Rules Can Change Our Lives
Shane Parrish narrates an interesting idea on the Tim Ferris podcast where he talks about his friend who lost a lot of weight by following simple rules. His rules were simple. Rule no. 1 - order the healthest thing on the menu while eating out. Rule no. 2 - He would not order alcohol ever. Rule no. 3 - He would not order desserts.
He goes on to explain why Daniel Kanheman likes to have rules. According to Kanheman, people don’t argue with rules and you end up following them. Kanheman has a rule that he would never say yes on a phone call for anything. He doesn’t want to end up saying yes to people because of social pressure or to please them.
Nassim Taleb is completely paranoid about certain risks and in order to avoid those risks, he made rules for himself. He has strict rules for no smoking, no sugar (particularly fructose), no motorcycles, no bicycles in town or more generally outside a traffic-free area such as the Sahara desert, no mixing with the Eastern European mafias, and no getting on a plane not flown by a professional pilot (unless there is a co-pilot). He avoids terminal injury religiously.
Rules will not let you do things the best version of yourself may not want to do. They remove the use of willpower. When you dont have a rule to not eat dessert or not drink, it becomes harder to say no to friends because of limited will power. When you use rules, the scope for negotiation is completely removed.
When it comes to investing and managing money, Mohnish Pabrai is the master of creating rules and copying rules that other people mastered. “I want to play games that I know I can win,” says Pabrai. “So how do you win the game? You’ve got to play according to the rules. And the good news is, I’m playing against players who don’t even fucking know the rules.”
Rules should not been seen as laws in my opinion. These should be followed like principles which will help to live a great life. I have written about them. I got the idea from Taylor Pearson.
Writing more than 25 books and running 30 marathons takes a lot of hard work. You need discipline to grow. And Haruki Murakami had bucket loads of discipline.
He never took two days off in a row from running.
"Running every day is like a lifeline for me, so I'm not going to layoff or quit just because I am busy. I only have a few reasons to keep running and a truckload of them to quit"
He never walked during a run, even when he ran ultra marathons.
"I stopped a lot to stretch, but I never walked. I didn't come here to walk. I came to run."
He would make sure that he got 30 to 40 miles of running every week.
“Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest.”
He writes for four to six hours a day. During his writing time, no one could disturb him.
He would wake up before sun rise and sleep before 10.
We do not need complex rules to win. Easy, simple rules, consistently applied can make a significant difference in very short spans of time. If done for long periods of time, you will be miles ahead of everyone. The old testament has more than 613 commandments but only 10 are most important.
If you want to start somewhere, the Charlie Munger manifesto has a lot of ideas.
Credits for the images -
Tapan Desai
Vishal Khandelwal
