As I recently discovered, strength training is straightforward. Just lift weights three times per week. Every time you lift weights, lift more than you did before. Eat enough food to make sure your body has enough for growth. And every single day, you will become stronger.

Physical strength is not the only attribute that can be improved by training. Endurance is another one. It can be trained by doing exactly the same thing as with strength: Practice often, and constantly push yourself to the limits. So long as you haven’t already reached your genetic potential (and you almost certainly haven’t), your endurance will improve.

What about intelligence? For some reason, this isn’t as widely recognized as strength and endurance, from what I’ve noticed. But intelligence can be trained just like they can. And your progress can be quantified too. With strength, you can measure how much you lift. With endurance, you can measure how long you can last. And with intelligence, you can measure your IQ.

I think there are many more. Consider art. No one starts out being an excellent artist, but with practice, your skills will improve. Skill at art is hard to quantify, but certainly it is clear that some artists are better than others nonetheless.

All of this seems to me to beg the question: precisely what are all the attributes that can be trained? There are two ways to answer this. One, survey all the crafts that people do, and arrange them into a tree organized by similarity of skillset. Or two, survey all the parts of the human body, and arrange them into a tree organized by functional similarity.

Consider crafts first. Here is an example tree:

• Intellectual
  • Mathematics
  • Graphic Design
• Physical
  • Weight Lifting
  • Distance Running

Now consider the human body. Here is another tree:

• Brain
  • Right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex
  • Left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex
• Body (non-brain)
  • Size of muscles
  • Efficiency of muscles

Obviously these lists are very simplistic and subject to change, but I hope the point is clear. Some tasks require many body parts, and some body parts can perform many tasks. But there is a correspondence between tasks human beings can perform, and the body parts most responsible for dong them. The skill at crafts can be improved by improving the corresponding body parts.

I assume most people want to become better. (And if they don’t, well, this article isn’t for those people.) So there are two pressing questions. First, precisely what are the attributes that can be improved? And secondly, how do we go about improving them? All of this information is out there. It would be nice to organize it so that we could know precisely what we need to do to improve every area of our lives.

(This has been tried before. Consider the “mind, body, spirit” concept. But there is no spirit; and spiritual feelings are feelings like any other. If this project is to be successful, it needs to be backed by science, and not fantasy.)