Principles to live by

"Principles to live by" sounds, I dunno, really pretentious, something your favorite tech-dude-cum-philosopher might say. It's something of an aspirational title, a "wouldn't it be great if I lived by these" sort of thing.

Rules to live by feels wrong. Rules have a complicated relationship with consequences when you don't follow them. That's not what this is.

ANYWAY 🧐

My hope here is that by organizing these in a list on a dedicated page on my website, it will lend the necessary "gravitas" for my brain to take these principles seriously over time. Mostly this is a list of important ideas I'd like to remember over time, to check in on and bring myself back to. Something of a more potent digital cat poster, if you will.

Hopefully you get some use out of these too. ✌️

  1. Play infinite games
  2. Leverage compounding
  3. Move fast
  4. Think outside the box (second & n-order thinking)
  5. Practice 5 whys
  6. Strive for depth
  7. Be compulsive
  8. "Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or B = f (P,E)" - Atomic Habits
  9. Happiness is the difference between expectation and outcome, or
    Happiness = Reality - Expectation
  10. Life is short. Take big swings.
  11. Focus on inputs more than outputs. Related: Thinking in Systems