7 Rules of Life

Principle 1: Willpower is your most precious resource

Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place

— Tao Te Ching

• You don’t need willpower to be a good father or mother.
• You don’t need willpower to avoid being a murderer.
• You don’t need willpower to drink water when you’re thirsty.

All this happens effortlessly.

You want to get to a state where your day-to-day life does not require willpower. Everything that needs to happen gets done seemingly automatically.

But ironically, you need willpower to build the habits so life is effortless.

Focus your limited willpower less on the action and more on the triggers. A recovering drug addict should stay away from the people and locations where they used to do drugs. Similarly, if you want to go the gym more, focus on showing up at the gym at a designated time (the time and location) and don’t worry about the workout (the action).

Principle 2: Seek greatness

This is a truth: when you sacrifice your life, you must make the fullest use of your weaponry. It is false to not to do so, and to die with your weapon yet undrawn.

— Miyamoto Musashi

Fight tooth and nail for greatness. You get to define what you want to be great at. The journey to greatness becomes effortless and a perpetually renewable source of happiness when the work is meaningful and challenging.

Principle 3: Do not be results-oriented

The wise man regards the reason for all his action, but not the results.

— Seneca

You can only control your actions. The outcome of your actions is up to chance.

Focus on what you can control. Focus on making the right plays throughout your life. You might get unlucky and lose a hand that you should have won but in the long-run, there’s no such thing as luck.

Principle 4: Do not be data-oriented

Do not seek data. Seek the truth.

Sources of truth include:

• Data
• Common sense
• Your own experience
• The experience of others

If multiple sources of truth are saying the same thing, you know you are close to finding the answer. If they are not saying the same thing, then you need to dig deeper.

Principle 5: Enjoy the ride

Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: and that this should accompany him in his labor the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, not knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

— Ecclesiastes

Sensual pleasure adds a beauty to life and balances work-derived enjoyment.

Principle 6: Learn how to play hurt.

What are we trying to heal, anyway? The athlete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt.

— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

We are all playing hurt. Move past the pain. There are a few ways of doing that:

• Burn the bridges behind you: You’ll commit when there’s no retreat.
• Focus: Do the things that matter. Drop the things that don’t.
• Up the ante: Invest more money into a business. Commit to quitting smoking publicly.
• Make it easy: Build the habits and processes to put the hard things on autopilot.
• Understand the path to reach the goal: Get to a point where you feel like you’re making progress.

A note on passion: Passion is another way to move past the pain, but it’s fickle and fleeting. You can be passionate about something for a little while, but then it goes away. It’s not in your control. It comes and goes as it pleases.

Principle 7: Your body controls your mind

Contrary to the way we intuitively think our emotions work, the physiological response comes before the feeling. Love and anger do not cause your heart rate to increase. Rather, your heart rate increases and then your brain interprets the situation as love or anger.

Your body has great power over you mind. By taking care of the body, you take care of the mind too.

Start with the main 3 main pillars to physiological health — diet, exercise and sleep.

Then improve your physiologically-rooted behaviors.

• Smiling more will make you happier.
• Sitting with a good posture will make you more alert.
• Meditation will make you more relaxed.