gm gm!

Thanks for being an early adopter to the newsletter and coming along for the ride as we experiment and build this thing. It’s been unexpectedly fun and thought-provoking for me personally, and I hope the same can be said for your experience as a reader.

I’ve created a 4 question survey to ask you what value you get from the newsletter and how I improve the newsletter (inspired by the 4 questions I use to measure product market fit).

Principles

I mentioned before that I sometimes use ChatGPT as a personal mentor when I ask it to impersonate people who have a lot of writing/source material online.

I do this whenever I have a relatively clear goal but I’d like some guidance from my digital mentors, like Ray Dalio, Seth Godin, James Clear and Tim Ferriss.

One such topic is developing a clear sense of my personal principles.

This was an esoteric and theoretical exercise that I felt zero desire to prioritize until I realized that I needed to get back in touch with who I am at my core.

We have so many big decisions and choice today - where we live, what our careers are, who we associate with, and what we prioritize in terms of time, attention and energy.

How can I make consistent decisions about those types of things if I don’t understand my principles?

Principles systematize good decisions

In an effort to reduce my decision fatigue, I asked my mentors for some help.

Here’s what they had to say.

Interesting to see the patterns and intersections across what they each had to say.

10 min call to action

Let’s get tactical and actually figure it out. What are your principles?

Step 1. Reflect on Past Decisions

Exercise: Take a moment to write down three decisions you're proud of and three you regret.

• What guided those decisions?

• Were there common themes or values underlying the decisions you're proud of?

• What do you wish you had prioritized in the decisions you regret?

Step 2. Consider Role Models:

Exercise: List down three to five people you deeply admire, either personally known to you or famous figures.

Questions:

• What specific qualities or behaviors of these individuals do you admire?

• Which of their values resonate with you? Why?

• How do they make decisions, and what can you learn from that?

tl;dr

If you have to make a lot of different decisions and you want to stay on track, define your principles.

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Until next time,

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