizing your beliefs, but it is one way that works.

Despite how important it is, we don’t learn how to build our own philosophy in school, so it is natural to be puzzled about how to go about doing it.

What I am offering here is a way to go about doing this that is supported by years of studying, researching, and teaching philosophy at the highest levels, as well as the results that I have achieved for myself, and that my students have achieved in the Micro-Philosophy: Foundations course.

I think almost anyone can build their own micro-philosophy by following these 4 very general steps outlined below.

Step 1) Discover Your Birthview

One of the best ways to figure out what your current beliefs, is to spend a bit of time reflecting on where your beliefs came from.

Whether they realize it or not, everyone is born into a worldview.

I call this your birthview.

Your birthview has had, and will likely continue to have, a massive impact on how you think, feel, and do.

Your birthview is the earliest source of your beliefs about the world.

What are beliefs?

Very simply, beliefs are your thoughts about whether statements about the world are true or false.

For example, you might believe that the globe is warming as a result of human activity, or that this is a hoax.

You probably believe that you are reading this sentence right now (unless you think this some kind of dream or illusion).

All human beings hold millions of beliefs in their minds, but most of them are completely uninteresting.

For example, you probably believe that you were born at the date, time, and place indicated on your birth certificate. When people ask you when and where you were born, you repeat what is written on your birth certificate.

Other beliefs we hold, however, are incredibly important and exert an overwhelming influence on the course of our lives.

For billions of human beings, the belief that God exists is not only part of their birthview, but has a significant impact on their thoughts, actions, and feelings.

For example, it might lead to a lifetime of shame surrounding bodily pleasure, or it might lead to a life of purpose, joy, and self-sacrifice.

Results may vary.

(If you are interested in exploring the overwhelmingly powerful influence that religious belief can have on our mental health, I highly recommend the writings of Jim Palmer here on Substack. Jim is an ex mega-church pastor who has dedicated himself to helping individuals rebuild their worldview after leaving their religion).

One of the primary benefits of building your own micro-philosophy is that you can pinpoint exactly what you believe and begin to think critically about how certain beliefs may be exerting a positive or negative influence on your life.

Very often people turn to studying topics like philosophy, psychology, religion, and self-improvement to look for answers when they are struggling in life.

I think this is great.

I really do.

But there is also a risk that someone spends thousands of hours (and dollars) filling their minds with all sorts of interesting and important ideas, but ends up repeating the same mistakes and thought-patterns for years.

Why?

Because, at some point, you need to stop and figure out what you believe, what you think, so that the ideas you are consuming can be applied to your unique life circumstances.

Studying other people’s ideas has many well-known benefits, but I strongly recommend studying yourself as well.

One of the best ways to do this is to simply figure out where you currently are.

What are your intellectual coordinates?

Where do you uniquely exist in the vast world of ideas? How have you changed your location over time?

Discovering your birthview will provide you with a great starting point since, for most people, the worldview they were born into is directly connected to what they currently think (even if you have changed your mind).

Additionally, it can often be hard to see ourselves clearly in the present moment, since we are too close to ourselves.

Your birthview provides you with the right amount of intellectual distance from yourself, but is still relevant to who you are today — because it is part of the intellectual history of your life.

If is your intellectual gene pool.

Some people continue to think, feel, and live in alignment with their birthview even as adults (there is nothing wrong with this by the way). Others have radically changed their beliefs and values and no longer identify with their birthview.

Whether you identify with your birthview, or have rejected and replaced it, it is important to uncover the ways in which it has influenced, or continues to influence your thinking today if you want to build your own philosophy.

You can, of course, start building your own philosophy while completely ignoring the past, but the danger is that you will wall yourself into your current way of thinking.

So, how do you discover your birthview?

Here is a list of questions you can ask yourself to begin uncovering it:

1. In what town, state/province, and country did you spend the most time between ages 0 and 18? And in what year were you born?

2. As a child, what seemed “normal” to you in terms of lifestyle, safety, or opportunity—and when did you first realize that others lived differently?

3. Think back to your childhood. For each member of your family, recall the first moment you recognized that they held certain fundamental beliefs—religious, political, or philosophical. What do you remember about each person’s outlook?

4. Which family member’s belief exerted the greatest influence on you while growing up, and why?

5. Looking back, were there any ideas in your family that felt uncomfortable or risky to discuss?

6. Were your family’s outlooks broadly accepted by the surrounding society, or were they seen as controversial or unwelcome?

7. Imagine you were born into a radically different culture. Which convictions or habits of mind might have changed, and which might have persisted?

8. What belief systems or worldviews do you feel that you understand poorly or seldom encounter?

9. What movies, books, albums, or other media most profoundly shaped your way of thinking as you were growing up?

10. What unspoken ideas about truth, success, or what it means to be a “good person” did your society seem to take for granted?

To make this easier, I created a free advanced AI prompt you can use to get a detailed analysis of your birthview so that you can uncover personal blindspots and areas for growth and exploration.

You can access it for free here: https://discovermybirthview.com/

Step 2) Figure Out What Kind Of World You Take Yourself To Be In

Every worldview, scientific theory, philosophy, or religion either takes for granted some ideas about what the world is like, or explicitly argues that the world is a certain way.

Likewise, every individual human being must take for granted certain beliefs about the world in order to live a life.

I call the beliefs we have about what the world is like world beliefs.

Whenever I ask people about their world beliefs, they often express that they aren’t really sure what the world is really like and they rarely take themselves to know anything for certain.

That’s totally fine.

Most of the benefits of studying and systematizing your world beliefs have nothing to do with whether you can prove or justify them in some ultimate sense.

There is so much more to be gained for an individual by focusing instead on discovering, clarifying, questioning, and investing the implications of the beliefs they hold.

When it comes to personal development, clarity is often more valuable than truth.

The truth is complicated.

For most people, studying impersonal academic debates about technical questions is not going to help them live better.

Such debates can be interesting, entertaining, and enlightening.

Personally, I love them.

But that is not all philosophy is good for.

What I am arguing for here is that the tools, concepts, and frameworks that philosophers use can be employed to help individuals live better if they are applied in a personal way to someone’s own belief system, rather than to some fundamental philosophical question.

Philosophy can help you draw a map of your thoughts so you can find a path forward.

It can help you think things you have never thought before.

It isn’t only about arguing that you are correct, or that someone else’s theory is false.

The second step to building your micro-philosophy consists in figuring out which world beliefs you currently hold.

So, how do you do this?

In order to begin creating a catalogue or system of your world beliefs, you need to answer some fundamental questions about what philosophers call metaphysics and epistemology.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the ultimate nature of reality and asks questions not only about what kinds of things exist in the world, but also what things are ultimately like and how they relate to each other.

A classic example of a metaphysical question would be “Is reality ultimately just composed of matter? Or are there other non-material forms of being?”.

Even if you aren’t a professional philosopher, you probably already have lots of sophisticated thoughts about this question.

You might be someone who believes, for example, in the existence of an immaterial soul that continues to exist after your body decomposes. This belief might be a genuine source of comfort (or anxiety) for you, depending on what other beliefs you hold. For example, if you believe that your soul will live on after you die and that it’s quality of life will be affected by the bad things you did on Earth, then you might be anxious about dying.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature and structure of knowledge and related concepts like belief, evidence, and justification.

What a human being believes about knowledge can significantly alter how they live their life.

For example, if you are a highly skeptical person who refuses to believe things without being given strong evidence, you might find it difficult to trust people. This could affect your romantic relationships, your politics, and many other areas of human life that involve trust. On the flip side, if you are someone who believes things without much evidence and are willing to believe in something until given a reason not to, then you might be open to being manipulated without realizing it.

While metaphysics and epistemology are typically thought of as some of the more abstract and esoteric areas of philosophy, I believe that they have deep practical implications and show up in our everyday thinking in ways that truly matter.

Having a personal micro-philosophy that allows you to think more deeply about your relationship to these deep subjects will raise your awareness of how these seemingly theoretical or abstract beliefs influence your life.

Here are some basic questions you can ask yourself to get started:

1. What do you think everything is made of at the deepest level—only physical stuff, only minds/ideas, both, or something else entirely?

2. Is every event fully caused by what came before, partly random, fully random, guided by purpose?

3. Do purposes or ends exist in nature (e.g., an acorn “aims” at becoming an oak), or are purposes always projected by minds?

4. How do you view the relationship between mind and brain? Are they the same thing, different things, does one depend upon the other?

5. Has the world always existed, or did it come into existence? Will it come to an end? What kind of explanation do you think could answer such a question?

Step 3) Decide What’s Valuable To You

Knowing what you believe about what the world is like is incredibly illuminating, but when it comes to the actual decisions you make and actions you take in the real world, the most significant determining factor is your values.

Some philosophers believe that values are not real.

Again, while it can be incredibly fun and interesting to debate such questions, it is counterproductive for someone to get bogged down trying to prove that values are real before they “allow” themselves to figure out their personal values.

Whether or not values are ultimately real, it is impossible for a human being to avoid acting as if they are real.

Every day, human beings around the world have billions of thoughts about value — thoughts about which things are worthy of time, effort, money, thoughts about what is good, beautiful, ugly, and so on.

This shows up, most of all, in the actions we take.

If you purchase something, you are acting out of your values.

If you enjoy something, you are responding to value in the world.

Values are what make life interesting and worth living.

A universe without values is a universe where nothing is worth pursuing or avoiding and everything just is.

It is like a world without color.

Once values are introduced, everything in the world takes on a new significance.

So how do you figure out your values?

It is important to point out, up front, that thinking about values can be a messy affair, and there is no single best way to go about it.

Here is what I recommend.

First, take a detailed look at your actions.

For example, sit down for 15-20 minutes at the end of the day and write down a list of all the actions that you took that day.

Be incredibly specific.

Don’t just write “went to the gym”.

Instead, write that you “went to the gym and did 3 sets of bench press at 185 lbs. for 10 reps, while listening to [insert artist] and checked my email on my phone in between each set”, or “I woke up and laid in bed for 30 minutes thinking about what I should do today, and then I watched instagram reels about natural disasters for 15 minutes”.

Notice how much more revealing these examples are about what someone values.

The more richly you can describe your actions, the more you will reveal about your values, motivations, desires, and intentions.

Second, consider things that you did not do but that you think you should have done.

For example, you may have went to the gym on your day off, but perhaps you did not call your mother, or meditate for 15 minutes, or cook a meal for yourself.

We can learn just as much about our values from the things we do as we can from the things we end up not doing.

The list of things you did not do is revealing because the very fact that you think about certain items as belonging on that list (and not others) also reveals important information about what you value.

It is very likely the case that you don’t value something you never think about doing.

For example, consider how different this list would look for someone who is training to become a classical violinist vs. professional athlete.

The violinist might include on their list of things they did not do something like “practice musical scales”, while the professional athlete would never even think to put such an omission on their list. Meanwhile, the professional athlete might include something like “make 1,000 three pointers”, which would never even occur to the violinist.

Third, you can simply review a list of common human values and try to find the values which most resonate with you.

The world of values is messy and complex.

In the Micro-Philosophy:Foundations course, I provide students with a list of 250+ human values to sort through as they build their micro-philosophy.

Now, you obviously cannot practically hold 250 values in your head while going about your day, and I don’t think it is even possible for someone to truly value so many different things, but there is a trick you can use to make things more manageable.

Some values are dependent upon others.

For example, you might value Health, Movement, Sleep, and Nutrition.

Health serves as a foundational value that includes sub-values like Movement and Nutrition. It would be weird to think that Nutrition is the foundation for Health, since that would leave out many other aspects of Health which don’t have to do with Nutrition.

When you begin to notice that values can be arranged into hierarchies, it can become much easier to think about how various values fit into your life.

Step 4) Specify Actionable Principles

The ultimate point of building your own micro-philosophy is to act in alignment with your most deeply held beliefs and values.

But how do you go from thinking about what the world is like, what we can know about it, and what is valuable, to taking specific actions?

I believe that action-guiding principles are an incredibly useful tool for connecting the abstract ideas of your micro-philosophy with concrete life situations in which you must act.

Actionable principles are general statements about what to do, think, and feel, that can be used to help individuals realize their values and act in alignment with their beliefs.

Let’s take an example that someone enrolled in Micro-Philosophy:Foundations came up with.

In response to one of their weekly assignments, they wrote the following principle:

“Build trust by making and honoring commitments”>

This is a very general practical principle that focuses one’s mind on being proactive and making positive commitments and promises to others, as well as following through on them.

In a later part of the exercise, the student specified the specific types of actions they must prioritize in order to live in alignment with this principle.

This is what they wrote:

“Promising, following through, apologizing, scheduling, showing up on time”.

By getting specific about the kinds of principles we want to live by and the types of actions we can take to promote those principles, we are able to live our lives with more clarity and intention.

We are also able to better uphold our deeply held values, in this case Trust, and live in alignment with our micro-philosophy and ideal conception of our self.

If you want to create actionable principles, you can begin by looking at your list of values and thinking about what general rules you could follow to promote those values.

After this, you should specify a list of act-types that align with the principle, so you can make it even more specific and practical.

The final thing to do is simple.

Act.

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I hope you found that this article gave you some direction for how to start building your own micro-philosophy.

If you enjoyed reading this, and want to learn more, you might want to check out some other articles I wrote here on Substack below.

Thanks for reading.

-Paul