Sources
Every page on this site is written in our own words, and we do not put names in the way of a man who came to work on his aim. But we learned from people, and this is where they are named — once, with what we took. Quoted sentences anywhere in the family carry their owner's name at the point of use.
The method
Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997) — the whole of it: that life asks the question and a man answers with what he does; that meaning is found, not supplied, and so no tool here supplies it; that the therapist is a midwife, not a painter; the gate on the back of the card (if it can be changed, change it; if it cannot, what can be changed is how you stand in it); and the observation that the emptiness shows up most on Sundays, which is why the practice asks on Sunday. Man's Search for Meaning (1946; English 1959/1963), The Doctor and the Soul (1946; 3rd ed. 1986). The full account, with page numbers, is on the library.
Socrates, by way of Plato — the midwife who never supplies the answer (Theaetetus), which is the design rule of the mirror on the north-star page.
Thomas Aquinas — that a person is made to stand outside himself, the same thing Frankl called self-transcendence, seven centuries earlier.
John Vervaeke — that no single practice is ever enough, and that self-deception is the problem every practice has to answer (Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, 2019).
The tools
Jim Rohn (1930–2009) — the shape of the one card (reasons first, a written list, one small discipline, the day you decide) and of the seasons question on its back; the four things that can turn a life in a day. The shapes are his; every sentence on the card is ours.
Tony Robbins — Rohn's student, and the man who showed how to take a teacher's frame and fill it with your own life.
Jordan Peterson — faith as the willingness to abide by what your conscience tells you; and the good man as a dangerous man who keeps the sword in the sheath.
David Goggins — that the first step is the truth, all the time, to everyone, especially yourself.
Tom Bilyeu — two of the six north-star questions take their shape from him: do what you would do even if you were failing, and the identity you choose drives what you do. His own rule for the machines — use them to understand, never to be handed an answer — is now ours. He co-founded Quest Nutrition and Impact Theory and says of his twenties that he had big dreams and could not get out of bed; that story, in his words, is on the library's "why" page.
Emad Mostaque — mathematician, founder of Intelligent Internet and former CEO of Stability AI. The forecast on the front page is his: that for most cognitive work the economic value of a human is going to zero (The Last Economy, 2025, free at ii.inc). His remark that the machines have the answers and very few people know the questions to ask is the seam this site is built on. His forecasts are his own, dated where we quote them.
Douglas Adams — the computer that answered "forty-two" to a question nobody had asked (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979).
Andrew Huberman — the card format of the daily protocols on transcendent.com; the evidence grades there are ours.
Jorge Bucay, and the Dhammapada — the chained elephant that stopped testing the post, and the caught elephant that longs for the grove.
The studies
Yeager, D. S., et al. (2014), "Boring but important: a self-transcendent purpose for learning fosters academic self-regulation," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107(4). The reason behind the fifth north-star question: a reason beyond the self worked; a self-centered reason did nothing.
Jahoda, M. (1982), Employment and Unemployment. What a job gives a man besides pay — structure, contact, purpose, status, activity — and therefore what has to be rebuilt when the pay goes.
The evidence for logotherapy itself, at its real strength, is on the library's evidence page.