Scivive Summary
Scivive by Richard Heart was created over time from his own voice recordings, organized and edited throughout the years, possibly throughout the 2000s - 2010s. It has been narrated into an audiobook available online, and now in 2023 it is making strides towards a print and published version of the work. The word “Scivivor” is used to describe a person who applies Scivive’s principles in their own life.
The literature explores the author’s best ideas and effective thinking techniques to understand and excel in the real world. These are things that one can use to better their own life and situation. The goal of this summary is to provide a highly condensed version of the book. It was created to introduce the symbolism of Scivive, perhaps pique the interest of the reader to move onto the full text, and give one an idea of how they might apply its principles to win, however you individually define it, at the game of life.
If you enjoy this summary, feel free to listen to the narrated audiobook available here on YouTube.
Introduction
With the secrets and life lessons revealed in Scivive, you’re on your way to having the power to do everything that you want to do. The paths to greatness have followed a similar form for thousands of years. Eat healthy, sleep well, love yourself, your family, and your fellow man—you’re off to a good start. Intelligent action and using your knowledge equals power. Life can be described in terms of quality multiplied by quantity of years, and nearly everything that increases time also increases the quality. We’re all supposed to be different, and species such as humans with wide variations in abilities, desires, and behaviors are vastly superior in survival.
There are nine core principles of Scivive.
1. Mind
2. Body
3. Spirit
These first three are “you.” You are your physical body, but as well as what you think and what you feel. You will inherently become what you do, what surrounds you, and the experiences you have.
4. Money
5. Power
6. Respect
These next three are “amplifiers.” How fast and how well you become your future self are amplified by the money, power, and respect you build.
7. Time
8. Space
9. Experience
These three are what you are in the world. If you want your personality to shine a pure white light, you need to have all of the colors in balance. Your brain works most effectively when it’s given just the right amount of information to digest. Scivive will tell you what’s good for you where it can, and when it can be most effective to you, at the cost of cool points and broader vagaries.
Mind
You do less than you could and know more than you need. Be smart, even wise; but only as a means rather than an end. Knowing isn’t doing and knowledge isn’t action. If it’s better to say new, better things in a single language, than the same limited things in several languages. Focus control and attention economy. Have high standards for what you pay attention to. Don’t focus on problems. Instead rephrase in a positive light.
Our brains also are susceptible to shortcuts that make us more effective sometimes, or less effective other times. The brain wants to take shortcuts while making decisions. Sometimes we save time by making quick decisions without fully analyzing the available data. However, we need to be aware of this tendency. If you strive for well-roundedness and can excel in all areas, you must trade education for motivation. Only learn the minimum necessary to complete a task, as restricting your learning to what you need to know is often more beneficial than learning everything. Intelligence is the ability to understand and manipulate knowledge. Simpler ideas are often more useful. People less intelligent than the smartest are often more useful to the general public, as the information they study is more beneficial to common folk. It is better to learn logic than chess.
Be cautious about taking advice from others. For example, homeless people are generally unsuccessful and may not be the best sources for investment advice. Replace “homeless” with any other kind of person lacking sustained credentials professionally or in life. It is important to know the right things. An intelligent person who lacks opportunities to learn is equally tragic. By understanding certain aspects of life, you may unexpectedly learn about others. Judging highest is easier than judging best. To make money, you must be willing to do what others cannot or will not do. Learning is only useful if it is translated into action. Read about the learning journeys of others, have mentors, and seek feedback. Delete non-useful subjects like history and astronomy, and focus on useful ones like logic, ethics, and mnemonics. Learning about the real world, recognizing patterns, and extending them into the future is important. Knowing when to learn is also critical. Learn what you need to know just before you need to do it. Curiosity leads to intelligence. Catching up will not make you rich.
If you cannot find the knowledge you seek, you may need to create and discover it yourself. It is easier to learn about things you care about. Amplifiers and chemical stimulants, such as caffeine and amphetamines, or chemicals produced by your own brain after meditating or firing an empowering pattern, can enhance brain abilities. Focus on learning a few things and excelling in them. Almost nothing is done without the help of others. We have a desire, motivation, and discipline problem. Selling requires more than just knowledge; it involves the ability to sell. We do not need more people to be told things; we need people to take action.
Give your mind the freedom and the blank canvas to paint your own identity. Rejecting the noise of the world allows your brain to find patterns and be creative. Creating new ideas or testing and proving others is more useful globally. Many ideas and behaviors are arrived at through opposing methods. Skill comes from using correct knowledge and practicing over time. Knowing whether you are right or wrong about something is crucial. People often overestimate the value of intelligence compared to motivation and delayed gratification. Creative ideas are effective because they are new and interesting. Apply what works in one context to see if it works in another. Build off greatness rather than trying to create your own.
Synthesis is the highest and best application of the human spirit and ability to create something new. Be the middleware by doing what machines cannot. It can be useful to zoom out and see things from a smaller perspective. Illogical pattern finding leads you away from the truth. The first wrong idea facilitates more wrong ideas. If you can improve at finding and using analogies, you will likely show a higher IQ score on IQ tests.
Learning and transmitting knowledge is best done through storytelling – the story of imaginary futures. Avoid the correlation causation fallacy and improve your understanding and reasoning. Do not assume the world is as wise as you are. Overly simplistic understanding is more dangerous than overly complex. Focus on solving today's problems instead of future problems that do not yet exist. Solve the problems that you think are important, not what others think. Do not spend your life blocking people's ideas or solving their problems. Learning to make good decisions should be a priority. When a problem is complicated, focus on doing what you know you need to try. Avoid logical fallacies and emulate the traits of those you respect.
Body
Take care of your body and get enough sleep. Visualize weight loss or other goals in terms of distance rather than time to make it more enjoyable. Knowing how many calories you consume is only useful if you understand how those calories affect your body. Eating less food can save you money and prevent weight gain, as consuming more calories than your BMR (basal metabolic rate, the number of calories your body burns each day without exercise) can lead to weight gain. Eating less frequently can also improve dental health. Cutting calories is more effective than trying to compensate for an unhealthy diet with exercise. "Hara hachi bu" is a Japanese term meaning "Eat until you are 80% full." People in poorer countries tend to have fewer hemorrhoids because they squat more often to defecate. Take care of your oral health by flossing and brushing after every meal or drink.
Scivive highly recommends watching the introduction video or reading his book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, which is a guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping mechanisms. Scivive also suggests the idea of working from a swimming pool, which can ease back pain. Strength is more important than speed, and Socrates once said, "No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training." The people who have been lifting weights the longest typically achieve the best results in the gym. Some studies suggest that taking steroids can enhance performance more than lifting weights. The 40% rule for weight training is to train until failure and complete one more repetition.
Don’t shake hands with people more than you need to unless you’re okay with the risk of getting sick. In life, your body is a self-correcting, self-regulating, basically conscious actor. Whether that’s gambling or gaming or singing or doing drugs, you need to know the minimum, the maximum, and the normal. Pattern recognition is a necessary component of progress, and some drugs offer range detection as to where certain practices and behaviors might or will lead.
Spirit
To be human is to experience not only the storms and calmness of Mother Nature, but also our own passions. Find every edge and use every trick to make the path of least resistance the one that brings long-term fulfillment. For normally empowered individuals, overconfidence is better than underconfidence. Focus on your potential impact multiplied by the number of people it will impact. To play with the big boys, work on the hardest things that exist. Fear the person who knows one technique very well. Understand the difference between what can be taught and what cannot be taught. Common habits of focus and useful questions can help you choose your path. Do not waste 80% of your effort to achieve only 20% of the results. Everything matters. Consider the future, and do not settle for the local maximum.
Ignorance of differences is insulting and demeaning. If you believe men and women are the same, you do not know much about men, women, or both. Scivive wants you to feel good about doing things for others so that they can do things for you. Doing things for others is powerful and relates to scaling, which could fall under power. The best way to understand the value of a dream book is if it influences your behavior. Celebrate your victories and hold onto them without re-sampling the happiness. Scivive believes that your emotions are your internal environment, and your filters of beliefs, values, and meanings will change the internal environment with the matchup between new things.
Sciviving is a wonderful practice that emphasizes the quality of life and emotions. To avoid emotional wipeouts, do good things and have reasonable goals. Consider having children or being content with being the last of a hundred-thousand-year chain of successful parents.
The programming that governs our behavior is not necessary; it is our mood and emotions. Gratitude is a key to happiness, and it is good to honor those to whom we owe so much. Scivive would call it courage, as it takes courage to jump into the unknown. Frustration is an emotion that essentially stops you from what you are doing and makes you try something else. Everyone is cheating, so do not be too jealous. Any creature with a territory will fight to keep it. Frustration is a halt command, while anger is the following command. The more comfortable you are with uncertainty, the more joy you will have in your life. Being happier leads to less effectiveness. During peaceful times, it is always better to appear stronger than weaker. Consciousness is like color; your brain decided it was a useful way to organize the perception of different wavelengths of light. Complaining is describing an event in a negative tone without indicating next steps to fix or improve the situation.
Equality does not exist; not even two-foot-long rulers are the same size. Choose the most powerful and useful belief systems, hopefully those that have been proven useful for others. Humans are built to be robust, and robustness requires that we all have slight differences in desires and efficacy. Do not live everyone else's program; build your own program. "To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom" (Bertrand Russell). Laziness often prevents us from doing most things. Scivive tells us that there is an internal conflict within ourselves: the set of things we would ideally do and the set of things we will actually do.
You cannot be a great leader unless you learn to lead yourself first. Winning is a journey, not a destination, and the first minute of progress is the most important. Your own opinion rarely discovers anything new. We are designed to be powerful, important, and sexually desirable. Do not fall for the appeal of complexity logical fallacy and choose the meanings in your life that give you the most power. Think about problems only long enough to develop solutions, and focus on solutions. What matters most is doing the things we already know we should do.
Money
In capitalism, consumer demand drives production and consumption. The funny thing about money is that you can get the most value from it by turning it into goods and services. The greed and desire for wealth can become a trap. Warren Buffett once said, "The difference between rich people and really rich people is that really rich people say 'no' to almost everything." Owning a business can be an easier way to make lots of money than pursuing a solitary profession. Scivivors would prefer to see you become excellent at making the world a better place and then make money from your efforts. Good ideas can lead to huge financial gains. Remember, a dollar saved is a dollar earned. Automation taking jobs is not necessarily a bad thing. The only good in this world is that which benefits humankind. Don't hinder technological progress to try to make up for bad governance and wealth distribution. Treat your potential employees with the same respect you show your customers when marketing to them.
Products are often better than services because you can scale up and expand your product range. Focus on creating a design that human resources can advance without you. Scaling is easier when code does the work for you. Forced vacations can be useful because they reveal who is truly important to a business and who is just a pretender. To determine how "sticky" your idea is, look at its profitability. When offered a discount or bargain, assume the odds are not in your favor. Selling to "greater fools" can be better than selling to savvy buyers. Your income is the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Move out of the working class and into the capital class, and then strive to join the one percent. Percentages can be useful, but they can also be misleading.
Power
If you want consistent results, you must perform your action from a consistent “base.” Keep your eye on the prize and don’t waste time practicing bad behavior: conscious or subconscious. Power is exclusivity. To invent, to build, to influence are the things that scale. Think about the quality of what you’re doing, not just the quantity. You should be mindful of what you spend that consciousness on. If you focus your mind, with enough focus you can make an impact. Be effective and useful when you’re deciding what to do with your life. If you want to be more than three times as effective in the world, you need other people, things, or ideas that aren’t you.
Respect
The art of winning friends and influencing people is only good if your influence is positive, not evil. Replace trust with verification. Don't worry about being insulted; it's unavoidable. Overcomplicating things to appear smart is the opposite of intelligence. Turn every graph or text you generate into an infographic. People rarely change for the better. The key to firing, rather than fixing, workers is to have a constant flow of leads. Your destiny is created by you and your partner. We evolved to be private, so we show our best selves to others. Make sure the people you spend time with are worthy of you. Play in the league you qualify for; 10s attract 10s, 9s attract 9s. Personal development beats tactics, just as discipline beats motivation. Mystery is power; attractive people get away with more.
Adaptability combined with knowledge of your audience is a good trait. Nitpickers don't contribute meaningfully to conversations. Women test for strength, and it's good for them to sense it. Guys who focus on getting women instead of becoming more powerful shirk their responsibility and what women are selecting for. Be honest if someone doesn't meet your standards. Changing fast is more important than changing. Use positively framed language to garner attention and hang out with cool people. The reason employees work out so well is that it's functionally the same as doing it yourself. What's right for the world may not be right for us individually. A properly programmed person reciprocates a gift with another awesome gift. Don't test friends unfairly. We're programmed to find meaning in society. Some people seek significance in harmful ways. If you think you're not responsible, you make yourself powerless.
There are prerequisites people must understand to use knowledge. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people believe they are smarter than they are. If you're never wrong, you're rarely right. Jealousy is effective; there's a reason for its existence. Forgiving those who wrong you benefits you. Switch "buts" to "ands" to influence others. Hardship exists for everyone; empower it to feel it. A good exercise to encourage living is to consider what you would say to someone contemplating suicide.
Collaborations reduce failure more than they achieve greatness or innovation. Inclusion works well; include productive and awesome people. Speaking faster is less influential. Demand respect, even indirectly. The more complex the thing you examine, the costlier false but normally correct assumptions will be. Use easy analogies. To influence friends, family, and yourself, you need money to outcompete other experts who've taken over their consciousness. Money is only half the equation; you also need a good, sticky message that pays benefits for following it.
Time
Urgent isn’t always important. If you don’t know exactly what you want, you may never notice that you’ve already achieved it. The stair climbing strategy of want, get, be satisfied, over and over is the most effective that exists. Don’t worry about understanding everything up front; you’ll understand it better once you’ve started. Having tunnel vision is more efficient than removing distractions. Tunnel vision is discipline, changing your environment is “motivation.” If you get used to testing your new setup while you are doing something productive, you will make progress in both the productive thing and the other, experimental thing for fun.
You only have so much attention, so be careful about what hobbies you have, as at some point they may control you more than you control them. Going to the gym and deleting Facebook is good for all times. The people around you have more processing power to observe what you are doing with your body than you are aware of. Someone else could see you doing something before you’re even conscious of the concept that you’re doing it. Your personal attributes compound against each other, so if you have a strong position in one area, it can also help you in another. Forget dressing for success, dress for usefulness.
If you want to live properly in this world, you need to be a little greedy. If a female companion comes with a problem, do not solve it immediately. Often your female companion actually does not want you to solve the problem; think a hundred times before you go and destroy the excellent problem that she helped create. The worst paper and pen are better than the best memory. You don’t have to be a really smart guy to duck a punch; you just have to practice. Timing is important. If you go to get your eyes checked, it’s best to go with your eyes already tired and under strain because those are the times when you will need your glasses the most.
People used to think that what you ate was super important, but then they realized that there's a micro world of amazing bacteria in people’s guts. All the bacteria and little things that live in your stomach operate differently from human to human. Organize your stuff; it will save you time. If you aren’t specific about what you want, then you’re not able to make those decisions where they can be made. It would be useful for people to see personal development as rewarding in the short term to enhance repetitive and short-term achievement. Use alarms so you don’t have to worry about missing a thing. The pain of working goes away when you start the work.
If you pick your top 25 things and remove the bottom 20 to avoid hurting the top 5, you would be using the negative space idea. As important as it is to show that you should get the ball rolling in the right direction, it’s almost as important to make sure that you don’t get the ball rolling in the wrong direction. You can skip motivational stuff by just getting your significance from the hard stuff you’re doing. You can either work on building motivation, or you can work on doing the actual hard things. Distractions eat time and create problems. The feeling of accomplishment makes all the tasks of the day so much easier. Knowledge is only as useful as its application.
When you want things badly enough that you must have them, then you might schedule them. The first step to scheduling is desire. Performing hard tasks improves willpower.
Willpower gets stronger with training, just like your muscles. Free up your time by not wasting it. We all have only 24 hours in a day. Use this to outcompete everyone else. Replace everything that, upon analysis, doesn’t actually lead to any tangible benefits to your life. Jealousy exists to motivate you to act in the right direction. Focus on a future that is yours and not somebody else’s. Model great behavior that gets great results. You may not yet have the willpower to do what you must, but you might have the willpower to not do all the other distractions. To avoid the pain of boredom, we’ll do even the pain of work, often to discover that the work is quite enjoyable once started. Put first things first. Working on a weekend night can be the difference between those who win and those who work for those who win. Being creative is a lot like pull-ups; it’s quite easy to improve it once you are doing it. It does take concentration and effort. Keep getting better. If you’re not perfect, keep getting better. When preparation meets opportunity, that’s what luck is. The forms of preparation that have the most payoff in the least time are the ones where the preparation is most different from the application.
The Pomodoro system works by forcing you to take a break so you feel greedy about getting the most of what seems limited. For you to be able to classify a thing, for instance, an open lock, it needs to be lined up the right way first. When you dedicate yourself to a direction so hard and immerse yourself so hard in a behavior or an outcome, you begin to see the whole world through that lens. When you are so fixed in a state, there’s a risk that you will experience great personal pain. You may benefit from having a partner or coach that you answer to, one that expects you to perform. If you commit to doing things often and don’t do them often, you have strengthened your loser muscle.
Two statements appear to be true: “Stop starting new things, focus on finishing.” You get what you focus on, so do others it seems; they sense your focus and may understand what you are trying to accomplish. Starve the bad behaviors for three weeks and see them become weak. Engage the new behaviors for three weeks and see them become stronger. You should only focus on what you do want long enough to calculate the stuff you need to do to get it, and then you focus on that. Only action matters, and dreaming is only useful to action as long as you need it to create the plan. Once you have the plan, stop dreaming and start doing. Don’t confuse personal excellence with “self-help.” Timing to do the most difficult thing first so you can enjoy the rest of your day without it looming over your head is called “eating the frog.” When you see a movie, it has an end. When you play an MMORPG, the content creators own your soul. South Park had a great episode on it, making money on the backs of the addicted. One mistake people make is not noticing that they’re chasing a small percentage difference that doesn’t matter. You must do things that have lasting value and impact, if not for the world, at least for yourself.
Space
Never give out personal information on an inbound call. The more time you spend thinking about anything other than the road, the slower your reactions are to problems. Having things and places that you call your own, and are willing to fight to keep exclusively yours, pays great dividends. Let’s have the coolest stuff. Some stuff lets you have magic moments easier. There are speed reading programs that move the text without you having to move your eyes, and thus they increase the rate at which you can read. Use the coolest mouse and keyboards that can save your time. Use a chair that is the healthiest and most comfortable and allows you to get in and out of it comfortably. Use a QWERTY keyboard, which is great because it’s on every device and every keyboard. Having a little nipple mouse in the middle of your keyboard is faster if you time yourself on tasks. You should work at the lowest resolution you’re comfortable with because you can see more.
The human is becoming more and more the limiting factor of digital enjoyment with every passing year. Be careful with headphones and earbuds. All of them "color" the sound in one way or another. Avoid trendy types and go for the boring brands that pro audio engineers use. Scivive believes that more things should be made modular. If you have the one that is easily upgradeable, you lock customers into your ecosystem, and you can even charge a slightly higher margin for that single component. You need to have a couple of ways to fight temptation and find freedom. The things around you will influence your focus, and an empowering and enriching environment makes everything in life easier. Once your taste in things gets advanced enough, you basically save a lot of time shopping because no one has anything you want, anywhere. When you're leaving the house, there's a small statistical probability that you'll get robbed while you're out. You should only bring the necessary wallet, keys, and phone.
Experience
Choose what you do wisely. You get good at what you focus on in the real world. Know your capabilities. Stay sober. You would have a better memory of your life if you were totally conscious and aware of the best parts of it. Often when you speak to a drug user, they pretend to have an aura of superiority because they have experienced drugs. Your status as a drug user doesn’t lend any credence to the statement that drugs are useful, and people should do them more. Your relationships on drugs shouldn’t differ from your relationship with any other potentially dangerous item.
Emotions are the programming that you were born with. While you are playing around trying to feel different feelings, the real world is coming for your limited resources, they will eat your lunch, and it will not be pretty. Experience life through all your senses. In order for your audience to appreciate your idea, they need to have the vocabulary, logic, life experience, and similar beliefs and understandings regarding how the world works to be able to understand what you are saying. When you’re exploring consciousness and feeling by using chemicals, you’re doing risky things by blocking up receptors in your brain with things that you haven’t properly qualified as pure. You should always try other people's food first so you can get the full flavor of theirs and then the full flavor of yours. These are the magic moments that you will remember on your deathbed - the things that made life worth living: your first love, the birth of your child, achieving that lifelong dream, and sharing great food and sights with friends and loved ones.
Longevity
It is time to take our destinies into our own hands and mold our futures into what we are worthy of. When you diet and exercise, you only help yourself. “I predict that the first person to live to 150 is probably already in middle age.” – Aubrey de Grey. Don’t be so busy with today that you lose tomorrow. Take responsibility – no one else is going to do it. Make people feel responsible. Inaction is an action. Scientists should work on helping their family and loved ones survive with medical tech instead of spending time fiddling with AI or space travel. The perception that we don’t have a choice about dying can be changed. We can fight it. Scivive hopes to get the job done by being straight up and telling people that living longer would be cool.
Drive the safest car at the safest times, on the safest roads, to the safest places. Your pre-programmed responses need to exist because there’s so much profit in acting quickly in so many situations. Be near the exit and know where all the exits are. Share your location with friends before you go out. Don’t loiter in dangerous neighborhoods. Better than training is controlling your own environment. You don’t need to be in those places where bad things tend to happen.
The biotech sector is going to outperform the weapons sector, so invest in it. Invest in your future, your real living future, not just your financial future. If you have money and you’re saving it for the future but not saving your health, you’re doing it wrong. You know only science is going to save your life, and scientists need funding so they can eat and buy cool machines. If you buy a stock in a company that may eventually save your life through one of the cool products they make, then if the price drops in half, it doesn’t matter. Mind uploading won’t work; the memory isn’t in the meat, it is the meat. Digital security is a competition, and whoever has more money wins. If your brain becomes data, you will be hacked, or perhaps there are so many copies of you.
A great reason to cure a thing is that you would not have to treat it anymore, and you don’t have to consume other people’s lives with the treatment. You should exercise with a huge amount of effort for maybe 10-15 minutes per week. Working on longevity is guaranteed to give you dividends. Correct action is difficult and requires quality data. If you don’t have quality data, you can’t make good decisions. Anti-aging technology that could make you 30 again when you’re 50 gives you another 20 years. Dreams are only as useful as they turn into behaviors. If you must group people and label them, it's better to label them by profession than race. Working on aging doesn’t pay quickly; it only pays very slowly over time. Part of the reason people don’t fight hard enough for life is that they’re perhaps not that passionate about life.
The most precious commodity in this universe is human consciousness, and the only place we are aware of it is in the human mind. We need more people becoming researchers now to create the products within the next ten years. In 20 years, students just getting out of college can start to make a difference. Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement that advocates using evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others. The more Scivivors there are, the happier and healthier we shall all be. Fill your mental environment with what you want to become. If you learn something but don’t use it, eventually you won't know it anymore. If you want science to start outperforming other things, then you better start meeting people's needs.
Throughout history, the most powerful ideas have been associated with a logo. This concept of assigning a powerful, unique, brandable, memorable symbol to something that can be believed in, bought, or understood is super powerful. Use the tools of business to sell great ideas. There is no medical progress without general scientific progress. General scientific progress is the tide that lifts all ships.
