This is a message for the upcoming generation.
I spend a lot of time over the course of this book talking about high-minded concepts, but something that I came to realize is that all of these high-minded concepts are based on some base assumptions and since this book is intended for my kid, I should probably talk about some of those base assumptions.
There are often times where your code of conduct is going to conflict internally. As an example, in the law people are explicitly provided freedom of speech. On the other hand, people are also explicitly provided protection from fraud. Any code of laws that contains both of these has to balance the freedom to speak from the freedom to speak things that are false with the intention to get an unearned gain. There are other situations, where the same right can conflict with itself. If I have a right to speak, does that mean that I have the right to go wherever you are whenever you are there and go out of my way to silence your speak by yelling into your ear with a megaphone? Under certain circumstances that might be acceptable, but not for long! Eventually I'm at home, I'm at my place of work, I'm trying to eat dinner, and you're just sitting there screaming nothing's in my ear and at some point my rights are being violated such that your right to speak has to be abridged. Keep this in mind while reading all of these, that even a very tightly formulated code of ethics, which this is not, shall always have situations where the code itself isn't enough and individuals have to use their brain.
There are a number of ways to look at a personal code of conduct. The first is to look at it from a "I will be punished" standpoint. In this way of looking at things, you are trying to behave in a good way in order to not face the punishment for behaving in a bad way. The second is to look at it from a "I may or may not be punished, but I will know" sort of way. The purpose of a code of conduct and a code of ethics then not being about trying to impress the outside world, but trying to be a person worth being proud of being by upholding the best even when no one else is watching. Personally, I think that this is the way anyone should live their life. If getting caught is the only reason why you are following the rules, then you will become a terrible person in the moment that the threat of getting in trouble if you don't follow the rules goes away. By contrast, a person who follows their own code of conduct because it's the right thing to do and they are trying to live up to their own ideals may not just follow the rules when there's no one around, they may end up becoming a moral anchor for others in trying times. People who would otherwise be lost in the storm will realize that they too must do the right thing. This sort of leadership is what you should be striving for. You are not trying to not get caught, you are potentially the master tomorrow if you do the right things, and you need to start acting like it as soon as possible. A good master has a code of conduct that they must follow just as much as a poor Master lacks a code of conduct that they must follow. Both may be in charge, but the good Master will build upon his responsibility and make something great whereas a poor leader will shirk responsibility and build nothing at all.
First, tell the truth or at least try not to lie. It can be really hard because it seems like the best thing is to tell a lie to get out of something, but the problem is that if you lie when it doesn't matter no one will believe you when it does.
There once was a boy in a village a long time ago. This village was having problems with wildlife, and so everyone was being super vigilant for wild animals. One day, a young boy thought that it would be funny to start screaming "wolf! wolf!" And when the entire village came out with their weapons the kid just laughed at the stupid adults who had come running. The kid did this a couple times until people just stopped believing that kid. One day, the kid was set upon by some wolves, and though he screamed and yelled and hollered nobody came, and he was eaten by wolves.
This is one example, but it's definitely not the only type of situation where you really need someone to be telling the truth. There might be times where you're being accused of something, and if you are known liar no one will believe your defense. Besides simply the act of being honest, our entire society relies somewhat on trust. When you walk down the street, you'll see giant picture windows. In a low Trust society, you would see bars because people wouldn't trust people walking down the street not to try to break the windows and break into someone's house. In a low trust society you would not be able to walk into a store and pick up the things that you need and then bring them to the till, you would have to fill out an order form and the clerk would go behind into a locked room grab the things that you asked for and then come back out and take your money. In a low trust society you wouldn't be able to go sleep over with your friends because we wouldn't trust other parents to watch you. There are so many ways that the fact that we are a high trust society pays off for everybody. The only way that we can remain a high trust society is for the people in that society to remain trustworthy people. Thus, in addition to there being a practical reason to be honest, in that a person who is consistently truthful will be trusted and can rely on that banked trust, there is also a broader societal reason to be trustworthy in that if we are not a trustworthy society filled with trustworthy people then the privileges gained by being trustworthy will not be afforded to us.
Whenever you can, it's often a good idea to proactively tell the truth. If you did something bad and it wasn't intentional, and go out and try to admit to it and apologize for it before the person finds out. It sucks in the moment, but that's sort of behavior is what really makes people trust you, and although I do not promise you that things will be this way, often if you do something wrong and you realize it's wrong in the moment or you later realize it's wrong and you go out of your way to admit to it and apologize early the punishment is often significantly lower than if you wait to see if you're about to get caught.
I know sometimes it's not a good idea to tell the truth. There's a movie called liar liar from the late 90s. The point of the movie is that towing nothing but the truth at all times is kind of a problem. Blurting out things that are true but also hurtful doesn't really help anybody. In this sense, telling the truth all the time isn't necessarily the right thing to do. To live in this society, your best bet in these cases is to just stay silent. If you see someone who's very fat, for example, it's rather rude to just go right out and point and say "look at the fat man". If you see somebody who has no legs, it's extremely rude to just go right out and point and say "look, that man has no legs!" -- in these cases, although you know the truth the better thing is to just remain silent. Don't lie, don't tell the fat man that he's skinny, just don't talk about it.
An advanced technique of this is when somebody asks you, for example, "do I look ugly in this dress?" Now, sometimes the best thing to do is say ,"yes, that is the ugliest dress I've ever seen please don't go outside in that". On the other hand, sometimes the problem isn't the dress! A tactful way to not say anything false is to choose a true statement that is positive. If the dress doesn't look good but is as good as it's going to get, you can say something like "I really like the material" which is true, and you're avoiding the top at hand. You have to play this one pretty carefully, because being polite is important, but being honest is also important.
Next up, do your very best to be polite.
Politeness is the practical application of good manners or etiquette so as not to offend others. In another essay I talk about the past history of humanity. In that past we lived in a 50 person society where everybody could know everybody. As society grew, etiquette became much more important because you don't know everybody that you run into, and in order for our massive society to function we have to do our best to try not to get in each other's way.
Politeness is a complicated topic that will take a lot of time to learn, but the fundamental idea is that you're just trying not to hurt anyone else's feelings. Doing your best to treat others with respect, saying please and thank you when you're asking for something and when you receive something, showing humility, being considerate of others, and absolutely showing proper deference to your elders and your betters.
Treating others with basic dignity and respect is a fundamentally important thing. A lot of people in our very selfish culture think that there's something wrong with being polite, respectful, quiet. They are simply wrong. Being honest, it can sometimes feel really good treating others like crap. Especially if they are your enemies, sometimes you just want to get in their face and scream and yell and tell them that they're wrong and they're stupid and they're bad. Sometimes you get the the short end of the stick, and you get mistreated, and you just want to go out and yell and scream and hoot and holler. Make no mistake, there is a time to speak up for yourself, but often that time isn't when you're angry.
A lot of people with very little self control fly off the handle and don't do themselves any favors.
Let's talk a little bit about self control, because although it is built into politeness, I think that it's built into everything. Last week, we were in a discussion with somebody and somebody had said some lies and it was very hurtful. In their defense, someone else said "what, so we're going to punish someone for having emotions?" Which made me extremely upset. Every human being on the planet has emotions. Often, those emotions are bad emotions pushing you to do bad things. If every single person did every single bad thing that they had a fancy to do in the moment, then the human race would be obliterated. There would be violence in the streets hourly, there wouldn't be a single thing left on the shelves in any store, women who are physically weaker than men would be passed around like trading cards by the strongest men, nobody would have a job, they would all be trying to steal, and no one would have a permanent home, because the moment that they stepped away that home would be taken over by someone else. The thing that stops all these things from happening is self-control. Look around you, everything that you have is a monument to self control.
The clothes on your back are the result of centuries of research and development, the result of centuries of very smart people dedicating themselves to the study of fabric and cloth and thread. And somewhere there is somebody who instead of spending their time at home playing video games spend their entire day making shirts or making pants or making socks. Every single one of these takes huge amounts of self-control. The walls around you are covered in paint that is the result of centuries of research and development. The walls themselves are probably covered in a space age material, and that material likely involves highly processed wood fiber combined with highly processed mineral deposits. Somebody needed to gather the Raw materials. Somebody else needed to process the raw materials. Somebody needed to transfer all these materials to somewhere near where you live. Someone else needed to sell the materials. Somebody else needed to take those materials and turn them into the walls that you're staring at right now. I could go on and on and on but every single thing that you're looking at represents self control. Instead of doing something fun, they decided to go to work and do something that made your world a better place. This book that you're reading right now, this is an example of self control. I love video games. And I really don't mind getting drunk or getting high either. There are a lot of things that I could be doing that would just be instantly fun. Instead of doing those fun things, I have spent hours every weekend for months putting together these essays. Your entire world is built and maintained by people exercising self control.
There are a lot of people who look around at self control and to an extent they attack it. The reason that they don't like self-control is it prevents people from seizing the day. It's a fairly compelling message because on the surface it makes a lot of sense. You look around at people who exercise too much self-control and they never bother going out and doing the things that actually matter. Maybe they never approach that pretty girl that they like. Maybe they spend their entire time working and they never bother having a vacation and doing something fun. Maybe they are so strict at adhering to a certain code that their lives passed them by. In reality, there is some truth to this, but in our society at the moment I don't think that we should be wasting our time entertaining this. That sort of criticism arose out of a historical time when people lacked freedom and agency. Rather than exercising self control, they were being controlled by the state or the church or society in ways that didn't let them reach their ultimate goals. Right now there are entire countries where every single city block has speakers mounted and five times a day those speakers blare a commandment and the people in those cities have to stop everything and pray. And those places lack freedom. The men are certainly subjugated under the religious regime and the dictatorships that form these countries, and the women are absolutely subjugated under the same regimes that don't allow them to do basic things that we consider normal in our homeland. But they are not in control of themselves, they are being controlled.
I know quite a few people who live the life of carpe diem. On the surface it looks like a good life! They get to go out and party whenever they want, they'll just go out and eat whatever they want whenever there's money, if there's someone that they want to date, they'll just go and date them, and in those circles pretty much everyone has dated pretty much everybody else because at some point they got an inkling, "hey, why not?". It looks like a lot of fun. But the problem is it's like taking a vacation somewhere where they party everyday. You're on vacation, and after you're done you go back to your quiet life. This little time of vacation is a whole lot of fun to you, it's new and exciting and fun! But stop for a minute and imagine the people who never get to leave, the people who live there. This exciting adventure isn't an exciting adventure for them. The parting is going on all the time so they don't have any money to do anything else. They don't really have any money to be partying either, so once you get a little bit under the skin of this amazing shining monolith you start to see the things that they need to do to keep their Carpe Diem dream happening. You see that they try to scam each other and their family and their friends who aren't part of that. You hear the stories about the terrible things that they do to each other because they just go ahead and do it. You go back to their filthy homes and realize that they never clean -- they just party and their places are moldy and gross and there's food everywhere all over the ground and there's probably bugs or rodents or something because it's just all over the place! And that girl who was so beautiful and carefree and she just decided to spend the night with you, well what you find out is that she spends the night with pretty much anyone because carpe diem! And it was fun in the moment, but you could never have anything with her because she was never going to stay with you.
Self control means delaying gratification, but not forever. It means choosing to do the right thing today so that tomorrow is better. That delaying of gratification one of the best predictors of future success there is. You should strive not to arbitrarily delayed gratification, but to make the right decisions in the moment so that your future self is best positioned to live a good life.
Do everything in your power not to employ violence. Hurting others virtually never helps anything. The reality is usually that if you lash out at another person, you are going to face punishment, not just from your parents, but usually from the systems at large. It doesn't really matter how justified lashing out at someone is, it won't help.
When I was a kid, I felt very uncomfortable a lot of the time, and sometimes I felt like I was being bullied. My mom's advice to me was fight back. As a result, I got in many fights, almost all of them I lost. I would take on half my class in a big street fight because I had hurt feelings. I would turn around and just physically attack some guy who is 3 ft taller than me because I was feeling intimidated. None of it worked out well for me. At no point did any of these mystical benefits materialize, I just got in trouble with the principal and ultimately I had to apologize.
As someone who resorted to violence frequently in my youth, I can understand the appeal. Lashing out immediately feels good, and if you manage to physically harm the people that you don't like then you get to feel like you did something. The problem is that usually you didn't. The history of mankind is littered with people who fought and fought back and then defended themselves and continuously had a cycle of violence that never ended. They felt good in the moment, but all of the effort put into fighting was ultimately wasted. If you kill 10 men and they kill 10 men then that's 20 Men who will never be able to produce another useful thing because they're dead. If you spend a thousand tons of steel on guns those guns can't do anything other than be guns without a bunch of extra work. If you spend a hundred years fighting, that's 100 years you will never get back. The greatest conflict of the past couple centuries was called world war ii. What most people don't realize is the countries that made it out of world war II the strongest or the ones that either didn't fight or didn't have to fight much. The United States of America became a superpower on isolationism. Yes, they eventually joined to the war but in a very limited capacity. There were only two battles on the mainland United States. Switzerland was neutral and ended up becoming the world's Bank, Sweden was neutral and ended up becoming one of the most powerful nations in Europe for a very long time. Meanwhile, all of the Nations that participated were great powers and after the war were no longer great powers. Today, they struggled to be regional powers. It really is the Foley of war. Now, there are times when it's worthwhile to fight regardless but when you're just a kid you have to be very careful because most of the time isn't that.
Try to respect people's rights. Now people talk about a lot of different rights out there, rights are inherently something that you would have if no one else was around. Other people have the right to speak. If there was no one around, they could say whatever they wanted. People have the right to their property. If there was no one around to take it, the things that they had would stay theirs. People have a right to be secure in their persons. If no one was around, they'd be secure as hell. People have a right to their opinions, to their faith, in general people have a right to act however they wish as long as they aren't hurting themselves or others. A lot of this is simpler than it sounds, because I'm catching it in some pretty heavy terms.
You want to support the right of others to speak because you want your right to speak protected as well. You might think that your ideas and what you have to say is completely innocuous and therefore only the bad guys should be silenced. The problem is, somebody else thinks you're the bad guy. If you don't support others right to speak then that person won't be there to support your right to speak. The only way we can protect our freedoms is together. So what does harming someone else's right to speak look like? Well often, this means going out of your way to cause someone harm for their words. At this moment in time, the biggest websites in the world are all going out of their way to find people who are saying things that they don't like and they are shutting that speech down. They're kicking people right off the websites for saying the wrong thing. In addition to that, even when they keep the people on the websites they are editing the posts and adding little things to them. I've never been kicked off of any social media site. Honestly, most of the opinions that they're going after aren't opinions that I hold. However, those people are our canaries. If the people saying things that we detest our band and go away then we are always next. We are always next. After the people that you disagree with are silence, you are always next.
With respect to property rights, this is pretty simple. Don't steal. Even when you're not stealing, don't use other people's things without permission. Respect property lines, try not to trespass on other people's land, respect intellectual property rights, as difficult as it is don't download illegal copies of television shows or music or video games. There are people out there who want you using their stuff even if it's for free, if you don't have any money use that stuff.
The Bible tells people not to covet others property, I'm not going to go that far. What I will say is don't waste your time obsessing over other people's stuff. No matter who you are there's always always going to be someone with more stuff. Even the person with the most stuff is probably looking at the guy with the second most stuff and wondering why he doesn't have a bunch of the stuff that that first guy has. In a lot of ways we need to look at possessions as a means to an end. Why would you actually own a house? You would own a house to have a place to live. Why would you actually own a car? You would own a car that have a mode of transportation. Why would you actually own a computer? Computers do a lot of amazing things from watching videos to surfing websites to creating things to playing video games. On the other hand, why would you own a diamond? There are very few reasons why you actually would other than it's expensive and pretty. To an extent that's fine but it's something to keep in mind that there is something to be said for the utility of things and not a whole lot to be said for the lack of utility of things. I think that by focusing on utility it will help us stay out of the collectors trap. The collectors trap is the tendency for people to just collect useless things. Sometimes those useless things are very expensive items, and all that having those things does for us is push us towards the next thing. This puts us on a treadmill. I've seen people who have basically nothing, and whenever they get any kind of money instead of spending it on things that are going to make their life better or on paying their bills or other things like that, they will run out to the nearest toy store and pick up some useless toys that they hang on their wall and never even open and play with. They just collect these useless toys with every penny they get. You know, there isn't actually a prize at the end. I understand that sometimes you just feel like collecting, but you have to remember the goal of life is to live a good life. I've collected almost a thousand video games, and they are nothing but bits on a server somewhere. I collected those after making sure my life was okay, after I done everything that I needed to to be prepared. And I did not let collecting video games override my responsibilities.
An extension of this property right is the right to be secure in their persons. You don't have a right to go snooping around someone's papers, you don't have a right to go snooping through someone's clothes, you don't have a right to go snooping through someone's wallet. Just don't do it. Of course, this all changes if someone gives you permission or request you to look through their stuff.
The right of people to have their own faith, to have their own opinions, to have their own beliefs, this is another situation where all you need to do is nothing. Don't go out of your way to harm somebody just because they have a religion you don't agree with. Don't go out of your way to hurt people because they have an opinion you disagree with. Don't go out of your way to hurt people who have a belief that you disagree with. You are probably wrong about something. I am definitely wrong about something. Everybody is probably wrong about something. The only way that we can find truth and try not to lie is to respect others with opinions you disagree with and earnestly communicate with them. If you are correct then maybe you can change their mind. If you are incorrect then maybe you can learn the truth.
The next rule I'd like to talk about is being generous to the people around you. If I'm being totally honest, there is no practical everyday reason to treat others generously. It isn't like you are being generous to others with an expectation that they will be generous to you in the future. If you find that you are generous to the people around you and they aren't generous back, maybe it's time to surround yourself with new people. Always always take care of yourself first, you don't need to be going off and sacrificing your life to help others. Trust me when I say that if you try to martyr yourself, the only person who will notice is you.
When I was young I had this terrible habit of modern myself for no good reason. I would end up going out and helping someone to the extent that I was truly suffering. One time, I ended up living on rice and cream corn for two weeks saving for a trip for a friend. We went on the trip, and despite everything that happened on the trip was nothing but complaining. All the sacrifice that I did to make that trip happen and basically I was staring down the barrel of a week of complaints. Person who took the trip with me didn't particularly care, they were too busy being stuck in their own world. You're suffering doesn't impress anyone.
If you have a little bit of extra though, it's a good thing to treat the people around you well. Having a generous spirit will pay off in subtle ways.
Do everything in your power to be compassionate and empathetic. What do I mean by this? Well, I think the best way to show being reasonable is to explain some situations where someone is unreasonable. Often, people in power maybe having a bad day and they will lash out at someone who doesn't deserve it but is under their jurisdiction. That lashing out, the person in question didn't deserve to be lashed out at but they have been because the person in power is being unreasonable. Another example, if a leader asks a subordinate to do something without considering whether that thing is possible, that is unreasonable. If a customer in a store ends up taking out their anger on a sales clerk for something that is clearly outside of the sales clerk's control, that is clearly unreasonable. I guess, the best way to put it is to always be working to put yourself into the other person's shoes and making your decisions based on that. Sometimes, you will absolutely put yourself into someone else's shoes and even after that you will realize that they are being unreasonable towards you and in that moment you will get angry and righteously so. The process of slowing down stopping taking a step back and looking at the situation before jumping to conclusions is very important. If my mother had given me this piece of advice instead of the piece of advice to go out and get in fights, I probably would have had a much easier time in school. Often the things that I started fights over were completely unreasonable, I just misinterpreted things and flew off the handle because that was the advice I was given.
Listen and learn. Your elders, your superiors and rank, those ahead of you in the race of life, there are a lot of people who would like you to think that they just magically have always been there. The reality is quite different. Your elders have been alive a lot longer than you have and whether you like it or not may have some useful advice for you. Sometimes that advice might not seem like it makes any sense, and absolutely sometimes that's because they are simply wrong. However, there's a lot of times where they're not wrong. This directive really applies to you when you are younger because while there are definitely a lot of things that your elders may be wrong about, in order to survive and thrive they've had to be right about so much more. Life is a complicated thing and there's often rules that seem to be nonsensical or contradictory. That's because often the rules are nonsensical and contradictory, but they're still important. To become a master at anything there's a certain path that must be followed. The first step is to learn all the rules. The next step is to learn how to apply the rules properly. After that you learn to understand the rules, and finally you learn how to break or change the rules in productive ways. This is the first principle because in this extremely complicated world if you don't know the rules, you don't know how to reply the rules, then you will never come to understand the rules and you will never be able to productively break or change the rules.
My generation made a big mistake in assuming that all of the rules were wrong. Along the way we did everything we could to simply erase them. In erasing all the rules, only then did we realize why many of them existed, and by then it was too late. Now a lot of us work really hard to try to reinstate rules that our parents gave us that we never appreciated.
When I was younger, everyone always told me I was so smart. The latest technology of the day was something I was an expert at, and because of that people really gave me a lot of respect. When you get that kind of respect too early and before you really earned it, you get misunderstandings of your own abilities. No one ever really told me that there was a path to walk, and that it takes time, and that no matter what sort of titles people give you you haven't actually arrived until you've gone through all the steps to get there.
So early on, your parents will be telling you things to do. For the first part of your life just follow them, because the things that they tell you to do are things that they think are going to be important later. Sometimes they'll tell you something that seems absurd but it's meant to keep you safe from things that you don't understand. Sometimes they'll tell you something that seems absurd but it will be very important much further down the line. Sometimes it seems absurd, but it just isn't and you just don't understand it yet. For that reason, earlier on in your life just try to do as you're told, and later on try to understand why they're telling you these things, and eventually you'll learn how to live on your own, and eventually you'll learn how to write your own rules. Each of these steps will take years and years to accomplish. If you manage to have things figured out by your twenties, you will be ahead of the game.
Closing things out, even though it's the last thing I'm talking about it's probably the most important. Be safe. In my workplace there was someone who took an unnecessary risk. They thought that by taking this unnecessary risk they were going to be able to get a bigger bonus later. As a result of taking that risk, they died. They won't be receiving a bonus because they're dead. They will be receiving a paycheck because they're dead. Their family will not be taken care of, because they're dead. It's really easy for your story to end, and if your story ends then none of it matters.
Besides the absolute safety of being alive or dead, there are other levels of safety. It's entirely conceivable that someone kidnaps you and goes on to sell you on the black market, and you will be alive but you will wish you weren't. Even though you're still alive all of your dreams are over. Another thing that can happen is you aren't sold on the black market you aren't dead but you can end up painting yourself into a corner in life such that you don't have a way forward. You can do this by becoming so addicted to drugs that you never get out of it, you can do this by falling in with the wrong crowd, you can do this by having a kid really early on and having to go and work because somebody needs to pay for that kid and you never get to go to college or university and you never get a career and so the rest of your life you're just fighting to live. I'm not going to tell you that your dreams are over at that point, but your life becomes tremendously harder than it has to be. There are definitely people who get out of drugs and go on to do great things, there are definitely people who get out of bad circumstances like an early pregnancy and things go just fine, but those people have to work a lot harder than everyone else. The ideal is to not get yourself into that situation in the first place.
Of course like everything there's a caveat, this doesn't mean that you completely stop taking risks. It means that you need to calculate your risks, and try to take the least amount of risk for the most amount of gain. There's a lot of people who take massive risks for very little payoff and even if they succeed they don't really come out very far ahead. On the other hand, there are very small risks that you can take that will have a big payoff. I always think about going to college is that, going to college was terrifying. On the other hand, going to college can net you a few million dollars that you wouldn't have made otherwise.
The most important bottom line especially when you're young, is to just do your best to be safe. As you get older you'll get smarter and you'll get wiser and you'll get better equipped to take risks that have the most upside and the least downside. When you're a little kid, you just don't know enough about the world to make those decisions. The weight of your life hasn't even sunk in yet. It's important then to listen to your parents and try to do what they tell you to do in order to stay safe until you understand the world, and the world's rules, and you can behave in the world, and later on you can understand how the rules can be bent or broken or changed.
So to sum it up: Tell the truth. Be polite. Exercise self-control. Don't be violent. Respect people's rights. Be generous. Be reasonable. Listen and learn. Be safe.
I spend a lot of time over the course of this book talking about high-minded concepts, but something that I came to realize is that all of these high-minded concepts are based on some base assumptions and since this book is intended for my kid, I should probably talk about some of those base assumptions.
There are often times where your code of conduct is going to conflict internally. As an example, in the law people are explicitly provided freedom of speech. On the other hand, people are also explicitly provided protection from fraud. Any code of laws that contains both of these has to balance the freedom to speak from the freedom to speak things that are false with the intention to get an unearned gain. There are other situations, where the same right can conflict with itself. If I have a right to speak, does that mean that I have the right to go wherever you are whenever you are there and go out of my way to silence your speak by yelling into your ear with a megaphone? Under certain circumstances that might be acceptable, but not for long! Eventually I'm at home, I'm at my place of work, I'm trying to eat dinner, and you're just sitting there screaming nothing's in my ear and at some point my rights are being violated such that your right to speak has to be abridged. Keep this in mind while reading all of these, that even a very tightly formulated code of ethics, which this is not, shall always have situations where the code itself isn't enough and individuals have to use their brain.
There are a number of ways to look at a personal code of conduct. The first is to look at it from a "I will be punished" standpoint. In this way of looking at things, you are trying to behave in a good way in order to not face the punishment for behaving in a bad way. The second is to look at it from a "I may or may not be punished, but I will know" sort of way. The purpose of a code of conduct and a code of ethics then not being about trying to impress the outside world, but trying to be a person worth being proud of being by upholding the best even when no one else is watching. Personally, I think that this is the way anyone should live their life. If getting caught is the only reason why you are following the rules, then you will become a terrible person in the moment that the threat of getting in trouble if you don't follow the rules goes away. By contrast, a person who follows their own code of conduct because it's the right thing to do and they are trying to live up to their own ideals may not just follow the rules when there's no one around, they may end up becoming a moral anchor for others in trying times. People who would otherwise be lost in the storm will realize that they too must do the right thing. This sort of leadership is what you should be striving for. You are not trying to not get caught, you are potentially the master tomorrow if you do the right things, and you need to start acting like it as soon as possible. A good master has a code of conduct that they must follow just as much as a poor Master lacks a code of conduct that they must follow. Both may be in charge, but the good Master will build upon his responsibility and make something great whereas a poor leader will shirk responsibility and build nothing at all.
First, tell the truth or at least try not to lie. It can be really hard because it seems like the best thing is to tell a lie to get out of something, but the problem is that if you lie when it doesn't matter no one will believe you when it does.
There once was a boy in a village a long time ago. This village was having problems with wildlife, and so everyone was being super vigilant for wild animals. One day, a young boy thought that it would be funny to start screaming "wolf! wolf!" And when the entire village came out with their weapons the kid just laughed at the stupid adults who had come running. The kid did this a couple times until people just stopped believing that kid. One day, the kid was set upon by some wolves, and though he screamed and yelled and hollered nobody came, and he was eaten by wolves.
This is one example, but it's definitely not the only type of situation where you really need someone to be telling the truth. There might be times where you're being accused of something, and if you are known liar no one will believe your defense. Besides simply the act of being honest, our entire society relies somewhat on trust. When you walk down the street, you'll see giant picture windows. In a low Trust society, you would see bars because people wouldn't trust people walking down the street not to try to break the windows and break into someone's house. In a low trust society you would not be able to walk into a store and pick up the things that you need and then bring them to the till, you would have to fill out an order form and the clerk would go behind into a locked room grab the things that you asked for and then come back out and take your money. In a low trust society you wouldn't be able to go sleep over with your friends because we wouldn't trust other parents to watch you. There are so many ways that the fact that we are a high trust society pays off for everybody. The only way that we can remain a high trust society is for the people in that society to remain trustworthy people. Thus, in addition to there being a practical reason to be honest, in that a person who is consistently truthful will be trusted and can rely on that banked trust, there is also a broader societal reason to be trustworthy in that if we are not a trustworthy society filled with trustworthy people then the privileges gained by being trustworthy will not be afforded to us.
Whenever you can, it's often a good idea to proactively tell the truth. If you did something bad and it wasn't intentional, and go out and try to admit to it and apologize for it before the person finds out. It sucks in the moment, but that's sort of behavior is what really makes people trust you, and although I do not promise you that things will be this way, often if you do something wrong and you realize it's wrong in the moment or you later realize it's wrong and you go out of your way to admit to it and apologize early the punishment is often significantly lower than if you wait to see if you're about to get caught.
I know sometimes it's not a good idea to tell the truth. There's a movie called liar liar from the late 90s. The point of the movie is that towing nothing but the truth at all times is kind of a problem. Blurting out things that are true but also hurtful doesn't really help anybody. In this sense, telling the truth all the time isn't necessarily the right thing to do. To live in this society, your best bet in these cases is to just stay silent. If you see someone who's very fat, for example, it's rather rude to just go right out and point and say "look at the fat man". If you see somebody who has no legs, it's extremely rude to just go right out and point and say "look, that man has no legs!" -- in these cases, although you know the truth the better thing is to just remain silent. Don't lie, don't tell the fat man that he's skinny, just don't talk about it.
An advanced technique of this is when somebody asks you, for example, "do I look ugly in this dress?" Now, sometimes the best thing to do is say ,"yes, that is the ugliest dress I've ever seen please don't go outside in that". On the other hand, sometimes the problem isn't the dress! A tactful way to not say anything false is to choose a true statement that is positive. If the dress doesn't look good but is as good as it's going to get, you can say something like "I really like the material" which is true, and you're avoiding the top at hand. You have to play this one pretty carefully, because being polite is important, but being honest is also important.
Next up, do your very best to be polite.
Politeness is the practical application of good manners or etiquette so as not to offend others. In another essay I talk about the past history of humanity. In that past we lived in a 50 person society where everybody could know everybody. As society grew, etiquette became much more important because you don't know everybody that you run into, and in order for our massive society to function we have to do our best to try not to get in each other's way.
Politeness is a complicated topic that will take a lot of time to learn, but the fundamental idea is that you're just trying not to hurt anyone else's feelings. Doing your best to treat others with respect, saying please and thank you when you're asking for something and when you receive something, showing humility, being considerate of others, and absolutely showing proper deference to your elders and your betters.
Treating others with basic dignity and respect is a fundamentally important thing. A lot of people in our very selfish culture think that there's something wrong with being polite, respectful, quiet. They are simply wrong. Being honest, it can sometimes feel really good treating others like crap. Especially if they are your enemies, sometimes you just want to get in their face and scream and yell and tell them that they're wrong and they're stupid and they're bad. Sometimes you get the the short end of the stick, and you get mistreated, and you just want to go out and yell and scream and hoot and holler. Make no mistake, there is a time to speak up for yourself, but often that time isn't when you're angry.
A lot of people with very little self control fly off the handle and don't do themselves any favors.
Let's talk a little bit about self control, because although it is built into politeness, I think that it's built into everything. Last week, we were in a discussion with somebody and somebody had said some lies and it was very hurtful. In their defense, someone else said "what, so we're going to punish someone for having emotions?" Which made me extremely upset. Every human being on the planet has emotions. Often, those emotions are bad emotions pushing you to do bad things. If every single person did every single bad thing that they had a fancy to do in the moment, then the human race would be obliterated. There would be violence in the streets hourly, there wouldn't be a single thing left on the shelves in any store, women who are physically weaker than men would be passed around like trading cards by the strongest men, nobody would have a job, they would all be trying to steal, and no one would have a permanent home, because the moment that they stepped away that home would be taken over by someone else. The thing that stops all these things from happening is self-control. Look around you, everything that you have is a monument to self control.
The clothes on your back are the result of centuries of research and development, the result of centuries of very smart people dedicating themselves to the study of fabric and cloth and thread. And somewhere there is somebody who instead of spending their time at home playing video games spend their entire day making shirts or making pants or making socks. Every single one of these takes huge amounts of self-control. The walls around you are covered in paint that is the result of centuries of research and development. The walls themselves are probably covered in a space age material, and that material likely involves highly processed wood fiber combined with highly processed mineral deposits. Somebody needed to gather the Raw materials. Somebody else needed to process the raw materials. Somebody needed to transfer all these materials to somewhere near where you live. Someone else needed to sell the materials. Somebody else needed to take those materials and turn them into the walls that you're staring at right now. I could go on and on and on but every single thing that you're looking at represents self control. Instead of doing something fun, they decided to go to work and do something that made your world a better place. This book that you're reading right now, this is an example of self control. I love video games. And I really don't mind getting drunk or getting high either. There are a lot of things that I could be doing that would just be instantly fun. Instead of doing those fun things, I have spent hours every weekend for months putting together these essays. Your entire world is built and maintained by people exercising self control.
There are a lot of people who look around at self control and to an extent they attack it. The reason that they don't like self-control is it prevents people from seizing the day. It's a fairly compelling message because on the surface it makes a lot of sense. You look around at people who exercise too much self-control and they never bother going out and doing the things that actually matter. Maybe they never approach that pretty girl that they like. Maybe they spend their entire time working and they never bother having a vacation and doing something fun. Maybe they are so strict at adhering to a certain code that their lives passed them by. In reality, there is some truth to this, but in our society at the moment I don't think that we should be wasting our time entertaining this. That sort of criticism arose out of a historical time when people lacked freedom and agency. Rather than exercising self control, they were being controlled by the state or the church or society in ways that didn't let them reach their ultimate goals. Right now there are entire countries where every single city block has speakers mounted and five times a day those speakers blare a commandment and the people in those cities have to stop everything and pray. And those places lack freedom. The men are certainly subjugated under the religious regime and the dictatorships that form these countries, and the women are absolutely subjugated under the same regimes that don't allow them to do basic things that we consider normal in our homeland. But they are not in control of themselves, they are being controlled.
I know quite a few people who live the life of carpe diem. On the surface it looks like a good life! They get to go out and party whenever they want, they'll just go out and eat whatever they want whenever there's money, if there's someone that they want to date, they'll just go and date them, and in those circles pretty much everyone has dated pretty much everybody else because at some point they got an inkling, "hey, why not?". It looks like a lot of fun. But the problem is it's like taking a vacation somewhere where they party everyday. You're on vacation, and after you're done you go back to your quiet life. This little time of vacation is a whole lot of fun to you, it's new and exciting and fun! But stop for a minute and imagine the people who never get to leave, the people who live there. This exciting adventure isn't an exciting adventure for them. The parting is going on all the time so they don't have any money to do anything else. They don't really have any money to be partying either, so once you get a little bit under the skin of this amazing shining monolith you start to see the things that they need to do to keep their Carpe Diem dream happening. You see that they try to scam each other and their family and their friends who aren't part of that. You hear the stories about the terrible things that they do to each other because they just go ahead and do it. You go back to their filthy homes and realize that they never clean -- they just party and their places are moldy and gross and there's food everywhere all over the ground and there's probably bugs or rodents or something because it's just all over the place! And that girl who was so beautiful and carefree and she just decided to spend the night with you, well what you find out is that she spends the night with pretty much anyone because carpe diem! And it was fun in the moment, but you could never have anything with her because she was never going to stay with you.
Self control means delaying gratification, but not forever. It means choosing to do the right thing today so that tomorrow is better. That delaying of gratification one of the best predictors of future success there is. You should strive not to arbitrarily delayed gratification, but to make the right decisions in the moment so that your future self is best positioned to live a good life.
Do everything in your power not to employ violence. Hurting others virtually never helps anything. The reality is usually that if you lash out at another person, you are going to face punishment, not just from your parents, but usually from the systems at large. It doesn't really matter how justified lashing out at someone is, it won't help.
When I was a kid, I felt very uncomfortable a lot of the time, and sometimes I felt like I was being bullied. My mom's advice to me was fight back. As a result, I got in many fights, almost all of them I lost. I would take on half my class in a big street fight because I had hurt feelings. I would turn around and just physically attack some guy who is 3 ft taller than me because I was feeling intimidated. None of it worked out well for me. At no point did any of these mystical benefits materialize, I just got in trouble with the principal and ultimately I had to apologize.
As someone who resorted to violence frequently in my youth, I can understand the appeal. Lashing out immediately feels good, and if you manage to physically harm the people that you don't like then you get to feel like you did something. The problem is that usually you didn't. The history of mankind is littered with people who fought and fought back and then defended themselves and continuously had a cycle of violence that never ended. They felt good in the moment, but all of the effort put into fighting was ultimately wasted. If you kill 10 men and they kill 10 men then that's 20 Men who will never be able to produce another useful thing because they're dead. If you spend a thousand tons of steel on guns those guns can't do anything other than be guns without a bunch of extra work. If you spend a hundred years fighting, that's 100 years you will never get back. The greatest conflict of the past couple centuries was called world war ii. What most people don't realize is the countries that made it out of world war II the strongest or the ones that either didn't fight or didn't have to fight much. The United States of America became a superpower on isolationism. Yes, they eventually joined to the war but in a very limited capacity. There were only two battles on the mainland United States. Switzerland was neutral and ended up becoming the world's Bank, Sweden was neutral and ended up becoming one of the most powerful nations in Europe for a very long time. Meanwhile, all of the Nations that participated were great powers and after the war were no longer great powers. Today, they struggled to be regional powers. It really is the Foley of war. Now, there are times when it's worthwhile to fight regardless but when you're just a kid you have to be very careful because most of the time isn't that.
Try to respect people's rights. Now people talk about a lot of different rights out there, rights are inherently something that you would have if no one else was around. Other people have the right to speak. If there was no one around, they could say whatever they wanted. People have the right to their property. If there was no one around to take it, the things that they had would stay theirs. People have a right to be secure in their persons. If no one was around, they'd be secure as hell. People have a right to their opinions, to their faith, in general people have a right to act however they wish as long as they aren't hurting themselves or others. A lot of this is simpler than it sounds, because I'm catching it in some pretty heavy terms.
You want to support the right of others to speak because you want your right to speak protected as well. You might think that your ideas and what you have to say is completely innocuous and therefore only the bad guys should be silenced. The problem is, somebody else thinks you're the bad guy. If you don't support others right to speak then that person won't be there to support your right to speak. The only way we can protect our freedoms is together. So what does harming someone else's right to speak look like? Well often, this means going out of your way to cause someone harm for their words. At this moment in time, the biggest websites in the world are all going out of their way to find people who are saying things that they don't like and they are shutting that speech down. They're kicking people right off the websites for saying the wrong thing. In addition to that, even when they keep the people on the websites they are editing the posts and adding little things to them. I've never been kicked off of any social media site. Honestly, most of the opinions that they're going after aren't opinions that I hold. However, those people are our canaries. If the people saying things that we detest our band and go away then we are always next. We are always next. After the people that you disagree with are silence, you are always next.
With respect to property rights, this is pretty simple. Don't steal. Even when you're not stealing, don't use other people's things without permission. Respect property lines, try not to trespass on other people's land, respect intellectual property rights, as difficult as it is don't download illegal copies of television shows or music or video games. There are people out there who want you using their stuff even if it's for free, if you don't have any money use that stuff.
The Bible tells people not to covet others property, I'm not going to go that far. What I will say is don't waste your time obsessing over other people's stuff. No matter who you are there's always always going to be someone with more stuff. Even the person with the most stuff is probably looking at the guy with the second most stuff and wondering why he doesn't have a bunch of the stuff that that first guy has. In a lot of ways we need to look at possessions as a means to an end. Why would you actually own a house? You would own a house to have a place to live. Why would you actually own a car? You would own a car that have a mode of transportation. Why would you actually own a computer? Computers do a lot of amazing things from watching videos to surfing websites to creating things to playing video games. On the other hand, why would you own a diamond? There are very few reasons why you actually would other than it's expensive and pretty. To an extent that's fine but it's something to keep in mind that there is something to be said for the utility of things and not a whole lot to be said for the lack of utility of things. I think that by focusing on utility it will help us stay out of the collectors trap. The collectors trap is the tendency for people to just collect useless things. Sometimes those useless things are very expensive items, and all that having those things does for us is push us towards the next thing. This puts us on a treadmill. I've seen people who have basically nothing, and whenever they get any kind of money instead of spending it on things that are going to make their life better or on paying their bills or other things like that, they will run out to the nearest toy store and pick up some useless toys that they hang on their wall and never even open and play with. They just collect these useless toys with every penny they get. You know, there isn't actually a prize at the end. I understand that sometimes you just feel like collecting, but you have to remember the goal of life is to live a good life. I've collected almost a thousand video games, and they are nothing but bits on a server somewhere. I collected those after making sure my life was okay, after I done everything that I needed to to be prepared. And I did not let collecting video games override my responsibilities.
An extension of this property right is the right to be secure in their persons. You don't have a right to go snooping around someone's papers, you don't have a right to go snooping through someone's clothes, you don't have a right to go snooping through someone's wallet. Just don't do it. Of course, this all changes if someone gives you permission or request you to look through their stuff.
The right of people to have their own faith, to have their own opinions, to have their own beliefs, this is another situation where all you need to do is nothing. Don't go out of your way to harm somebody just because they have a religion you don't agree with. Don't go out of your way to hurt people because they have an opinion you disagree with. Don't go out of your way to hurt people who have a belief that you disagree with. You are probably wrong about something. I am definitely wrong about something. Everybody is probably wrong about something. The only way that we can find truth and try not to lie is to respect others with opinions you disagree with and earnestly communicate with them. If you are correct then maybe you can change their mind. If you are incorrect then maybe you can learn the truth.
The next rule I'd like to talk about is being generous to the people around you. If I'm being totally honest, there is no practical everyday reason to treat others generously. It isn't like you are being generous to others with an expectation that they will be generous to you in the future. If you find that you are generous to the people around you and they aren't generous back, maybe it's time to surround yourself with new people. Always always take care of yourself first, you don't need to be going off and sacrificing your life to help others. Trust me when I say that if you try to martyr yourself, the only person who will notice is you.
When I was young I had this terrible habit of modern myself for no good reason. I would end up going out and helping someone to the extent that I was truly suffering. One time, I ended up living on rice and cream corn for two weeks saving for a trip for a friend. We went on the trip, and despite everything that happened on the trip was nothing but complaining. All the sacrifice that I did to make that trip happen and basically I was staring down the barrel of a week of complaints. Person who took the trip with me didn't particularly care, they were too busy being stuck in their own world. You're suffering doesn't impress anyone.
If you have a little bit of extra though, it's a good thing to treat the people around you well. Having a generous spirit will pay off in subtle ways.
Do everything in your power to be compassionate and empathetic. What do I mean by this? Well, I think the best way to show being reasonable is to explain some situations where someone is unreasonable. Often, people in power maybe having a bad day and they will lash out at someone who doesn't deserve it but is under their jurisdiction. That lashing out, the person in question didn't deserve to be lashed out at but they have been because the person in power is being unreasonable. Another example, if a leader asks a subordinate to do something without considering whether that thing is possible, that is unreasonable. If a customer in a store ends up taking out their anger on a sales clerk for something that is clearly outside of the sales clerk's control, that is clearly unreasonable. I guess, the best way to put it is to always be working to put yourself into the other person's shoes and making your decisions based on that. Sometimes, you will absolutely put yourself into someone else's shoes and even after that you will realize that they are being unreasonable towards you and in that moment you will get angry and righteously so. The process of slowing down stopping taking a step back and looking at the situation before jumping to conclusions is very important. If my mother had given me this piece of advice instead of the piece of advice to go out and get in fights, I probably would have had a much easier time in school. Often the things that I started fights over were completely unreasonable, I just misinterpreted things and flew off the handle because that was the advice I was given.
Listen and learn. Your elders, your superiors and rank, those ahead of you in the race of life, there are a lot of people who would like you to think that they just magically have always been there. The reality is quite different. Your elders have been alive a lot longer than you have and whether you like it or not may have some useful advice for you. Sometimes that advice might not seem like it makes any sense, and absolutely sometimes that's because they are simply wrong. However, there's a lot of times where they're not wrong. This directive really applies to you when you are younger because while there are definitely a lot of things that your elders may be wrong about, in order to survive and thrive they've had to be right about so much more. Life is a complicated thing and there's often rules that seem to be nonsensical or contradictory. That's because often the rules are nonsensical and contradictory, but they're still important. To become a master at anything there's a certain path that must be followed. The first step is to learn all the rules. The next step is to learn how to apply the rules properly. After that you learn to understand the rules, and finally you learn how to break or change the rules in productive ways. This is the first principle because in this extremely complicated world if you don't know the rules, you don't know how to reply the rules, then you will never come to understand the rules and you will never be able to productively break or change the rules.
My generation made a big mistake in assuming that all of the rules were wrong. Along the way we did everything we could to simply erase them. In erasing all the rules, only then did we realize why many of them existed, and by then it was too late. Now a lot of us work really hard to try to reinstate rules that our parents gave us that we never appreciated.
When I was younger, everyone always told me I was so smart. The latest technology of the day was something I was an expert at, and because of that people really gave me a lot of respect. When you get that kind of respect too early and before you really earned it, you get misunderstandings of your own abilities. No one ever really told me that there was a path to walk, and that it takes time, and that no matter what sort of titles people give you you haven't actually arrived until you've gone through all the steps to get there.
So early on, your parents will be telling you things to do. For the first part of your life just follow them, because the things that they tell you to do are things that they think are going to be important later. Sometimes they'll tell you something that seems absurd but it's meant to keep you safe from things that you don't understand. Sometimes they'll tell you something that seems absurd but it will be very important much further down the line. Sometimes it seems absurd, but it just isn't and you just don't understand it yet. For that reason, earlier on in your life just try to do as you're told, and later on try to understand why they're telling you these things, and eventually you'll learn how to live on your own, and eventually you'll learn how to write your own rules. Each of these steps will take years and years to accomplish. If you manage to have things figured out by your twenties, you will be ahead of the game.
Closing things out, even though it's the last thing I'm talking about it's probably the most important. Be safe. In my workplace there was someone who took an unnecessary risk. They thought that by taking this unnecessary risk they were going to be able to get a bigger bonus later. As a result of taking that risk, they died. They won't be receiving a bonus because they're dead. They will be receiving a paycheck because they're dead. Their family will not be taken care of, because they're dead. It's really easy for your story to end, and if your story ends then none of it matters.
Besides the absolute safety of being alive or dead, there are other levels of safety. It's entirely conceivable that someone kidnaps you and goes on to sell you on the black market, and you will be alive but you will wish you weren't. Even though you're still alive all of your dreams are over. Another thing that can happen is you aren't sold on the black market you aren't dead but you can end up painting yourself into a corner in life such that you don't have a way forward. You can do this by becoming so addicted to drugs that you never get out of it, you can do this by falling in with the wrong crowd, you can do this by having a kid really early on and having to go and work because somebody needs to pay for that kid and you never get to go to college or university and you never get a career and so the rest of your life you're just fighting to live. I'm not going to tell you that your dreams are over at that point, but your life becomes tremendously harder than it has to be. There are definitely people who get out of drugs and go on to do great things, there are definitely people who get out of bad circumstances like an early pregnancy and things go just fine, but those people have to work a lot harder than everyone else. The ideal is to not get yourself into that situation in the first place.
Of course like everything there's a caveat, this doesn't mean that you completely stop taking risks. It means that you need to calculate your risks, and try to take the least amount of risk for the most amount of gain. There's a lot of people who take massive risks for very little payoff and even if they succeed they don't really come out very far ahead. On the other hand, there are very small risks that you can take that will have a big payoff. I always think about going to college is that, going to college was terrifying. On the other hand, going to college can net you a few million dollars that you wouldn't have made otherwise.
The most important bottom line especially when you're young, is to just do your best to be safe. As you get older you'll get smarter and you'll get wiser and you'll get better equipped to take risks that have the most upside and the least downside. When you're a little kid, you just don't know enough about the world to make those decisions. The weight of your life hasn't even sunk in yet. It's important then to listen to your parents and try to do what they tell you to do in order to stay safe until you understand the world, and the world's rules, and you can behave in the world, and later on you can understand how the rules can be bent or broken or changed.
So to sum it up: Tell the truth. Be polite. Exercise self-control. Don't be violent. Respect people's rights. Be generous. Be reasonable. Listen and learn. Be safe.
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