The Personal Evolutionary Process

• Principles are essential truths that work as the foundations for the behavior that leads you where you want in life.
• Those principles that are most valuable come from your own experiences and your reflections on those experiences.
• You turn to your principl...

• Know and understand the biggest threat to good decision making - harmful emotions
• Decision making is a two-step process: first learning, then deciding
• Synthesize the situation you're dealing with
• Make your decisio...

• A correct understanding of reality is the essential foundation for any good outcome.
• Don’t get attached to your views about how things should be; there should always be space for learning.
• Evolution is the single greatest force in ...

Your principles will influence your standards of behavior. In relationships with other people, your and their principles will decide how you collaborate.

People who have shared values and principles get along. People who don’t share values and principles, experienc...

• Don’t confuse reality with the way you wish reality to be.
• Don’t overweight first-order consequences relative to second and third-order ones.
• Don’t let pain stop you from progressing.
• Don’t blame negative results on anyone but yourself.

• Seek out the smartest people you disagreed with and try to understand their logic
• Know when it's best not to have an opinion
• Develop, test, and systematize timeless and universal principles

• Express your sincere, authentic thoughts
• Have considerate debates in which people are willing to shift their opinions as they learn new perspectives
• Have agreed-upon ways of deciding (voting, authorities, etc.) if disagre...

The most important thing for you to do is write down your principles to clarify them.

• Write down every type of interaction you had and how you handled them (take the future into consideration as well). Test your assumption and update your data when necessary.

Your principles should reflect the values you truly believe in.

While it isn’t always a bad thing to use the principles of someone else (it’s hard to come up with your own, and often much wisdom has gone into those already created), adopting pre-packaged principles...

Use this five-step process:

1. Set clear goals.
2. Identify the issues that stand in the way of you achieving those goals.
3. Diagnose the issues correctly to get at their root causes.
4. Draft plans t...

• Prioritize: you can’t have everything you want
• Don’t confuse goals with desires. A goal - something you have to achieve; a desire - something you want, but it stands in the way of your goals.
• Don't give up on the goals tha...