PRACTICES, NOT THEORY.
36 guided practices · Short, concrete exercises drawn from the traditions Mull surfaces. Each one takes 5–25 minutes. Start anywhere.
Morning intention
⚡ Quick · 3–5 minBegin the day by naming what you're bringing to it, not what you want from it.
Contemplative
Introspective practices drawn from the Stoic, Buddhist, and monastic traditions. Short, structured, deliberately quiet.
- Premortem10–15 min
Imagine the failure of your plan in vivid detail before you start.
Stoic / decision theory (Gary Klein, after Seneca) - Negative visualization5–10 min
Imagine losing what you have, briefly and concretely, to remember it's a gift.
Stoic (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca) - Socratic self-questioning15–25 min
Take one strongly-held belief and walk it through five 'why' questions.
Socratic (Plato's dialogues) - View from above5 min
Mentally zoom out — your city, your country, the planet — and look back at your day.
Stoic (Marcus Aurelius) - The Examen10–15 min
Five-step Ignatian end-of-day review — what was given, what was missed, what to take into tomorrow.
Ignatian (Jesuit, but works secular) - Memento mori5–10 min
A short, deliberate confrontation with mortality. Clarifying.
Stoic, Buddhist, monastic Christian - Morning intention3–5 min
Begin the day by naming what you're bringing to it, not what you want from it.
Stoic - Three-line evening2–3 min
A nightly review compressed to its three honest sentences.
Stoic (modern compression) - Metta (loving-kindness)8–15 min
Buddhist practice for extending warmth — first to yourself, then outward in widening circles.
Theravada Buddhist (with modern adaptations) - Breath count to ten5–20 min
The simplest concentration practice in the Zen toolkit. Most people fail before five.
Zen - Mindful eating10–25 min (one meal)
One meal eaten with full attention. Reveals how rarely you taste what you eat.
Buddhist (Vipassana lineage) - Letter to your future self20–40 min
Write to who you'll be in one year, five years, ten. Discover what you most want to tell them.
Universal contemplative - Body scan15–30 min
Slow attention to each region of the body. Returns you to the only place you actually live.
Modern (Kabat-Zinn) + ancient (Vipassana, Yoga Nidra)
Logic
Sharpen the moves themselves: spot fallacies, structure inferences, pressure-test your own reasoning.
- Fallacy hunt15–25 min
Pick a real argument from the wild and find three reasoning errors in it.
Critical thinking (Aristotelian fallacy taxonomy onward) - Steelmanning the opposite20–40 min
Write the strongest possible version of the view you most reject.
Analytic philosophy (Daniel Dennett, after the principle of charity) - Counterexample drill15–20 min
Try to break a moral rule with a single concrete case.
Analytic ethics (the trolley-problem tradition) - Argument mapping20–30 min
Draw the structure of an argument as boxes and arrows. See its load-bearing walls.
Informal logic, critical thinking pedagogy - Reductio ad absurdum15–25 min
Take a claim seriously, run it to its logical limit, see if you still believe it.
Greek (Zeno, Plato), surviving across all of analytic philosophy - Burden-of-proof check5–10 min
Most arguments lose because the wrong side is being asked to prove the wrong thing.
Analytic philosophy - Necessary vs sufficient5 min
A confusion that's killed more arguments than any fallacy.
Analytic logic - Modus tollens practice5–10 min
The classical denying-the-consequent move. The fastest way to spot a broken conditional.
Classical logic - Bayesian update10–15 min
New evidence in. How much should the belief move? Probability done responsibly.
Bayesian epistemology - Naming hidden premises10 min
Most arguments don't state their assumptions. The fastest way to refute one is to make them visible.
Argumentation theory - Ockham's razor5–10 min
When two theories explain the same evidence, prefer the one with fewer entities. A scalpel, not a club.
Scholastic + scientific - Disjunction elimination5 min
When you know it's A or B, and you can rule out one, the other is forced.
Classical logic
Argument
Practical exercises in forming, delivering, and defending arguments — what philosophers actually do with each other.
- The 60-second case15–25 min
Compress your argument until 60 seconds is enough.
Rhetoric (think the elevator pitch, but slower) - Anticipating objections20–35 min
For every position, list the three strongest objections — then answer them.
Aquinas (Summa structure: objection, sed contra, response) - Translation under constraint20–30 min
Rephrase a complex argument for a 12-year-old, then for a skeptic, then for an adversary.
Pedagogy + rhetoric (Feynman technique generalized) - Dialectical loop25–40 min
Thesis → strongest antithesis → synthesis. Hegel's move, made walkable.
Hegelian dialectic, refined by Marx and many others - Switch sides30–45 min
Argue both sides of a debate, alternating, until you no longer know which side you started on.
Sophistic / dialectical (Protagoras, antilogic) - Charitable interpretation10 min
Before arguing against a position, prove you understand it well enough that its holder would say "yes, that's it."
Analytic + virtue epistemology - Concession-and-counter5–10 min
A rhetorical structure that builds trust before it pushes back.
Classical rhetoric - Ideological Turing test15–30 min
Argue an opponent's view well enough that strangers can't tell you're not a believer.
Modern (Bryan Caplan, 2011) + classical (Plato's Socratic method) - Reframing the disagreement10–15 min
When two people argue past each other, the disagreement is usually deeper than either is naming.
Dialectic + therapy - Stoic preview10 min
Before a hard conversation, rehearse the worst version of how it could go. Then walk in.
Stoic (premeditatio malorum) - The ten-word version5–10 min
Compress your argument to ten words. The compression forces honesty.
Modern (precis writing, Hemingway, Anglo-American journalism)
These are starter exercises. More to come, including ones with built-in reflection prompts that feed your map. If you want something specific added, write to jimmy.kaian.ji@gmail.com.