- Log per day - 2026
- Outcome of the below
- Simmo is now at the EA Hotel, yay!
- We’re both doing life planning stuff, and it feels like a good place to start (which also nicely maps onto my “learning how to think” project) is arriving at some unifying ground truths for our lives. Some key principles that are evident from our last n years, and that make it easier to prioritise and also to say no to things
- This is partly inspired by meeting someone recently who I experienced as very principled and high in integrity. It’s also inspired by my gradual foregrounding of how ridiculous I’ve been over the last n years with all the pivots I’ve done (which I now call Scrunching)
- I’ve also been finding astrology really useful in these last few weeks for giving language to shine a light on my genuine strengths & drives
- Leo sun Taurus moon Scorpio rising with venus in Gemini and a Pisces mars. Really feels like it points at some useful stuff for me
1. Talking with Claude
How should we approach arriving at some durable first principles?
“The honest scope of this: You’re not going to “arrive” at first principles in a single sitting, or even a week. But you also don’t need months. The actual work is probably 3-5 hours of focused thinking spread over a couple of weeks, followed by an ongoing lightweight practice of checking your principles against reality.”
I think we’ve both already done a bunch of pre-thinking about this too, have already for example done the Daniel Schmachtenberger “Personal Dharma Inquiry”. This isn’t a cold start for either of us
“I’d honestly steer you away from anything that looks like “sit down and enumerate your values from first principles.” You’ve tried something adjacent to that (the Schmachtenberger personal dharma questions) and you called it quixotic yourself. The risk is that you produce a beautiful-sounding list that doesn’t actually constrain your behaviour, and then feel disillusioned when you pivot again.”
4 angles
- What has survived your pivots? You could give me a chronological list of your major life phases and what you cared about in each, and I could help you spot what threads persist across all of them. The things that show up in every phase are your most reliable signal.
- What do you actually do, vs what do you say you value? Revealed preferences are more honest than stated preferences. We could look at how you actually spend your time and energy and reverse-engineer what that implies about what you care about.
- What would you need to say no to right now? You mentioned wanting principles partly to be able to say no. That’s really practical. If you told me what’s currently on your plate and what you’re considering, we could work backwards from the decisions you’re facing rather than forward from abstract values.
- What does the person you admired actually do differently? Not their stated principles, but their behaviour — how do they make decisions, what do they say no to, how do they carry themselves? That might tell you more about what you’re actually attracted to than trying to derive principles from scratch.
Plan
Phase 1 - Gather data (1-2 hours)
Go through the four angles I mentioned. You don’t need to do all four — probably two or three will be enough to triangulate. The “what has survived your pivots” one is highest signal-to-noise, I think. You write up your answers, we discuss them, and I help you spot patterns you might not see yourself.
Phase 2 — Draft principles (1 hour)
Based on the patterns, we try to articulate maybe 3-5 things that seem genuinely stable and action-relevant. Not a grand philosophical system. More like: ”here's what I actually care about, stated plainly enough that it could help me make a decision next week.”
Man, a simple charter of what I actually care about, engineered to be memetically fit, would be so good
Phase 3 — Stress-test (30 mins)
We take some real past decisions and future decisions and see if the principles actually help. If they don't constrain anything, they’re too vague. If they’d have prevented something you’re glad you did, they’re wrong.
Phase 4 — Live with them
This isn’t a session, it’s just… using them for a month or two and seeing what happens. Then revisiting.
Summary & going forwards
The 80/20: Phase 1 is where most of the value is. If you do that well, the principles almost write themselves. If you skip it and try to generate principles directly, you’ll just produce aspirational statements that don’t reflect reality.
Refinement over time: I’d say revisit them every few months, or whenever you notice yourself making a big decision and the principles aren’t helping. They should be living things, not a constitution.
The main thing I’d want you to avoid is treating this as another learning project where you accumulate inputs forever. The goal is to get to a usable draft quickly and then refine through living, not through more thinking.
2. Ok cool, let’s do it then!
Phase 1 - gather data
- First principles 1 - what have survived my pivots?
- First principles 2 - revealed preferences
- First principles 3 - what to say “no” to
- First principles 4 - people you admire, and what they do differently?