Rules for life: building your principles

Principles to live by

What comes to mind when you think of principles? Is it slogans that companies like to have on their walls, specific buzzwords, or maybe something else?

Since reading Ray Dalio’s ‘Principles’ I see them as guiding rules for your life. Using the format in Dalio’s book, I wrote my own principles to live by. They have helped guide how I approach my day to day life, and improve my decision making. One of my favourites is ‘Be radically open minded and radically transparent’, and in the interests of being radically transparent, I want to share my high level principles with you, followed by how to approach designing your own principles to live by.

Principle 1: Practice essentialism

How I apply this principle:

If you haven’t come across essentialism yet, I learned the concept from Greg McKeown’s book, of the same title. It is based around only doing the truly meaningful things and removing the trivial from your life, and this is exactly what I have tried to do.

In everything you do, you have a choice in whether or not you engage with that thing. This could be a social interaction, or a meeting at work — although there might be a trade-off, the choice is always yours. I ask myself if opportunities I get are an absolute ‘yes’, and if it isn’t, for me it is a ‘no’.

How this principle has improved my life: