There are several rules I do my best to follow. Some of them are in line with my concept of morality and others are simply useful in everyday life. I sometimes break them because I’m fallible, but I mostly abide by them. The self-improvement work I’ve done has made it easier to follow these rules and has even pointed me toward several of them. I’ve thought about how I live my life and figured out which rules I most often follow, so without further ado, here they are.
- Do to others as you’d have them do to you. The Golden Rule, and for good reason. Nearly everything about interacting with other people fits within this rule, it’s easy to remember, and it requires me to see things from others’ perspectives instead of just my own. There are some cases in which it doesn’t work, but it works perfectly far more often than not. If someone made me keep one rule and abandon the rest, this would be the one I’d keep.
- Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This one comes from Stephen Covey’s classic book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Listening to what others have to say and making sure I understand it teaches me much more than sharing my thoughts with them. Additionally, I’ve found that people are more willing to hear my take on something once I’ve heard them out. All of Covey’s habits are solid, and this is one of the best.
- Improve every day. Even after factoring in time for sleeping, working, eating, and driving, I still have time each day to use for self-improvement. Just spending a few minutes a day bettering myself is better than doing nothing because I don’t have as much time as I’d like. I’ve found meditating, praying, and reading to be powerful tools for self-improvement. Learning new things and practicing them every day has brought me much closer to the place I want to be in life as well as the person I want to be.
- Be honest. I believe honesty is morally right as well as useful in every area of life. Trust is essential in all relationships, whether they be familial, friendship, romantic, business, or anything else. Lying breaks that trust, sometimes irreparably, and drives people away. Telling the truth garners respect and strengthens trust, especially when it’s difficult or inconvenient to do so. There are ways to tell the truth that work better than others, but I’d rather clumsily tell the truth than smoothly tell a lie.
- Look for ways to help. No matter where I go, there is always something I can do to make that area a little bit better. I could spend years writing out all the different ways of helping people. Here are some of them: being a shoulder to cry on, giving somebody a jump start, volunteering for a good organization, or simply holding the door for someone. I never know what a seemingly small gesture might mean to another person (unless they tell me later on) but I know how much I’ve appreciated the gestures that others have given to me, so I’m always on the lookout for ways to pay it forward.
- Take chances. If I don’t pursue something, I’m almost surely not going to get it. Even if I don’t get exactly what I want, I usually end up getting something close to it, and sometimes I do get exactly what I want. I’ve had so many amazing experiences from simply saying “yes” even when I was scared or didn’t know what I was getting into. My experiences have taught me a lot of valuable lessons, and although I didn’t particularly enjoy some of them or even hated them at the time, I’m still grateful for the lessons I learned. I don’t always get what I want but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing I did my best to get it. Better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all.
- Dream big. If I try something small and fail, I’ll have almost nothing to show for it; if I fail while trying something big, I’ll have learned a lot of useful things in the process and may even succeed at accomplishing something else instead (such as a smaller version of what I had in mind or a certain part of it). Some of the best experiences in my life have come from dreaming big and believing things will work out against all odds and expectations from others. I’d much rather dream of doing something big and find out through experience that it won’t work than think it won’t work and never try it.
- Don’t think too much. This is one of the hardest rules for me to follow. Until last year, I wouldn’t have believed it to be possible to stop thinking or have much control over my thoughts. Ever since I first listened to The Power of Now and started practicing presence, however, I’ve discovered the benefits of thinking less: less anxiety, greater comfort around other people, easier conversations, more creativity, and a much easier time sleeping, to name a few. It’s difficult to change a lifetime of overthinking, so I still think much more than I should, and a lot of my thoughts are still negative, but I’ve definitely made a lot of progress since I started and can only see things getting better moving forward.