Getting started: What is a good rule?

Help me write my next book

What are the rules you have for how to live your life? It’s a good question. Many people throughout history have offered answers and I’ve read many of their books.

In 2011, I compiled a huge list of annoying platitudes. A platitude is a kind of rule, but they’re usually so generic that they’re useless, despite how often they’re said. In 2014 I wrote an essay called the Rules I Live By. I tried to capture my own rules at the time as an exercise to force myself to distill them down if I could.

From that essay, I explained that we sometime claim to have rules as virtue signals, but don’t actually follow them ourselves:

Rules are magnets for cognitive dissonance. More than any generation in history we’re awash in lists of rules: the 7 secrets of this, the 12 killer tips for that. These lists have the pretense of providing insider advice for living better lives. But I can’t say the abundance of rules has made much of a difference for our quality of life. Are we better people than we were 50, 100 or 500 years ago because of these lists?

Take the Ten Commandments: it’s the most well known list of rules in the world, and the most frequently ignored, even by those most faithful to them. I’m afraid of rules for that reason. It’s easy to find rules that are satisfying to mention, even when we delude ourselves that knowing a rule equates to following it.

So what is this book going to do then? Good question.

The goal of this book is to capture good rules, but also meta-rules. Things like:

• How do you know if your rules are any good?

• How do you decide when to make an exception or not?

• Can a good rule have an opposite rule that is also good sometimes?

• When is it time to abandon a rule and switch to a new one?

In my next post I’ll share more about my writing process for this book and how you can participate. Thanks for being here.

If you have thoughts or questions, leave a comment.