Over the years I have tried to reduce how I want to live and work down to something I can actually hold in my head. A short list I can return to when a week gets loud. It has settled into four principles and they build on each other: an orientation, a way of seeing, a discipline, and a container.
One: be of benefit
The first principle is the simplest to say and the hardest to keep: at all costs, be of benefit to all beings. It sits above everything else because it decides what the other three are for. Focus and systems are neutral tools — they will serve whatever you point them at. This principle is what I point them at. When a decision is genuinely unclear, I have found it is usually because I have drifted from this question and started optimising for something smaller.
Two: see the self as flowing energy
The second is a shift in perception. It is easy to treat the body as a machine that burns fuel to do work. But a living system is better described by how energy moves through it - thinking, healing, emotion, effort - than by what it consumes.
The biology backs this up more literally than I expected: sustained training can roughly double the mitochondria in your muscles, and much of how we age tracks not stress itself but the energy cost of our response to it.
Health, then, is less about forcing more in and more about allowing energy to flow and allocating it wisely.
Once you see yourself this way, fatigue and burnout stop looking like a lack of fuel and start looking like a failure of allocation. That reframing changes what you do about them.
Three: concentrate the energy
The third principle is the discipline that follows from the second. If I am a flow of energy, then the question is where it goes. Scattered across ten priorities, it dissipates and nothing moves. Concentrated on two or three, it moves in one direction with enough force to actually shift something.
This is the hardest one in practice, because the pull is always toward more — more commitments, more open loops, more things half-done. The skill is subtraction: deciding what does not get my energy this quarter so that what remains can have all of it.
Four: build systems, in iterations
The first three are about direction and intensity. The fourth is about what sustains them when attention runs out: because it always does. A principle you have to remember every morning is fragile. A system carries it for you.
Systems are the channels energy runs through, and a channel either leaks or compounds depending on how well it is built. So I build mine deliberately and in iterations — a rough version first, then refinement as I learn where it leaks. My training log, the way I capture ideas, the environment I do my thinking in: none of these were designed once and finished. They are on their third or fourth version, and each version loses a little less.
Putting these together
Put together, the four move from why, to what I am, to where it goes, to what holds it: an ethical orientation, a way of seeing the self, the concentration of energy, and the container that sustains the whole thing. Benefit all beings. Perceive the flow. Concentrate it. Build the systems that channel it rather than let it leak.
It is a short list. That is the point. The value of a principle is not in its sophistication but in whether you can still reach it on the worst day of the week — and act from it anyway.