I use my notes app sparsely, but when I do turn to it, I try to write something of value. Here are nine principles that I try to embody, in no particular order, because I think they add value to my life.
I hope they can add value to yours.
Never leave something you love to chance. The world is a gallery, and every wall is already hung with someone else’s passion made visible. The things you love privately, the projects you turn over in your head on the walk home, do not exist for anyone until you put them out where they can be seen. Chance is not a curator. If you want the thing you care about to have a life beyond your own attention, you have to be the one who hangs it on the wall.
Build the identity before you feel you have earned it. You will wait forever for permission to call yourself the thing you are becoming. The writer who has not been published; the influencer with only two videos; the founder before the company works; the person who is not yet who they intend to be. The waiting is the trap. You become the person you want to be by acting as that person, and then one day the title catches up to the behaviour.
Choose your problems, because you do not get a life without them. The fantasy is a life with the problems removed. It does not exist. Every path comes with its own set of difficulties, and maturity is found in selecting which ones you are willing to keep. The right question to ask yourself is never “what do I want to enjoy” but “what am I willing to suffer for.”
Follow your curiosity even when it does not look useful. The most interesting people are assembled from a hundred apparently pointless fascinations that turned out, much later, to connect. You cannot see the connections in advance, so the instinct to prune everything that is not immediately productive is a kind of self-impoverishment.
Be willing to be a beginner in public. The fear of looking foolish keeps more people small than any lack of talent. Every skill you envy in someone else was preceded by a period of being visibly bad at it, and they survived that period because they cared more about the skill than about how they appeared while acquiring it.
Distrust the comfort of cynicism. Cynicism feels like intelligence because it is unfalsifiable and it never gets disappointed. But it is mostly a defence, a way of deciding in advance that nothing was worth hoping for so that nothing can hurt you. It is easier to sneer than to try. The braver and rarer thing is to stay capable of sincerity and to care openly about something that might not work, knowing the sneer is always available and refusing it.
Let your standards be high and your self-judgement be kind. These two are not in tension, though most people collapse them into one. You can hold the work to an exacting standard while holding yourself with patience, the way a good teacher does. The person who lowers their standards to feel better never makes anything good. The person who flogs themselves for every failure burns out before they make anything at all. Aim for the mountain summit; be gentle with the climber.
Stop optimising for a version of yourself you will not recognise. You are constantly making sacrifices in the present moment on behalf of a future self. This is often a wise thing to do, but it is pertinent to remember that self is not a stranger, and they will not thank you for a life spent entirely in preparation. Live partly for the person you are now, because the future is not some destination you can arrive at. It is just more present, later.
Remember that you are going to die, and let it sharpen rather than paralyse you. Everything above gets its urgency from a single fact: you have a finite and unknown number of mornings. Held wrongly, that thought is a weight. Held rightly, it is a knife that cuts away everything that does not matter and leaves you holding only the things that do.
keep those principles that resonate with you, discard those that don’t :)
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