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WORKBOOK — THE STUDENT

Chapter I.01 · The Ninety Days

For the person studying this alone, or in a seminar, with no organisation to change yet. You are not too early. What you build in these ninety days is the apparatus you will use for thirty years.

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WHY THIS WORKBOOK IS DIFFERENT

The chapter was written for someone standing inside a firm with a P&L and a signature authority. You may have neither. It would be easy to conclude that the method has to wait until you do.

It does not, and the reason is the most useful thing in this workbook: the ninety-day method is not a management technique. It is a way of looking, and the looking is the transferable part. Find the place where something is already working, measure it before you change it, commit irreversibly at small scale, tell one true story to one person who can act. That sequence works on a dissertation, a household, a student society, a part-time job, a shared flat and a body. The organisation is only the case study most people encounter first.

So you will do exactly what the executive does. You will simply do it on a system you actually control — which, for most of the next decade, will be a considerable advantage.

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PART ONE — DISCOVERY

Days 1–30: find the positive core

Exercise 1.1 — The five candidates (90 minutes)

The chapter names five places to look inside a firm. Here they are translated.

Write five candidates. Do not evaluate them. You need one; five is so you have a choice.

Exercise 1.2 — The stock inventory (60 minutes)

Every one of the following is a stock with a regeneration rate. For each, write your honest estimate of D (your draw per week) and r (its recovery rate), and mark whether you are building or depleting.

• Sleep debt
• Physical capacity
• Depth of attention
• Close friendships
• Technical skill in your field
• Financial reserve
• Reputation with people who could open a door
• Curiosity

You will find, almost certainly, that two or three are in clear deficit and one is compounding beautifully without your involvement. The compounding one is your positive core. It is what you will study.

Exercise 1.3 — The appreciative interview (45 minutes, with another person)

Find someone whose work you admire and ask exactly this, without variation:

"Tell me about a time in your work when something went unusually well — not the biggest success, the one that surprised you. What were the conditions? What did you do that you would not normally do? What made it possible?"

Then stay quiet. Take notes on the conditions, not the outcome.

This is the core skill of the entire book. Most people, asked to reflect, produce a deficit narrative — what went wrong, what they lack. The appreciative question returns a different dataset, and it returns causes rather than complaints. Do this twenty times over a year and you will have an education in what actually makes things work that no course will give you.

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PART TWO — THE ARITHMETIC

Days 31–45: learn to compute before you argue

Exercise 2.1 — Reproduce the chapter's figures (2 hours)

Do not take the numbers on trust. Open lib/verify.py, read it, and then compute these independently — by hand, or in a spreadsheet, or in whatever language you use.

1. The solar-to-primary-energy ratio. You need incident solar flux at the surface (~173,000 TW) and global primary energy (~19 TW). Confirm 9,105.
2. Accessible surface fresh water. Total 1.386 × 10⁹ km³; 2.5 percent fresh; 0.3 percent of that accessible at the surface. Confirm ~103,950 km³ and the share of the total: 0.0075 percent.
3. Net energy to society at each EROI in the chapter's table, using (EROI − 1) / EROI.
4. The crossover years, both scenarios.

Then do the thing that matters most: find a figure in this chapter you can check against an outside source, and check it. If you find a discrepancy, write it down and bring it to your seminar. This edition wants to be checked. That is the difference between a text and a doctrine.

Exercise 2.2 — Your own crossover (45 minutes)

Choose a real decision you face where the cheap option degrades and the good option compounds. Buying a bicycle versus paying fares. Learning a skill properly versus improvising. Cooking versus not.

Estimate d, g, and the starting penalty. Compute the crossover year:

  n  =  ln(1 / (1 − penalty))  /  ln((1 + g) / (1 − d))

Write the year down. Then answer, in one sentence: can I hold on that long, and what would make holding easier?

This is the same question the CFO asks, at the same level of rigour, about a smaller sum. There is no difference in kind.

Exercise 2.3 — Find the honest negative (30 minutes)

Every Arithmetic movement in this book contains at least one case where the approach loses. Find the two in Chapter I.01. Write, in your own words, why each is included.

Then practise the move yourself: take a claim you personally believe about how the world should work, and write the strongest honest negative against it. Not a straw version — the version that troubles you.

If you cannot write it, you do not yet understand your own position well enough to defend it. That is not a criticism. It is the assignment.

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PART THREE — DREAM AND DESIGN

Days 46–70: build the apparatus

Exercise 3.1 — The present-tense description (60 minutes)

Write 500 words describing your working life eight years from now, in the present tense, as description rather than aspiration. Not "I would like to be" — "I am."

Constraints, and they are the whole exercise:

• No adjectives of achievement. No "successful", "respected", "leading".
• Describe a Tuesday. Ordinary hours, ordinary tasks.
• Include one thing that is difficult and remains difficult.
• Include the mechanism by which the value you create reaches you.

The last constraint defeats most people, and that is the finding. If you cannot describe how value reaches you in eight years' time, you have not designed a career — you have designed a hope.

Exercise 3.2 — Your baseline document (90 minutes)

Build the single most valuable artifact in this workbook.

Choose the compounding stock you identified in Exercise 1.2. Write a one-page baseline:

1. The metric. Defined so precisely that another person would compute it identically. "Reading" is not a metric. "Pages of primary source read per week, logged the day of" is.
2. The period. Long enough to contain normal variation — four weeks minimum.
3. The method. How and when you record it.
4. The verifier. A named human being who will look at it monthly. This is not optional and it is not symbolic.
5. Your signature and theirs. Actually sign it.

Then leave it alone for four weeks and change nothing. Measuring before intervening feels like waste. It is the entire foundation of every claim you will ever make.

Exercise 3.3 — The one-page case (45 minutes)

Practise the artifact that ends the ninety days. One page, four parts: baseline, intervention, result, and what it implies at ten times the size.

Write it about something already finished — a project, a term, a job. You are practising the form, not reporting news. Give it to one person and ask a single question: "What would you want to know that isn't here?"

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PART FOUR — DESTINY AND DELIGHT

Days 71–90: make it hold, and enjoy it

Exercise 4.1 — The three conditions (30 minutes)

The chapter names three things that make a practice self-sustaining: it is in the standing review, someone's compensation moves with it, and it has a second owner. Translate each:

• Standing review → a fixed weekly or monthly slot, in your calendar, that you do not negotiate with.
• Compensation → something you genuinely want, contingent on the practice. The signal matters more than the size.
• Second owner → one person who will notice if you stop. Ask them explicitly. Give them the credit for the first result.

Write your three. If you cannot name the second owner, that is your ninety-day task.

Exercise 4.2 — The irreversible commitment (this week)

One thing that cannot be quietly undone. Paid registration. A public commitment. A recurring transfer. A message you cannot retract.

The chapter's insight is that reversal is rarely a decision — it is a slow absence of renewal, and nobody has to defend that. Remove the option of drift.

Make it small. Small and irreversible beats large and provisional every time.

Exercise 4.3 — Delight, on purpose (ongoing)

Delight is not a reward for finishing. It is the adoption mechanism, and it belongs in the design.

Choose one element of your practice and make it genuinely pleasant. The specific notebook. The particular hour. The café. The pen. This is not indulgence — it is the thing that determines whether you are still doing it in March.

Write one sentence: the part of this I look forward to is ___. If you cannot complete the sentence, redesign the practice until you can. A practice with no pleasure in it is a practice with a half-life.

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THE TERM PROJECT

One piece of work, carried the whole way

Choose a single system you have genuine access to — a student society, a part-time job, a household, a community group, a team you play in — and run the full ninety days on it.

Deliverables.

1. Discovery memo (800 words). Five candidates, one chosen, with the appreciative interviews that informed it. Name the positive core explicitly.
2. The signed baseline (1 page). Metric, period, method, verifier, two signatures.
3. The arithmetic (600 words plus workings). Cost the intervention including the counterfactual. Compute the crossover. State at least one honest negative — a condition under which this fails.
4. The intervention (deployed, not described).
5. The one page (1 page). Baseline, intervention, result, implication at ten times. Delivered to one named person who could act on it.
6. The reflection (600 words). What you expected, what happened, what you would do differently, and what the gap between those tells you.

How it is assessed. Not on whether the intervention succeeded. On whether the measurement was honest — whether a reader could reproduce your numbers and whether you reported a result that did not flatter you.

A result that disappointed you and was measured cleanly is a first-class piece of work. A result that succeeded and cannot be reproduced is not.

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SELF-ASSESSMENT

Score yourself honestly. This is for you.

The two that matter most are the fourth and the fifth. Everything else can be learned quickly. Those two are habits, and habits take a term.

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CARRYING IT FORWARD

You will not have an organisation to change for some years yet. What you will have, if you do this properly, is:

• A four-week baseline on something that matters, and the habit of building one.
• Twenty appreciative interviews, which is a genuine education in causes.
• One completed cycle of measure-commit-report, in your hand, that you can describe in an interview in ninety seconds.
• The ability to compute a crossover year, which almost nobody in any room can do on request.

That last one is worth more than it sounds. The person who can put a date on "it pays off eventually" changes what a room is able to decide. You can be that person before you have any authority at all, and it is the fastest route to being given some.

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APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR SEMINAR

1. When has one of you measured something before changing it, and what did the baseline let you say afterwards that you could not otherwise have said?
2. Which stock in a student's life has the highest regeneration rate, and how would we prove it?
3. What is already working in how this group learns — and what makes it work?
4. If every member of this seminar left with one irreversible commitment, what would this group look like in a year?