Life Principles
What’s Here
This is where I collect various ideas and beliefs, concepts that are worth using as a basis for action.
Deciding Where to Go
Ikigai: the four-circle diagram did not come from Japan
Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a plain word in Japanese, roughly “the value of being alive”, the thing that makes getting up in the morning worth it. The examples Ken Mogi reaches for in The Little Book of Ikigai are on the scale of tending a plant or getting breakfast right. They have almost nothing to do with careers.
The famous four-circle Venn diagram did not come from Japan at all. The Spanish astrologer Andrés Zuzunaga drew a four-circle diagram about purpose in 2011, and in 2014 Marc Winn, in Britain, welded that diagram to the Japanese word and posted it on his blog. The two have been inseparable ever since.
The circles are: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what someone will pay for. The small overlap in the middle gets called ikigai.
I hold the diagram in two minds. It is useful, because it forces four questions from four directions at once, and a person asking “what should I actually be doing” usually manages only one of them. But it also makes an excellent excuse. The four circles never line up cleanly, and if you wait for the day they do, the day does not come.
So I use it as a diagnostic rather than a target. Whichever circle is missing from what I am doing right now is usually the one that explains why something has felt off lately.
Golden Circle: the evidence does not hold, but the question does
Simon Sinek drew three concentric circles in his 2009 TEDxPuget Sound talk: Why, How, What from the inside out. His claim is that most organisations communicate from the outside in, leading with what the product is and how it was made and rarely getting to why, while the few genuinely influential ones run the other way and start from Why.
I have always been half-convinced. The evidence in the talk is Apple and the Wright brothers, both cases where the outcome came first and the explanation was fitted afterwards, which is a sampling problem on its own. Sinek then attaches the three circles to a division of labour between the limbic system and the neocortex, and that neuroscience does not really stand up either.
Strip those away and something useful is still left. Its value is not that it is a law but that it is an ordering of questions. Before you have finished describing the spec and the method, can you say why the thing should exist at all? Being made to answer that alone filters out a fair number of things that should not have been started.
Time machine theory: stand in the future and look back at this decision
The same move goes by several names. Jeff Bezos calls it the regret minimisation framework. In 1994, deciding whether to leave D. E. Shaw and go sell books on the internet, this is what he ran: project yourself to eighty, stand there, look back, and ask which option the eighty-year-old regrets. He said he would not regret trying and failing. He would regret not trying.
Suzy Welch’s version is 10-10-10, smaller in scale and more often applicable: how will I feel about this decision in ten minutes, in ten months, in ten years.
Both versions run on the same mechanism. Stretch the time axis and short-term emotion loses the weight it was carrying. What makes a decision hard is often not that the options are close, but that a small immediate discomfort has been magnified out of proportion.
The direction I find most useful is the reverse one. Rather than asking whether my future self will be proud of this decision, I ask whether my future self will think it was worth spending this long on.
Moravec's paradox: the human ranking of difficulty and the machine ranking were never the same
For a long stretch I believed that if I climbed high enough in some corner of mathematics or raw intelligence, the achievement I wanted and a great deal of money would both be waiting up there. The belief was never tested. It simply looked correct. Hard things are scarce, scarce things are worth money.
AI has flattened that road in the space of a few years. What I assumed would take ten years to reach is now a text box. Being overtaken is the smaller problem. What I have begun to doubt is whether that definition of hard was ever sound.
Hans Moravec recorded an observation in Mind Children (1988) that later took his name. Getting a computer to adult-level performance on intelligence tests or chess is comparatively easy. Giving it the perception and mobility of a one-year-old is difficult to the point of near impossibility. His explanation is that abstract reasoning is an evolutionarily recent and very thin layer, resting on skills that took millions of years to build and cost us no effort at all.
In 1988 that was addressed to robotics, but it has been describing my situation the whole time. The human ranking of difficulty and the machine ranking of difficulty were never the same ranking. The mountain I picked happened to be the face machines climb fastest.
Larry Tesler supplies the other half. He is usually quoted as saying that artificial intelligence is whatever hasn’t been done yet, and he took the trouble to correct that misquote himself. What he actually said was that intelligence is whatever machines haven’t done yet. The difference matters. If our definition of intelligence amounts to the things machines cannot do, it retreats as machines advance, and I can never arrive, because it was built so that nobody arrives.
I have no conclusion here. The one thing I am sure of is that difficulty was never a good proxy for value. It merely overlapped with scarcity so neatly for a few centuries that I took them for the same thing. They are coming apart now, and I have not worked out what to steer by once they have.
Building Capability
Luck surface area: both terms are multipliers, so either one at zero gives zero
Jason Roberts wrote down a formula in 2010:
Luck = (Passionate) Doing × (Effective) Telling
The part that stayed with me is the multiplication sign. Doing and telling are factors, not addends, so either one falling to zero takes the whole thing to zero no matter how full the other one is. Working in silence and talking with nothing behind it meet the same fate in this formula.
That is uncomfortable, because I am plainly weighted toward the left-hand factor. Making things is not the problem. Letting anyone know what I am making is the thing I have always been bad at.
I wrote a whole piece on this one: Luck Surface Area: How to Increase Your Probability of Opportunity
Antifragile: the opposite of fragile is not robust, and the opposite of robust is not fragile
Nassim Taleb opens Antifragile (2012) on a gap in the language. What is the opposite of fragile? Most people answer robust, resilient, sturdy. But all of those describe surviving a shock unchanged, while fragile describes getting worse from one. The box for “gets better from a shock” is empty. There is no word in it. Taleb’s response was to mint one.
That three-way split is the part of the book I use more than anything else in it. A package marked “handle with care” is fragile. A package with nothing written on it is robust. The antifragile box needs a package marked “please mishandle”.
Biology named the underlying mechanism a long time ago: hormesis. Bone densifies under load, muscle rebuilds thicker after being torn, an immune system has to meet something before it can recognise it. None of these systems merely tolerate stress. They require it, and they degrade without it. A week in bed costs more bone density than a week of doing nothing in particular.
Taleb pulls two operations out of this. One is the barbell: put your resources at the two extremes, extremely safe and extremely speculative, and avoid the middle band that looks prudent while quietly carrying underpriced risk. The other is via negativa, the claim that removing something is more reliable than adding something, because what we know about harm is far sturdier than what we know about benefit.
I cannot honestly claim to live by this. I can identify the fragile arrangements in my own setup: a single income stream, a skill set bet on one direction. The distance between identifying them and fixing them is still considerable.
The Feynman technique: if you cannot say it simply, you do not understand it yet
A note about the name first. Feynman never proposed anything called the Feynman Technique. The name and the four steps were assembled afterwards, with Scott Young doing most of the work of popularising them.
What Feynman actually left behind is a more uncomfortable version. The physicist David Goodstein recalled asking him to prepare a freshman lecture on Fermi-Dirac statistics. Feynman agreed, and came back a few days later to say he could not do it. He could not reduce it to the freshman level. Then came the line that matters: that means we really don’t understand it.
The four steps run like this. Pick a concept and explain it in plain language. Wherever you stall is a gap. Go back and close the gap. Simplify again, using analogy.
Only the first step is doing any work. The other three are the procedure for handling a failure of the first. And the first step works because it pries apart feeling like you understand something and understanding it: the former needs only familiarity, the latter needs reconstruction. Human brains are extremely good at mistaking familiarity for comprehension, and the smoothness of a third reading is the most deceptive part of all.
Which is also why the method is unpleasant to use. Its output is not knowledge. It is a list of gaps you would rather not look at.
Reading People and Organisations
Three traits for judging people: cognition, execution, character, and you need all three
Plenty of people have assembled a framework for evaluating talent and partners, independently of each other, and arrived at nearly the same answer. The shared dimensions are cognitive ability, execution, and moral character.
Warren Buffett’s Standards
- Intelligence: capacity to learn and understand
- Energy: drive and persistence in execution
- Integrity: character and values
Buffett’s own phrasing is harsher than any bullet list. He says you look for three things when hiring: integrity, intelligence, energy. If they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. The order is not a list of equals. The first item is a gate, not a bonus.
Y Combinator’s Founder Assessment
- Intelligence: problem-solving ability
- Determination: persistent execution
- Integrity/Ethics: values and character
Paul Graham has said something counterintuitive about this: if he could keep only one, he would take determination over intelligence. He has watched too many smart founders who did not want it enough, and enough less-brilliant ones who simply refused to let the thing fail.
What each missing piece looks like is fairly distinct:
- Intelligence without determination → ideas that stay ideas
- Determination without intelligence → wrong direction, effort burned
- Both without integrity → looks impressive briefly, ends badly
Other Reference Frameworks
Ray Dalio in Principles:
- Character
- Common sense / Intelligence
- Creativity / Ability to get things done
Peter Drucker on what managers need:
- Integrity
- Intelligence
- Energy and drive
Four people, four eras, four industries, and the same table. Convergence at that level usually means one of two things: they copied each other, or it is true.
Remembering the three was never the hard part. The hard part is that integrity is close to untestable over short horizons, while the other two are visible on first meeting. So what actually happens is that we use the two we can see to infer the one we cannot, and find out much later that we inferred wrong.
The Gervais Principle: three tiers in an organisation, and how each is handled
The Gervais Principle comes from a series of long essays Venkatesh Rao wrote on Ribbonfarm in 2009, dissecting how power actually moves through organisations, with The Office as the specimen. The three-tier hierarchy is taken from a Hugh MacLeod cartoon.
One thing is easy to misread. All three labels are economic, not judgements of personality. A Loser is the party getting the worse end of a bargain, not a failed person, and Sociopath is not a clinical diagnosis but a term for someone unconstrained by the organisation’s own story about itself.
MacLeod Hierarchy
Three tiers of people exist in an organisation, playing different roles across its life cycle:
Losers
- Trait: people who made a bad economic bargain, trading the pursuit of capitalist upside for a stable income
- Mindset: chasing life satisfaction rather than power, looking for happiness rather than control
- Role: producing and creating value while being paid on terms set by the Sociopaths rather than by the value produced
- Exits: become a Sociopath, or settle into doing the job with minimum effort
Clueless
- Trait: an abnormal loyalty to an organisation that has demonstrably shown no loyalty back
- Mindset: believing the official story, over-optimistic, building a private fantasy on an idealised idea of the organisation
- Role: middle management, serving as a lightning rod that absorbs the tension between Sociopaths and Losers
- Bind: lacking the mobility to move freely through the economy, they hold their position until an irresistible force removes them
Sociopaths
- Trait: power-seekers driven by Darwinian logic and the Protestant ethic, pushing the organisation forward at any cost
- Mindset: deep scepticism toward the organisation itself, an unwillingness to hand it control, a determination to steer rather than be steered
- Role: the actual decision-makers, able to enter and exit at any stage of the life cycle
- Strategy: creativity in the early stage, distinctive leadership in the middle, and in the late stage the cold-bloodedness to make the decisions others cannot make out of fear or sympathy
The Core Insight
The sharpest claim in the whole theory is about promotion. Sociopaths deliberately promote the best-performing Losers into middle management, leave the mediocre ones where they are, and pull into the actual power structure those who perform poorly but understand how the game is played.
That explains something visible everywhere and rarely said out loud: the best performer on the ground floor usually gets promoted to the middle, and then stops moving. The promotion was not development. It was utility, and that position is where the friction between above and below gets absorbed most efficiently.
Rao has a colder conclusion still. Organisational pathology is not something that develops later. It is structural from the start, and a well-functioning organisation is merely one that is diseased more neatly.
How I Use It
Mostly not for sorting other people, which turns into a mean sort of entertainment very quickly. What it is genuinely good for is locating myself, and more importantly asking whether my loyalty to a company and that company’s loyalty to me are on the same order of magnitude.
The Clueless tier is the worst of the three not because those people are stupid, but because they are running a fundamentally transactional relationship as though it carried emotional obligation. Seeing that clearly does not make anyone cynical. It just removes one term that was consistently being miscounted.
Living With Yourself
Kintsugi: the repair is not something to hide, it is the value
Kintsugi (金継ぎ) is the craft of putting broken pottery back together with lacquer and dusting the seams with gold. The point is that the gold line is deliberately made visible. The repair is not there to make the damage disappear. It is there to keep the damage on the surface, as part of the object’s record.
The origin story usually told is the fifteenth-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. A favourite tea bowl broke, he sent it to China for repair, and it came back stapled together with ugly metal clamps. He was unimpressed, and Japanese craftsmen worked out the lacquer-and-gold method in response.
What makes the idea hold up is not that it is uplifting. It is that it is a statement about the direction of time. A bowl that has broken cannot return to never having broken, and that is physics rather than attitude. Which leaves exactly two options: pretend it never broke, or accept that it did and decide how to present it.
I dislike the version of kintsugi that gets flattened into “your scars make you beautiful”. That is too light, and unfair to anyone still in the middle of it. The actual claim is quieter: the marks of repair do not need hiding, because hiding them generally costs more effort than carrying them.
The Last Man: he knows exactly how small his life is, and he thinks it suits him fine
Nietzsche staged a scene in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) that still cools the back of my neck. Zarathustra comes down from the mountain and preaches the Übermensch to a crowd in the marketplace, and not one person understands him. So he changes tack. Let me describe the man I hold in deepest contempt, he says, a man who can no longer give birth to anything great. He calls him the Last Man.
The Last Man lives like this. He no longer grows poor or rich, because both are too much trouble. Nobody wants to rule and nobody wants to obey, equally too much trouble. They still work, but work is a form of entertainment, and they are careful that the entertainment does not tire them out. A small pleasure for the day, a small pleasure for the night, and a great regard for health. They still quarrel, but they make up quickly, or it would upset the stomach.
“We have invented happiness,” say the Last Men, and they blink.
The real blow lands afterwards. Zarathustra expected the description to shame the crowd. They cheered instead, and shouted for him to give them this Last Man, to turn them into Last Men. Nobody tricked them into that life. They asked for it out loud.
This concept is hard to hold because it points back at me. The blinking is the part that matters. The Last Man knows exactly how small his life is, he knows, and he thinks it suits him fine. Comfort itself is no crime. But when the only reason behind a decision is that this way is less trouble, and reasons like that stack up month after month, I am the one blinking.
Not forcing it: forcing yourself is not only more painful, it stops working
Nietzsche resigned his chair at Basel in 1879, aged thirty-four, on account of migraines, failing eyesight and constant vomiting. By his own estimate those episodes cost him about a third of every year. In January 1889 he collapsed in a street in Turin. He spent the following eleven years in the care of his mother and then his sister, and eventually stopped speaking altogether.
What actually caused the collapse remains unsettled. The diagnosis at the time was neurosyphilis, an account that turns out to be poorly supported, and later researchers have proposed a right-sided retro-orbital meningioma, frontotemporal dementia and CADASIL. So I will not claim he drove himself mad. Nobody is in a position to claim that.
What stays with me is something else. A man who wrote about self-overcoming as thoroughly as anyone ever has spent his last eleven years unable to look after himself. The doctrine did not protect him. Ideals issue no exemptions.
So I keep the bar low. When I have the energy, I go and do something I think is worth doing, without forcing myself to hit it every single day for a month. Fitness is the usual example. Most people can do the work. What ends it is missing one day and feeling the whole thing is already ruined.
I used to think this was just a way of letting myself off the hook. There turns out to be something underneath it. Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory (2000) lays motivation out along a spectrum, and one band of it is introjected regulation, behaviour propped up by guilt and self-image, the “I ought to” kind of force. Track people over time and introjected regulation does predict how long they persist early on, but that predictive power falls to non-significant later. Autonomous motivation keeps carrying.
Forcing yourself is not only more painful. It stops working.
Self-compassion offers an even less intuitive finding. Kristin Neff’s research from 2003 onward shows that the main reason people refuse to go easy on themselves is the fear that going easy will kill their drive. The data runs the other way. Self-compassionate people aim just as high and act more, because the cost of failure is cushioned and they dare to attempt harder things.
In my own case, knowing this made me do more rather than less. Walking into the gym thinking that skipping today ruins everything, and walking in thinking that I have energy today so I may as well, can produce an identical workout. Only the second one survives an exhausting Wednesday.
Living in the present: depression faces the past, anxiety faces the future
“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” That line is almost always hung on Lao Tzu. It is not in the Tao Te Ching and he never said it. The earliest source anyone can trace is a Brazilian motivational speaker called Junia Bretas.
Wrong author, sound content.
Rumination and worry are two kinds of repetitive negative thinking. Watkins, Moulds and Mackintosh compared them in 2005 and found exactly one difference that replicates reliably, which is temporal orientation. Rumination faces the past, worry faces the future. The two also grow on different illnesses, rumination mostly in the depression literature and worry mostly in the generalised anxiety literature. Nolen-Hoeksema’s response styles theory had already shown in 1991 that habitual ruminators are not merely more miserable at the time, they are also more likely to develop a depressive episode across the follow-up period. Brooding about the past making you depressed and brooding about the future making you anxious are two separate paths, each carrying its own evidence, and not simply a tidy piece of symmetry.
As for why the present is worth returning to, Killingsworth and Gilbert gave a blunt answer in Science in 2010. They interrupted 2,250 people at random moments through their phones and asked what they were doing, whether their mind was on it, and how happy they felt. Minds were elsewhere for 46.9% of waking hours, close to half. A time-lag analysis indicated that the wandering causes the unhappiness rather than following from it.
This is something I only learned properly in the last few years. It sounds like a weightless sentence, but what it points at is a very specific move. You notice that you are replaying something already finished, and you carry your attention back to whatever is actually in front of you. Understanding that part is easy. The hard part is being willing to carry it back on the fortieth time you catch yourself gone.
