TL;DR
- The first instinct — "health, family, career, friends, hobbies" — is almost always too generic to be useful.
- A pillar should be specific enough that you can tell a good week from a bad one.
- The 12-month regret test: a pillar is something you'd be sad to look back on and find you ignored.
- Pick three to five, not ten. The constraint is the point.
- Once you pick, you commit for a year. The constraint isn't a bug — it's the practice.
When you open My Lighthouse for the first time, you're asked to pick three to five pillars. It sounds easy. It isn't.
The "starter pack" trap
Most people, when asked to name what matters most, reach for the same five words: Health. Family. Career. Friends. Hobbies. That list isn't wrong, but it's so generic that you can't measure it. What does a good week of "Friends" look like? What's a bad week of "Career"? If you can't tell, the pillar isn't doing its job.
The fix isn't to pick smaller words. It's to pick the version that's specific to your life right now.
A pillar should be specific enough to score
Try this test. Take whatever you wrote down — say, "Health" — and ask: what would a dim week look like — not bad, just faded? If you can't say within ten seconds, the pillar is too abstract. Tighten it:
- "Health" → "Sleep, plus lifting twice a week"
- "Career" → "Writing the deck I keep postponing"
- "Family" → "Calling Mum every Sunday"
- "Creativity" → "One photo I'm proud of per week"
- "Friends" → "One in-person catch-up per fortnight"
Now you can tell a good week from a bad one. That's the job of a pillar.
The 12-month regret test
Here's a better way to choose than ranking values on a scale. Imagine it's twelve months from now and you look back at the year. Which of these would you be sad to have neglected? Which would feel like a relief? The ones you can't bear to skip belong on the list. Everything else is noise dressed up as priority.
This test is sharper than it sounds. It tends to surface things people don't expect — relationships they've drifted from, a creative project they keep deprioritising, a parent who's getting older.
Three to five, not ten
The point of My Lighthouse is constraint. If you put everything on the list, you'll track everything and pay attention to nothing. Three to five pillars force the hard choice: this matters more than that. Some users start with seven and trim. That's fine. But don't ship with more than five — you'll silently abandon the bottom two within a month, and the noise will pollute the whole picture.
Pick carefully — you commit for a year
This is the part most people resist when they hear it: you choose your pillars for the year. Not because the app locks you in — it doesn't — but because the year-long hold is the entire point of the practice.
Commitment is what separates a pillar from a passing interest. If you swap them out the moment the data gets uncomfortable, you don't have pillars — you have moods with labels. The year-long hold is what makes the data mean something: twelve months of consistent measurement against the same few things you said you cared about, through every season.
That's why the choice matters so much up front. You're not picking what feels right today; you're picking what you'd back yourself to honour through the busy quarter, the difficult winter, the holiday you didn't expect. Choose with that horizon in mind.
And life does bend — the app bends with it. A pillar can rest on weekends or take a holiday when you do, and if your year genuinely changes — a new child, a lost job, a move — you can replace one deliberately. That's a considered change, not a flinch. If a pillar merely turns out to be uncomfortable, hold it: by the New Year renewal you'll have the data to make a sharper pick than you could today.
A few prompts to make it easier
If you're stuck:
- What's one area of your life where, when it goes well, everything feels better?
- What's a recurring "I should…" you've been quietly ignoring?
- What would your closest friend, gently, point to as the thing you keep avoiding?
- What part of your life would a 75-year-old version of you wish you'd protected?
Write your answers. Edit them down to the form a bright or dim week could be measured against. That's your starting set.
One last note
Pillars aren't tasks. They're not goals either. They're the few directions your life moves in, and you'll measure your weeks against them. Pick them carefully, but pick them today. The thing that helps isn't getting it perfect — it's having something to come back to.
Related reading: Living authentically — how to be true to yourself · Our Why — the story behind My Lighthouse
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