Principles: Life and Work

I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.

Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.

Making a handful of good uncorrelated bets that are balanced and leveraged well is the surest way of having a lot of upside without being exposed to unacceptable downside.

If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life.

Experience taught me how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision, so I got in the habit of doing that.

Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively.

The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down, especially if you are working with others.

Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.

Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning. Know when not to have an opinion. Develop, test, and systemize timeless and universal principles. Balance risks in ways that keep the big upside while reducing the downside.

Have clear goals. Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of your achieving those goals. Accurately diagnose the problems to get at their root causes. Design plans that will get you around them. Do what’s necessary to push these designs through to results.

Don’t confuse what you wish were true with what is really true. Don’t worry about looking good—worry instead about achieving your goals. Don’t overweight first-order consequences relative to second- and third-order ones. Don’t let pain stand in the way of progress. Don’t blame bad outcomes on anyone but yourself.

I believe one of the most valuable things you can do to improve your decision making is to think through your principles for making decisions, write them out in both words and computer algorithms, back-test them if possible, and use them on a real-time basis to run in parallel with your brain’s decision making.

The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots.

Put our honest thoughts out on the table, 2. Have thoughtful disagreements in which people are willing to shift their opinions as they learn, and 3. Have agreed-upon ways of deciding (e.g., voting, having clear authorities) if disagreements remain so that we can move beyond them without resentments.

Look to the patterns of those things that affect you in order to understand the cause-effect relationships that drive them and to learn principles for dealing with them effectively.

“You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don’t you won’t know if these things can happen to you and, if they do, you won’t know how to deal with them.”

When encountering your weaknesses you have four choices: 1. You can deny them (which is what most people do). You can accept them and work at them in order to try to convert them into strengths (which might or might not work depending on your ability to change). You can accept your weaknesses and find ways around them. Or, you can change what you are going after.

Sincerely believe that you might not know the best possible path and recognize that your ability to deal well with “not knowing” is more important than whatever it is you do know.

To be “good” something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole; that is what is most rewarded.

Having a process that ensures problems are brought to the surface, and their root causes diagnosed, assures that continual improvements occur.