Allow me to let you all read about what I think about walking around my neighborhood. I try not to reflect too much on life, and instead visualize what the future could look like. Reflecting too much makes me start regretting, and that builds up in the body, making me unhealthy, thus causing my life to be much worse than it has to be. While visualizing on my strolls, I will also meditate on some ideas to write for articles. This one came to me in the shower and was further fleshed out on the walk.
I have done the self-help/Business book gambit, and the one that always sticks out, and I never fail to mention, is Zero to One by Peter Thiel. (Also, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams.) These books stand out to me solely because of the name of this article. Principles and Beliefs.
In my humble opinion, a belief tells you what to think, whereas a Principle tells you how to decide. And I want to preface as well that my definition of belief and principle is solely used in the context of career decisions. Beliefs are a product of someone’s subjective life experience. They arrive with context that may have nothing to do with your situation in life. My love of both above books comes from the fact that the advice within them (whether you agree with them or not) comes from a place that is without context. And this is where Principles come in.
Principles represent the knowledge within and underneath a belief. Or as I call it, the good stuff. On my own podcast for multiple years now, I make my best attempt to take the experience of lawyers, law students, and legal professionals, and produce an underlying learning that comes out of that experience, that applies to everyone’s life, no matter what stage they are at. A belief is a borrowed answer, and a Principle gives way for beliefs of our own to come about. This allows beliefs to take shape within a principle, and our life experience.
Why was this idea so entrenched in my mind for so long, causing me to write this article in the first place? My life up to this point was solely based on choosing principles over beliefs and creating my own. Common knowledge and belief would tell me that if I wanted to follow my path of making it to a top school and enjoying the fruits of a Big Law job, my 151 score was not going to cut it. Instead, I took the principle of creating something that was purely mine, building a body of work, and adding it as an item on my resume going forward.
But the principles don’t stop there. At the beginning of my journey, along the way, speaking to dozens of people each week, I learned new principles to apply to my life every day. Being useful, not overthinking, and just starting. With school, clubs, and organizations pulling me every which way, I knew at a certain point I needed to take the best principle I knew and put it into practice. Bet on myself.
So indeed I did, and to end my Junior year semester, I would pour 100’s of hours into my podcast and LinkedIn, along with my newly gained internship at Rhetoric. The underlying principle of it all was that each person I spoke with and interacted with would gain me access to an additional web of people. All I had to do was stay consistent and, above all, not quit.
The beliefs of those around me would lead me to believe that the journey I was about to embark on was nearly impossible to accomplish. I even had a friend tell me that I was crazy to think it could work. What he didn’t realize, and I do not blame him for thinking it, is that I would still be doing it and expanding on it to this day. Every founder of the largest companies in the world used this same principle to succeed. Ride the rocky wave till you possibly can’t.
The worst kind of belief I think that exists today (which is becoming less common over time) is the fact that you can’t start what I did at the age I did. At 19, the common belief is that I have absolutely no right to start a podcast speaking to lawyers, law students, and legal professionals. But the principles I came to instill into my life told me otherwise. It’s a free country after all.
The stark contrast between beliefs and principles is a profound one in my humble opinion. Beliefs that are taken and instilled from other people’s experiences can transform how you view your world both negatively and positively. The worst of the beliefs can form when you take a belief and make it your own, internalizing it. Principles avoid this trap by being broad enough and simple enough to be able to apply to your life in any given way. My life in the past years has been fueled by principles I try to follow every day. Beliefs, especially in the legal field, can turn the most positive people into cynics. Avoid the cynics at all costs. Great beauty can be found in simplicity!
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