Personal Constitution

I have always loved maps. Always loved guides. Why waste time when you can find a highly structured and deeply researched manual that provides the blueprint. For the longest time, I’ve wanted to create a guide of my own. A guide for my life. A keystone document that I could come back to when I drifted. And oh, did I drift. This document always felt like a pipe dream. Perhaps I could create it if I could take a week in the woods with nothing but solitude, a typewriter, and no internet to distract me.

The idea always seemed out of reach. Until now.

I’ve been trying to write what I call my personal constitution for years. A single document that captures how I want to live across everything that matters to me. Parenting, marriage, career, finances, health, even hobbies and social life. A founding document I could reference when I started to drift. And I always started to drift.

Every attempt stalled for the same reason. I’d sit down, think about the scope of what I was trying to capture, the totality of how I want to live my life, and the weight of it would shut me down. I’d call it laziness, but that’s not quite right. It was fear. Fear that I’d put in the work and produce something that didn’t hold up. Fear that I wasn’t capable of doing it alone. So, I’d close the document and tell myself I’d get to it later.

Then I found Claude.

Claude is Anthropic’s AI assistant, and it has become my biggest obsession. When I think of AI, the ultimate representation is Jarvis. Tony Stark’s AI partner who takes his chaotic genius and makes it operational. An invisible chief of staff who provides structure, precision, and constant feedback. Naturally, my goal became to build my own version of Jarvis. But first, I needed to give Jarvis something to work from. The constitution had to come first.

What changed wasn’t me. It was that I finally had a partner. The scope that had always felt paralyzing suddenly felt manageable because I wasn’t staring it down alone. We iterated through dozens of versions. Concepts were added, cut, reworked, and cut again. After mere days, I had a document I could actually commit to. A guiding document for Jarvis, and for myself, to rely on for balance and structure. To bring me back on track when I start to drift.

Next step: creating Jarvis.