At Rokk, we aim to help people live more meaningful lives, and one way we do that is the use of twelve guiding themes as a basis for many of our audio sessions, rituals, and actions. But where do these themes come from? Here’s a bit more about our process:
We started casting the net as wide as we could, researching whether universal themes to ‘living a meaningful life’ exist across everything from science, psychology and philosophy to literature, religion and art. Our sources included books, podcasts, interviews, and online content. Our methods included months of manual research, various in-person discussions, and using AI-assisted tools to synthesize themes across vast amounts of information.
We then looked for convergence. Where an idea keeps appearing independently, in Stoic Rome and in a longitudinal Harvard study, or in Buddhist teaching and in modern psychology, that recurrence is the strongest signal we have that something is genuinely universal.
We then clustered instead of splitting hairs. Debates on frameworks often die on semantics: is it ‘gratitude’ or ‘appreciation’? ‘Purpose’ or ‘calling’? Inspired by tools like the Wheel of Emotions, we grouped related ideas under one primary theme each, with the neighbouring concepts named alongside it; for example, ‘find purpose’ includes meaning, impact and calling. We focused on what is directionally right. The themes then settled naturally into three groups that echo how many fields of wisdom or traditions have grouped them: knowing yourself, connecting with others, and understanding the world.
We then checked our work, comparing our findings to other frameworks with a similar objective to ours. Examples of some of those are:
-
UC Berkeley Great Good Science Centre, 13 keys to wellbeing
-
The School of Life, 6 themes
-
The Happiness Hypothesis, 10 Great Ideas
-
Yale’s Science of Wellbeing, 8 ‘stuff that make us really happy’
-
The Wheel of Life coaching tool
-
Action for Happiness 10 keys
The good news is that there is a material overlap (over 80%) across all these frameworks, once again showing the universal nature of it all. Generally speaking, our themes also tended to be a bit broader (covering more topic areas) and deeper (covering a wider variety of sources, and both modern and ancient). We then also pressure-tested our framework with detailed surveys to some early testers to hear directly from them, with the findings once again supporting the overall findings.
Through this process of triangulation and a combination of sources and methods, we’re confident that we have a strong framework as our foundation.
Will our guiding themes ever change? Ideally, we’d like them to be static; however, we also realise that life is full of learnings and changes. So we’re committed to working with our member community to continue testing the current framework and ensure it makes sense and covers all the core things they need. We will also set the bar very high for making any changes. But if changes are required in the longer term, we will make them. That said, we don’t anticipate these to be material or happen regularly.