12 Rules for Life

Do you ask yourself what you want? Do you negotiate fairly with yourself? Or are you a tyrant, with yourself as slave?

Success: that's the mistery. Virtue: that's what's inexplicable. To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished.

Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It's easier not to shoulder a burden. It's easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It's easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today's cheap pleasures. As the infamous father of the Simpson clan puts it, immediately prior to downing a jar of mayonnaise and vodka, "That's a problem for Future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy!".

To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not "what you want". It is also not "what would make you happy". Every time you give a child something sweet, you make that child happy. That does not mean that you should do nothing for children except feed them candy. "Happy" is by no means synonymous with "good".

Question for parents: do you want to make your children safe, or strong?

How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without chalenge and danger?

So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them - at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead, Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.

The best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives.

But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions - and there's nothing freeing about that.
And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgement, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us - in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely unregulated way.

Наиболее реален тот порядок, который наименее изменчив, а это необязательно тот порядок, который проще всего увидеть.