Worth your time on this question

TRY · 10 MIN

Principles Under Pressure

TAIU

A principle only counts on the day it costs something.

Tests a stated principle against the last time holding it cost something.

READ · BOOK

Dare to Lead, and the Living Into Our Values work

Brené Brown

Read the values chapter and skip the leadership framing if it is not your world. Take it as a translation tool rather than as a way of choosing what you believe.

The useful part is not the list of values at the back. It is the exercise that follows it, where you have to write down what living that value looks like in behaviour and what its opposite looks like when you are tired and under pressure. Most people find the second list easier to write, which is the point.

READ · BOOK

Principles

Ray Dalio

Worth reading against yourself. The systematising instinct that makes it useful is the same one that can turn a life into an algorithm, and the exercise you have just done deliberately stops short of that.

Dalio's case is that most people rediscover their own rules under pressure, badly, every time. Writing them down turns a repeated agonising decision into a considered one made once. The book is at its best where he shows a principle failing and being rewritten.

READ · ARTICLE

Identity-based habits

James Clear

Best for seeing why repeated action is better evidence than self-description.

A short piece with one idea in it: every action is a small vote for the kind of person you believe you are, and the tally is more honest than the label. It is the clearest statement of the assumption this exercise runs on, which is that what you did tells you more than what you would say.

LISTEN · EPISODE

Steven Hayes on psychological flexibility

Dan Harris with Steven C. Hayes

Hayes founded the approach behind the previous entry, and the conversation is more useful than the books because he is being pushed on it. The part worth your time is where he separates a value you are moving towards from a rule you are obeying, and explains why holding the second one too tightly damages the first.

READ · BOOK

The Happiness Trap

Russ Harris

Read it if the exercise found a principle you have never allowed to bend. It is the strongest available argument against the tidy version of consistency.

The plainest introduction to acceptance and commitment therapy, where values are treated as directions you keep moving in rather than rules you either obey or break. It also makes the case that rigid rule-following, even about admirable things, is one of the more reliable ways to make yourself miserable.