Good principles are effective ways of dealing with reality. 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.

Embrace reality and deal with it.

Truth – or more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality- is the essential foundation for any good outcome. Most people fight seeing what’s true when it’s not what they want it to be. That’s bad, because it’s more important to understand and deal with the bad stuff since the good stuff will take care of itself.

Studying all those painful first-time encounters, I learned that even if they hadn’t happened to me, most of them had happened to other people in other times and places, which gave me a healthy respect for history, a hunger to have a universal understanding of how reality works, and the desire to build timeliness and universal principles for dealing with it. I begin to see reality as a gorgeous perpetual motion machine, in which causes becomes effects that becomes causes of new effects, and so on. I realised that reality was, if not perfect, I had to productively deal with them effectively than complaining about them. I came to understand that my encounters were tests of character and creativity. Over time, I came to appreciate what a tiny and short-lived part of that remarkable system I am, in how it’s both good for me and good for the system for me to know how to interact with it well.

Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change. Being radically open-minded enhances the efficiency of those feedback loops. because it makes what you are doing, and why, so clear to yourself and to others that there can’t be any misunderstandings. The more radically open-minded you are, the less likely you are to deceive yourself – and also the most likely that others will give you honest feedback. It can also be difficult to be radically transparent, and it’s natural to fear that. Yet if you don’t put yourself out there with your transparency, you won’t learn. What does it mean to be radical transparent – to learn to speak in public, such as me writing this, I am exposing personal material to the public that will attract attention and criticism. Yet I am doing it because it has allowed me to understand others and for them to understand me, which is far better than not having this understanding. Imagine how many fewer misunderstandings we would have, and how much closer we all would be to knowing what’s true – if instead of hiding what they think, people shared it openly. I am not talking about every personal inner secrets – I am talking about people’s opinions of each other and of how the world works. I have learned how powerful this kind of radical truth and transparency is in improving my decision and my relationships. So whenever I am faced with the choice, my instinct is to be transparent. I am practising it to be a discipline.

Radical truth + radical transparency = more meaningful work + more meaningful relationships.

Don’t get hung up on your views of how things ‘should’ be because you will miss out on learning how they really are. It’s important not to let our biases stand in the way of our objectivity. To get good results, we need to be analytical rather than emotional.
Think about:
1) What’s good and what’s bad
2) What my purpose in life is
3) What I should do when faced with my most important choice

In my early years (and maybe now still), I looked up to extraordinarily successful people, thinking that they were successful because they were extraordinary. But they are no happier than the rest of us, and they struggle just as much as average folks. Even after they surpass their wildest dreams, they still experience more struggle than glory. In time, I realised that satisfaction of success doesn’t come from achieving goals but from struggling well. I’m still struggling and we all will until we die, because even if I try to avoid the struggles, they will find me. Thanks to all that struggling (and learning), I have done everything I wanted to do, gone everywhere I wanted to go, met whoever I wanted to meet, gotten everything I wanted to own, have a career that through my perseverance and persistence to struggle, is enthralling and most rewarding as I want it to be. Yet I cannot say that having an intense life filled with accomplished moments is better than having a relaxed life filled with savouring, though I can say that being strong is better than being weak, and that struggling gives one strength.

Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe. It drives everything. As I thought about evolution, I realised that it exists in other forms than life and is carried out through other transmission mechanics than DNA, such as technologies, languages and everything else evolves. It is passed on from generation to generation and evolves, its impact on people over many generations.

Successful people are those who can go above themselves to see things objectively and manage those things to shape change. They take in the perspective of others instead of being trapped in their own heads with their own biasses. They are able to look objectively at what they are like – their strengths and weaknesses and what others are like to put the right people in the right roles to achieve their goals.

Watching people struggle and having others watch you struggle can elicit all kinds of ego-driven emotions such as sympathy, pity, embarrassment, anger, or defensiveness. You need to get over all that and stop seeing struggling as something negative. Most of life’s greatest opportunities comes out of moments of struggle; it;’s up to you to make the most of these tests of creativity and character. When encountering your weaknesses, you have 4 choices:

1) You can deny them (which is what most people do)
2) 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)
3) You can accept your weakness and find ways around them
4) Or, you can change what you are going after.

What solution you choose will be critically important to the direction of your life. The worst path you can take is the first. Denial can only lead to your constantly banging up against your weaknesses, having pain and not going anywhere. The second- accepting your weakness while trying to turn them into strengths – is probably the best path IF it works. BUT some things you will never be good and it takes a lot of time and effort to change. The best clue is whether the thing you are trying to do is consistent with your nature / natural abilities. The third path – is the easiest and most viable path, yet is the one least followed! The fourth path, is also a great path, though it requires flexibility on your part to get past preconceptions and enjoy the good fit when you find it.

Allow pain stand in the way progress VS Understand how to manage pain to produce progress

Use 5 step process to get what you want

1) GOALS: Have clear goals.

While you can have virtually anything you want, you can’t have everything you want. Prioritise.
Don’t confuse goals with desires. A proper goal is something that you want to achieve, whereas desires are first-order consequences.

2) PROBLEMS: Identify and don’t tolerate problems that stand in the way of achieving those goals

Be specific in identifying your problems. You need to be precise, because different problems have different solutions. If a problem is due to inadequate skill, additional training may be called for; if it is from an innate weakness, you may need to seek assistance from someone else or change the role you play.
Distinguish big problems from small ones. You only have so much time and energy.
Once you identify a problem, do NOT tolerate it.

3) DIAGNOSIS: Accurately diagnose the problems to get at their root cause

Focus on the ‘what is’ before deciding ‘what to do about it’. It involves speaking with the relevant people and looking at the evidence together to determine the root causes. Like principles, root causes manifest themselves over and over again in seemingly different situations. Finding them and dealing with them pays dividends again and again.

4) DESIGN: Design plans that will get you around them

It does not take a lot of time to design a good plan. It can be sketched out and refined in just hours or spread out over days or weeks. But the process is essential.

5) DOING: Do what’s necessary to push these designs through to results