Welcome to First Principles Weekly. A newsletter about the First Principles of happiness: Health, Wealth and Time.
Read Time: 3 mins
1) Living With Values
2) Something Interesting (Podcast)
3) Something to think about (Seneca on Anxiety)
“Open your arms to change but don’t let go of your values.”
Dalai Lama
It’s incredible to think how much of your life you end up living in a directionless way.
This doesn’t necessarily mean your life doesn’t have structure but you are living governed by a set of character traits (which were formed from a very young age) and not by values.
Values are something that we are aware of and are imparted on us by people as we grow up (teachers/parents). We acquire them via osmosis. No one sets them out for you and people who don’t acquire them tend to end up at the wrong end of society.
They are the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you do something you know isn’t right.
But how many times have you sit down to articulate what your values actually are?
Having a child puts so may things in perspective. For me it prompted me to ask myself (in a fit of catastrophising) if my son grew up not knowing me what would I be able to say I stood for?
This is not an easy task. There are many resources which will help you.
Ultimately having a set of values (whatever they are) allows you to live a more intentional life. They are a set of mental models that you are able to reference before you take a decision.
When you act according to your values you feel as if you are being true to yourself.
Here are the 6 core values I found are most important to me.
Health/Fitness
I want to be someone who is completely in control of his health. I have set of health metrics which I monitor closely.
Financial Independence
I don’t want to be someone that upgrades his lifestyle as his assets grow. I want to have a set of “rich life” aims which I aim to be able to sustain. Nothing more.
Growth/Knowledge/Achievement
I want to prioritise the acquisition of knowledge for the sake of growing my understanding of the world.
Generosity
I want to be someone that takes care of his own affairs in order to be able to provide security to other people.
Internal Peace
I want to take pleasure in growing spiritually as it will have a positive impact on those around me.
Humility/Honesty
I never want to lose sight of the fact that I could have been any of the 8bn people on the planet and the chances of being gifted the life I enjoy are infinitesimally small.
Having these core tenets allow you to model decisions based on whether they fit the way you want to live.
Ultimately this will lead to living a more intentional life.
What values do you hold up as the most important? It’s a really useful exercise to physically write them down.
I would love to hear any feedback!
Thanks for reading, until next week.
Something interesting (podcast)
Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies (Lex Friedman Podcast) here.
Yuval Harari is the author of Sapiens and one of the foremost thinkers alive today. He is brilliant at providing context on what it means to be human and helping us to understand our small place in the earth’s long history.
“What is the meaning of life? Most people expect a story, like a big drama with a plotline and everyone has a role to play. Life is not a story or a big drama, this is just a human fantasy.
The universe does not function like a story; it’s more complex and nonverbal. To really understand life, you need to observe it directly in a nonverbal way. Don’t turn it into a story.”
Something to think about
Two millennia before the clinical concept of anxiety was coined, the great Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC–AD 65) offered a timeless salve for this elemental human anguish in his correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, later published as Letters from a Stoic (public library).
In the thirteenth letter, titled “On groundless fears,” Seneca writes:
There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
Content creator update
Here’s some details on what’s currently on my reading list and progress as I build this newsletter to (hopefully) help more people.
Book currently reading: Outlive by Peter Attia.
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