How to write your own personal principles

Most personal-principle exercises fail the same way: you sit down with a blank page, write eight noble-sounding sentences, feel briefly clarified, and never look at the list again. The problem is the starting point. Principles are not invented from ideals — they are extracted from your own history. Here is a method that produces principles you will actually use.

Step 1: Mine, do not brainstorm

Do not ask "what do I value?" You will answer with words you have heard other people admire. Ask instead:

• What are the three decisions in the past two years I am most glad I made? What did I refuse in order to make them?
• What are the three I most regret? What did I know at the time and override?
• Where do I repeatedly give advice to friends that I do not follow myself?
• What behaviour in other people makes me disproportionately angry? (Anger is a fast, unflattering, extremely reliable values detector.)

Write the raw answers as stories, not slogans. "I said yes to that contract because I was scared of a slow month, and I resented every hour of it" is the raw material. You are looking for repeats. A principle worth writing shows up in at least two separate stories.

Step 2: Write the rule as an instruction to yourself

Convert each repeat into a single sentence in the imperative or first-person present. Not "honesty is important" — that is a category, not a rule. Write "I say the uncomfortable thing in the room it belongs in, not afterwards to someone else."

Three tests for the sentence:

Can it be violated?

If you cannot describe a specific action that would breach it, it is a mood, not a principle. "Be kind" fails. "I do not criticise someone's work without offering to help fix it" passes.

Does it cost something?

A principle that never costs you anything is not steering. Every real principle names a trade you are willing to lose. "I ship on the date even if the feature is smaller" costs scope. "I take the call from family even mid-task" costs focus. If nothing is given up, you have written a preference.

Is it yours?

Read it aloud. If it sounds like a LinkedIn post, or like your father, delete it and write what you actually do when nobody is grading you. Borrowed principles are the number one reason lists go stale — you cannot fail to live up to a rule you never believed, so nothing ever happens.

Step 3: Attach two or three behaviour standards

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the one that decides whether the list survives. Under each principle, write the observable actions that constitute living it. The bar: a stranger following you for a day could say yes or no.

Principle: I protect the first two hours of the day for work that compounds.

• No meetings scheduled before 11am.
• Phone stays face-down in a drawer until the first block ends.
• I decide the night before what the block is for.

Notice these are cheap to evaluate and expensive to fake. Notice also that they are replaceable: if you change jobs and 11am becomes absurd, you rewrite the standard and keep the principle. That separation is the whole trick.

Step 4: Stress-test against a real case

Take the hardest genuine situation from the last year and run each principle against it. Two useful outcomes:

• The principle would have changed what you did. Excellent — it has teeth. Keep it.
• The principle would have been overridden anyway. Then either it is not really yours, or there is a second, stronger principle you have not written down. Find that one; it is usually more important than the one you started with.

Also look for collisions. If two principles would have pulled in opposite directions, write the tiebreaker explicitly. "When speed and thoroughness conflict on reversible decisions, speed wins." Unwritten tiebreakers are where principles quietly stop working, because in the moment you will simply do whatever is easier and call it judgement.

Step 5: Record the reason, and date it

Under each principle, add one line: why this, why now. Six months later this line is worth more than the principle. It tells you whether the principle is still answering a live problem or a solved one. Principles have a shelf life; the ones written to fix a situation you are no longer in should be retired with thanks, not defended out of loyalty.

Step 6: Put it somewhere you are forced to see it

A document you have to remember to open is a document you will not open. Whatever you use — a note pinned to the top of your notes app, a recurring calendar block, a dedicated app — the requirement is the same: the list must arrive in front of you on a schedule you did not choose in the moment. Weekly is enough for review. Daily is enough for the standards.

A realistic first pass

Aim for three principles, not ten. Three that you consult beat ten that you admire. Write them, live a fortnight, and then look at what actually happened — the second draft, written with two weeks of evidence, is always better than the first draft written with none.