Principles
Thirteen rules for confronting reality more honestly. From the machinery of markets to the workings of the mind, the same search runs through all of them, how things truly work, and how rarely we admit we are part of what needs explaining.
Mechanism over narrative
Distrust any explanation you cannot reduce to how the thing actually works. Markets, minds, and currencies all run on machinery beneath the story people tell about them. Find the machinery.
Incentives explain most behaviour that confuses you
People are rarely irrational. You simply have not found the payoff yet. When a system acts strangely, follow the reward, not the rhetoric.
Simplicity is earned, not assumed
Anyone can make a thing complicated. Stripping it back to what actually matters takes more understanding, not less. Complexity is often just unfinished thinking.
Action over analysis
Thought has a failure mode: it feels like progress while producing none. Past a point, the only way to learn more is to do the thing and watch what breaks. Most 'I need more data' is fear wearing a lab coat. Analysis is where smart people hide.
Test by trying to break it
Do not ask whether something works. Ask what kills it. Fragility stays hidden until it is stressed, and by then it is expensive.
Optionality is worth paying for
Prefer moves that open doors over ones that merely pay out. The future is less predictable than any forecast, so the value is not in being right, it is in staying able to respond.
Own the real thing
Prefer assets and skills that produce value and survive debasement. Paper claims and borrowed status decay; productive things compound.
Build for the decade, not the dopamine
Construct things that outlast the mood that made them. Anything worth having is paid for in patience the short term resents.
Attention is the scarcest asset you own
Not time, not capital. Where you point the mind is the whole game, and it leaks by default. Guard it like the limited resource it is.
Discomfort is information
The instinct to avoid a thing often marks exactly where the growth or the truth sits. Pain is a signal, not just a cost. Read it before you flinch from it.
Write to discover what you think
Clarity is the output of articulation, not its precondition. If you cannot say it cleanly, you do not yet understand it.
Hold cosmic scale, act on a human one
The universe humbles you about how little any single decision matters, and a life of roughly four thousand weeks humbles you about how few you have to spend it on. Finitude is not the enemy; it is what forces the choosing. Since you cannot do everything, decide deliberately what to neglect, then pull the only lever you ever hold, which is today.
The hardest system to see clearly is yourself
Every principle here points outward at reality. This one points back. You will apply mechanism, incentives, and break-testing to the world far more honestly than to your own motives, because the observer is the one thing the method cannot easily get behind. Assume your self-account is the least reliable data you have.