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This is part of a series on defining an Ethos for yourself, using me as an example. If you want to see the roadmap for this, or jump to a different section, then head back to the series introduction.
In the Introduction I asked you(/myself) to trust the process. Here I will try to define what it is that we are actually putting our faith into. I expect this to change quite a lot as a work through each step, since I haven’t touched principles and have only vaguely defined problems long ago, I expect to find many holes in anything1 I can predict from here.
Overview
I’ll restate the process list from the Introduction for reference:
✨ Introduction to the Ethos Series
🔩 The Process - detail the process up front to force accountability and clear steps
💎 Virtues - why do I want to do, well, anything?
👤 The Persona - collect the virtues into a pseudophysical form
📏 Principles - how will I do things, and how will I stay aligned to my whys?
📚 The Stack - define which principles overrule others, and in which contexts
💼 Problems - what do I want to accomplish?
📜 The Protocols - remove as much thought and effort from the rest of life so focus can remain on the problems
Skipping 0 and 1 to not be weirdly recursive, let’s start with virtues.
Virtues
I mentioned this in the introduction, but virtues come first because they are the Why at the core of everything else. It’s important to understand why before trying to choose how and eventually what you will do with your life.
Virtues are personal in that you choose them for yourself, but they aren’t individual. Anyone else can have the same virtue that you choose. To use popular lingo, they are fungible. But the personal aspect keeps them subjective. You might believe that some virtues are universally held, and you may even be right, but that isn’t a factual requirement.
I’m saying this for two reasons.
To reinforce that you get to pick the virtues you want,
And to illustrate that there will be overlap with the virtues of others.
The overlap is key to how we can discover our personal virtues. It is a process of discovery vs. invention because you are already living for some reason(s). You might not find that you like all of the current reasons, that you actually prefer some others, or that your desires change over time. That’s all perfectly normal.
You can point yourself toward specific virtues with an idea of growing into them, or living with more alignment to them. But the source of those choices should come from deep inside of you.
One way that you already attach to the virtues you hold dear is by who you associate with. Your friends, family, and role models are very influential in your life2. If you cast a wide enough net, to cover your social and mimetic networks, you are likely to capture every virtue that you embody or aspire to in at least one person.
So that is how we will define our virtues.
Luckily many people publicize their virtues. You can simply collect the lists from those people. Others require a closer analysis of the way they live and guessing at the why behind how they act and what they do. If you want to be thorough you can check the lists (words) against the actions of the people in the first category. This is a good exercise to develop the ability to see the whys and pull them out of day to day (inter)actions.
Gather/create the lists. I chose a spreadsheet.
Once you have all of the data together you can compare and contrast. This is where you will start to choose the virtues that seem right to you. But you don’t need to worry about narrowing the lists too much. It is more about finding the most common, and most important, virtues as you group them into categories.
Organize the lists, find common virtues and bold important ones.
Laying out the categories in this way makes it easy to see how frequently someone you admire (enough to allow them around you3) holds that type of virtue. It’s a safe bet that the most common ones will make up the majority of the virtues you carry today, or wish that you could claim.
The bolded important (parts of) virtues will help guide you too. You can see where those are most common, or use them to remember a less frequent virtue that you want more than others do.
Collect and refine into your own list.
These refinement steps are not something to breeze past. Knowing that you like a virtue is a good start, but you still have to personalize it for it to fit you. Depending on how you want to define this it can take the form of thinking, writing, meditating, introspecting, etc. Maybe you want to take some time away from the list and then come back with fresh eyes later on. The groups and bolds will still be there waiting for you.
The more effort you put into this the easier it will be to remember, intuitively, your whys. You are building a sort of spaced repetition into the development process. Time also helps to make sure that you aren’t too hasty in your choices.
The Persona
I don’t think this is a required step in defining your Why, but it’s one that has helped me4. With an understanding of the distilled virtues you can build them back into an ideal role model. This doesn’t have to be, and probably shouldn’t be, a real person. They can be realistic, mythical, or completely imaginary. But by giving a form to the virtues it may be easier to keep them with you at all times. Like a funky wingman.
Principles
These define How you want to live, and how you will funnel the Why into What you do. While virtues live as adjectives about you, principles are rules5 for you to follow.
Much like with the virtues, they aren’t individual, and they don’t even need to be personal. The same ‘way of life’ can work for multiple virtues. That makes it even easier to work through the public principles of those you admire and simply pick the best ones for achieving your virtuous goals. So with some minor tweaks we will:
Gather/create lists from others, organize the lists, find common principles, and determine what virtues they support.
I’ve already deleted the virtues and subwants from the top because I specifically don’t want those coloring my next step.
Filter the groups to determine which common principles resonate or don’t.
Principles will align to one virtue or topic area more than the others, but an ideal principle carries all of your virtues at once. That is really hard to do. But you can evaluate principles from this angle to determine which ones are best for you, and how to tweak them.
The Stack6
This is where the principles get personal. Just because you share the same principle, or even virtue, as someone else, that doesn’t mean you share priorities.
Prioritizing principles makes them functional. It removes (some) doubt from your future decision making. Instead of needing to recall or reference your principles in every situation, you have already done the work to guide yourself through a swift jump into action.
Priority may change in different contexts, and you can’t plan for everything. But if you already know that principle 4 overrules principle 7 90% of the time, then you can do I quick comparison between the current situation and the other 10% to brush past a lengthy internal debate. The goal isn’t to be perfect, it is to make aligning with your principles, and ultimately your virtues, as easy as possible so that you want to continue doing so.
Problems
Many people want to start here, with their million-dollar idea, and try to change the world. Some succeed. But if you ever find yourself wondering, “what should I do with my life?”, they you’ll be happy to have a firm understanding of your virtues and principles before trying to answer.
“What are you doing?”, is small talk for a reason. It is easiest to interact at this surface level and just assume how and why people live through what they do, or ignore that depth in them completely. That is even more reason to ensure that the problems you try to solve, your Whats, are built on top of your Whys and Hows. It will make it easier for people to guess right, and you will find others like you working on the same things.
While you could try to cross-reference those around you and follow in someone else’s footsteps to find problems, I think this is a better exercise to do fresh. Everyone has pain points in their own life, those make a great place to start looking. Use How you want to live to identify What will make that easier. Maybe you need to learn a new language and you can develop a way help others to do the same more easily.
Beyond yourself it’s easy to find advice on how to discover problems people have, which will mostly wind up as some version of “ask them”, so I won’t rehash that any more here.
You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while, there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”
Common advice, tracing back to Feynman above, is to keep 12 problems on hand at a time. You don’t need to memorize them exactly, but you want many of them generally in focus so that you can benefit from moments of serendipity. Some of these may be grand problems that you carry with you your entire life.
But not every problem needs to be Life Changing, as per also Feynman below. Some will be stepping stones to something larger down the road.
The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of success, and of helping your fellow man, even if it is only to answer a question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is worthwhile.
The Protocols
In case you haven't caught the theme here, it's two interleaved lists:
Virtues, Principles, and Problems -Features of your desired life
Persona, Stack, Protocols - Efforts to make those easier
The Persona makes the Virtues memorable. They can walk right beside you. The Stack makes the Principles manageable. They have clear prioritization. There Protocols make the Problems solvable. Not directly, these are still hard problems that could take a lifetime. But most of us don't even have a lifetime to spare because we are drowning in distraction and monotony.
With protocols in place we can automate as much as possible of the unimportant middle of life.
If you’re ready to see how this process works in action then proceed to the next step where I will define my chosen Virtues.
I have already written publish-quality versions of the two Virtues steps at the time of this writing
You may have heard that, (paraphrasing) ‘you are the average of your 5 closest friends’
Or to ‘live rent free in your head’, as it were
I gave the why behind this (over-)compression in The Purpose
Some more flexible than others
This name comes from an Exponent podcast episode that I quite enjoyed