PRINCIPLES

Good principles are effective ways of dealing with reality. To learn my own, I spend a lot of time reflecting. So rather than just giving you my principles, I will share the reflections behind them.

I believe that everything that happens comes about because of cause-effect relationships that repeat and evolve over time. 

At the big bang, all the laws and forces of the universe were created and propelled forward, interacting with each other over time like a complex series of machines that work together: the structure of galaxies, the makeup of Earth’s geography and ecosystems, our economies and markets, and each one of us. Individually, we are machines made up of different machines—our circulatory systems, our nervous systems, and so on—that produce our thoughts, our dreams, our emotions, and every other aspect of our distinct personalities. All these machines are evolving together to produce the reality we encounter every day.

Look to the patterns of those things that affect you in order to understand the cause-effect relationships that drive them and to learn principles for dealing with them effectively.

By doing this, you will begin to understand how the machinery underlying any “another one of those” works and develop a mental map for dealing with it. As your understanding of these relationships grows, the essentials stand out from the blizzard of things coming at you; you will notice which “one of those” you are facing and instinctually apply the right principles to help you through it. Reality, in turn, will send you loud signals about how well your principles are working by rewarding or punishing you, so you will learn to fine-tune them accordingly.

Having good principles for dealing with the realities we encounter is the most important driver of how well we handle them. I’m not saying that all people have the same encounters. It is certainly the case that different people in different parts of the world face different challenges. Still, most of our encounters with reality fall under one category or another and the number of those categories is not enormous. If you were to write down what type of encounter you have every time you have one (e.g., the birth of a child, the loss of a job, a personal disagreement) and compile them in a list, it would probably total just a few hundred items and only a few of them would be unique to you. You might want to try this. Not only will you see for yourself if what I’m saying is true, but you will also start to build a list of the things you need to think about and have principles for.

Whatever success I’ve had is because of the principles I followed and not because of anything unique about me, so anyone following these principles can expect to produce broadly similar results. That said, I don’t want you to follow my (or anyone’s) principles blindly. I suggest that you think through all the principles available to you from different sources and put together a collection of your own that you can turn to whenever reality sends “another one of those” your way.

Life Principles and Work Principles are organized in outline form at three different levels .

Higher-level principles, which are also the chapter titles, are preceded by single numbers.

Mid-level principles are contained within each chapter and are designated by numbers.

Sub-principles fall under the mid-level principles and are marked with letters。