These are the principles that guide me. They are, like me, a work in progress. I intentionally don’t think of these as core values because that term carries baggage that doesn’t reflect why I take the time to articulate them.
It’s easy to see this as a useless exercise. But at least once a day my I’ll catch my brain spinning on a problem. And I’ll open this document and be reminded of one of these principles and suddenly the path will be clearer. My brain rests. I can physically feel the change.
I also don’t think one can set goals or create a vision for the world without having a sense of who he is and what he values. I have so much data floating around my head that I can’t keep all of these important reminders top of mind. So I write them down and review them often.
Frameworks help me trump emotional anchors and remember what not to do in situations where I’m likely to be thinking less than clearly.
I often suggest people read Thomas Schelling’s 1985 paper “Enforcing Rules on Oneself” to understand the role of primary, anticipatory and precautionary rules. That paper and Charlie Munger’s “Psychology of Human Misjudgement” helped me understand the role of frameworks in overcoming natural tendencies.
I’ve stolen most of my great ideas from other people, mostly dead people.
Many of my principles formed from a combination of experiences and reading. I’ve held some of them for a very long time. To form them I spend a lot of time on postmortems.
You can pieces of them in my massively chaotic Evernote version of a commonplace book (what is a commonplace book) where I keep quotes, marked up articles and book notes. I tag the most potent of that collection as Best Of and reread them often. Like most piles of papers in my life, I generally know where everything is.
In 2016 my world view, my body and mind shifted more than in any year to date. The key sources of that shift can be found in the tag called Catastrophe, so named because these works along with a few conversations shattered my life plan and it took me months to recover.
My principles are, like me, in a constant state of motion. If you have any suggestions please email me.
The only principles and ideas that matter are ones where reasonable people could disagree. -DHH
The greatest outcomes in my life have manifested as a result of decisions that made no sense at the time but seemed interesting. Leave room for the possible by letting go of the security of sensible. Security is safety from freedom and worry. *Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs*. - Hunter S. Thompson
Avoid bad decisions. Tools like negative checklists can help us avoid our common biases and trigger reminders of what to avoid in moments where our thoughts may be clouded by biases. Positive checklists are shortcuts based on past data that ignore context and fool us into thinking that we can make good decisions by outsourcing judgment. Positive checklists are to be avoided. All I Want To Know Is Where I’m Going To Die So I’ll Never Go There. - Charlie Munger
You have no right to an uninformed opinion. Come to the table with deep knowledge. Read. Ask questions. Seek knowledge. Become your most intelligent critic. Have the intellectual honesty to kill some of your best loved ideas. Only when you can argue against your own view better than others have you earned the right to your opinion.
Minimize dopamine-seeking. Optimize for medium to long-term feedback loops. Short-term feedback and validation loops (likes, applause, most press) are dopamine-triggers. They are like addictive drugs. The high is short-lived and shallow. Over time it gets harder to get high the next time.
Things that matter generally don’t provide immediate feedback. Be uncomfortable. Get off the train. Climb the ladder. This means you generally won’t know if a path is right for a few days, weeks or months. This rule does not apply to a child’s smile. This rule does apply to most conferences.
Say no to most things to leave room for the unplanned things you’ll wish you had time to do. Slack allows for the option to do something or meet someone interesting on a whim. Slack allows great conversations to continue without the interruption of a next appointment. Slack applies to time with people, meetings, learning, time with yourself, time with new ideas. No stacked meetings. Allow extra time for walks.
Simplicity has a way of making choices clear. While most people are trying to find an elusive edge, you can accomplish amazing things by keeping things simple. Knowing what to say yes and no to become clearer. While most people are trying to be brilliant you can accomplish great things by keeping things simple.
Have strong, well-informed opinions on where you want to go and then be flexible on the details. Be open to compelling data that proves you wrong.
You cannot control the emotions of others. When delivering bad news, firing someone, saying no, etc. focus your words and actions on how the other person will remember how you handled the situation in a year, once the emotional sting of the news is passed. Over the long-term, that you did hard things honorably will matter more than the next day’s headline or the immediate reactions of others.
I believe that in every distinct aspect of our lives such as work, learning, relationships, etc., we have the capacity to go deep or go wide.
It’s easiest to think of these things in the form of a fish tank. You ideally want to maximize the surface area which is the breadth of ideas, people, experiences, projects, etc. you expose yourself to. A higher variety increases the chances you will be exposed to unexpectedly positive things. The most powerful opportunities in my life came as a result of this approach rather than as a result of methodical planning.
Doing more things requires stretching the tank. But when you stretch the tank you end up with less depth. Bigger fish tend to avoid shallow pools. So you must find an optimal balance.
Maximizing breadth is the easiest way to live in our connected world. But this is an inherently bad approach as you are likely to become someone who:
understands the summary of many ideas but none deeply
is marginal at a lot of things but good at very little,
someone who has a lot of acquaintances but few friends.
Conversely if you go deep on less then you are more deeply exposed to a smaller number of things which comes at the cost of diversity of ideas, investments, etc.. This approach is not inherently bad but it is sub-optimal. The ideal life is one lived in balance between depth and breadth where you constantly adjust the axes so as to maximize the diversity of your exposure so as to be exposed to the most opportunities but go deep when and where it matters. Be willing to seem ignorant about some things to be brilliant at others. Sometimes you'll choose the wrong stuff.