Life Principles
Life principles are a set of rules to live by. They can help us shortcut decisions when the path forward is unclear and help unwind the paralysis brought on by uncertainty.
I first learned of principles through Ray Dalio's Principles: Life and Work, but the concept predates the book. Lists such as Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles are found throughout the corporate world to help establish cultural values across organizations and help nurture leaders who embody explicit virtues. In particular, life principles can help us avoid self-damaging outcomes and put us on a path towards deliberate self improvement.
Since finishing the book, I have been more conscious of these mental shortcuts and have made a deliberate point of acknowledging and saving the ones most valuable to me. These principles have helped in ways that are hard to quantify, from encouraging me to take paths less traveled to identifying the perils along those paths. Currently, my principles are as follows:
- Take the path of least regret
- Pursue passions but not at the cost of people
- Seek to understand, not to assume
- Learn from people
- Go with the flow of opportunity
- Fix the game
It's important to note that these are the principles that I find valuable, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll find them as helpful as I have. By all means, use them if you'd like. I'll expand on them in future posts. For now, though, you can find a brief explanation of each below. I'll continue to update this list as I discover more principles worth living by.
Take the path of least regret
If I had to strip the above list down to a single principle, this one would likely make callbacks. It's the Swiss army knife of the bunch, and it's a simple way of answering those "high-risk" situations that turn out to be not-so-high-risk in hindsight.
These are the situations where discomfort fogs your judgement. Like asking a crush out on a date or peering over the front of the diving board. It often leads to paralyzing inaction and biases us towards an unexplored life. Next time, try asking yourself which decision you'd regret least. This gets you thinking from the future, a mental hack of sorts to help dissociate you from the present discomfort and identify with your aspirational self. You'll find the "right" decision becomes more obvious.
As someone who was prone to social anxiety at a young age I've experienced "high-risk" scenarios more times than I can count. The primal reactions have subsided over time, but in my youth it felt like the weight of world might balance on the knife edge of a single interaction, the kind we often realize is trivial in hindsight. The challenges we face in adulthood tend to be more nuanced, but it's surprising how often they boil down to taking a leap off of the diving board.
Pursue passions but not at the cost of people
This one goes hand in hand with the first principle, along the theme of avoiding regret. However, there's a big difference in how they're applied. Whereas taking the path of least regret is a method of helping us address a known dilemma, this principle serves as a preventative measure against regret by negligence.
I won't expand much on this as I find it difficult to do so without being preachy, but the approach is predicated on the assumption that you have people in your life who you hold dear. It's easy to get lost in the immaterial and the grind. You can take a look at 기억난다 if you want some insight into the kinds of personal experiences that have inspired this principle in my life.
Seek to understand, not to assume
(To be Continued)