Principles For My Coming Years

I believe that we must articulate and explicitly declare our principles, at the least to ourselves. This comes from the idea that if you do not choose your path, someone else will choose it for you applied to our principles, if we do not choose what to believe in and understand why we believe it, we are doomed to pickup the beliefs of someone else even if we do not do that directly.

Principles are about direction rather than absolute correctness, truth or any form of binary such as right and wrong. Principles only lead us somewhere, whether that place is to our benefit or demise; which is another reason why I think we must carefully curate and choose our principles

In a way principles are a question about where we want to end up. Who we want to be in addition to being an answer to what we think we are at the present moment and what we represent to ourselves and the world.

I must not take principles to an extreme, too much challenge breaks you down rather than builds you up, too much memorization could make you stick to small details and forget the big picture, too much focus on understanding could make your ideas of everything transient with nothing stable to call for when needed to put what you know into action.

The only way to develop is by putting yourself in situations where your skills are tested to there limit, pick-out challenges in various areas, not only what you are familiar with.

Seek challenge in your ideas too, be open to change them and be open to sticking to them when needed.

Do not mistake constant pain and difficulty for challenge that brings growth, a rest is necessary to growth as well as an acknowledgment of what we have accomplished.

It is a fine line at times that you must not cross else you'll end up burning yourself instead of getting accustomed to the heat of challenge.

I believe that one can not hope to understand any sufficiently complex system without memorizing the basic terms and concepts of it. I challenge the idea that we can always just pause and look up definitions, we would be wiser to take the time to put those terms to memory. This way we wouldn't need to waste time and mental space looking up terms, also this possibly opens up the endless gates of distraction instead of focus.

At the same time keep an eye for the big picture and understand what you need to memorize and why, keep in mind the terms that will benefit you the most during practice of the skill or material you are learning.

The universe and the world trend towards chaos and decay, leave anything unattended and it'll break down eventually. To plan is to declare "I will bend the chaos" and to take actions is to declare "I weave order despite the chaos."

This principle is seen in planning but can be generalized to other areas of life.

Always think about what you are willing to give up when choosing plans and paths. Any role you invest time into should pay dividend in some form whether material or mental, the latter being often underrated and misrepresented.

Keep in mind that what makes sense as a sacrifice for you will not apply for other people, this is where you face judgment from the world. Keep this in mind before judging others for their paths and choices.

The world is unfair and unjust, but we don't have to see that as necessarily bad thing or an evil thing, it is just the state of the world, there are many who seek to balance those scales and to those goes my sincerest regards and appreciation.

Still, that does not mean to give up on the basis that we won't get where we want to be because everything is unjust, I'd like to think that on average, everything is justly unjust, eventually we will be the ones on the scale up and someone else will be on the scale down, some call that luck or fate.

Do what works for you, if it is not mainstream, prepare some explanations on why, do make sure to have those for yourself before others too.

Multitasking in most cases is just the quick switching between two tasks, each switch costing energy which over the course of the day would consume far more than if you had just stuck to doing one task at a time.

I think having the growth mindset can not be complete without some form of data collection about ourselves, otherwise how can you be sure that you are better than your past self in some category?

Personal data collection, a practice also known as the quantified self is vital to growth, in whichever category you want to grow, find meaningful ways to measure your performance on it and see if what you're doing to grow actually helps you or not. At the same time do not be lost in the numbers and remember why you are improving or learning a particular skill.

Keep data as yours whenever possible, back it up, secure it. If it is not on your machine it is never truly yours. Avoid extremes.

I wrote about this before, my ideas have not changed but only gained strength as I reaped the benefits of mastery of my tools, so for all the tools to come, read the manuals, understand its potential and what it means for you.