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Principles, Priorities and Values
No one is devoid of guiding principles. Whether you choose your habits, or whether your habits arise from influences greater than your own choice - no one is devoid of habits. The factors which influence your habits most are your guiding principles - for many people the habits they repeat are different from the moral values and principles they profess.
This might describe you.
Do you neglect the things you say are important?
Do you take action to become and remain the person you tell yourself and others that you are what you claim to be
Do you make sacrifices now to cause a result later?
(On that last one) of course you do. Such is the great advantage of the human intellect. We make choices to sacrifice something of little value for to gain something of greater value.
In the gym we sacrifice comfort now for strength later. When we quit the gym we sacrifice strength later for comfort now. Whichever sacrifice you choose tells us what your guiding principles are. Do which do you value more than the other: comfort now or strength later? Regardless of what you profess to say, it is what a person does that tells me your priorities, your values, your guiding principles.
And it does not go without saying - so I'll say it here - Earth is not a world of absolutes (quite the opposite) thus there is no absolute "right" rule on the above mentioned gym-relevant principles to apply broadly in every scenario. Don't be tempted to commit to inflexible absolutism - for example, most functional people agree that sacrificing comfort now to gain future strength (aka an exercise routine) is a worthwhile and valuable daily habit when pursued appropriate to you age, body, and other physical conditions. This consensus among functional people may incline you to favor an absolute principle of "never miss the gym" or "never sacrifice future strength for present comfort" - if you commit to such an unwavering principle you will be well served on most days, and you will be catastrophically ill served on some days when the conditions require some flexibility and nuance to your principle. The most noticeable exceptional condition is physical injury. When you are injured, and during the time you are healing, your should definitely sacrifice future strength to gain present comfort - or else you risk making a temporary wound a permanent one. That's just one example of the lesson: even a generally consistent principle requires flexibility and nuance to conform with reality.
You cannot stand against reality forever.
Let's take another example:
When shopping, we have the opportunity to make choices about our health (by the food we bring home) among other factors. To the extent we have options to choose from, and to the extent of our financial ability to expand our grocery budget to fit the choices we'd like to make (an admittedly constrained choice, within which we still make choices) we make choices of flavor and fun and price and nutrient content - prioritizing these in an order to affect our future reality. A lower price now means we still have more money in the future. A better nutrient profile means our better health in the future. A more fun and flavorful item acquired now means a change in our mood later. All three of these principles influence our grocery store choices - and regardless of how we tell ourselves and others about what we value, our principles that guide our habits reveal our priorities in the actions we take to create the future we want.
There is no shame in wanting to create one future or another, there is only ownership - a reconciliation of the behaviors we enact and the behaviors we profess to care about. The greater the similarity between what we say and what we do - the calmer your heart will become. The greater the difference between what we claim to ourselves and others as our priorities vs the things we actually prioritize - the greater you'll find yourself self-sabotaging, and getting in your own way.
I use the examples of exercise and dietary choices (to the extent our options are constrained by each persons physical conditions as well as the food we can access respectively) because these are universally relatable experiences. Everyone has a body that functions, ages, decays and will one day die - and all of us (with exception of the tragically nihilistic) would like to preserve our functionality and protract our experience of decay while we age - thus health choices are universally relatable examples to communicate the concept of matching our reality to our principles - and inferring our own guiding principles based on the reality we create.
Here are a few less universally relatable examples of sacrifices we choose between what we can have now and later
- Retirement and other financial planning: money to spend now vs money to spend later
- Marriage and romantic partnerships: longevity, improvement and resilience of the current relationship vs potentially more favorable "base stats" of a different relationship
- Design of secure software: accessibility vs security - which is of more value to the user?
- Actions of a governing body: freedom of the individual vs security, consistency, stability of the group - when is it acceptable to increase or preserve one at the expense of the other.
- In allocating time to hobbies: improving a basic skill vs exploring new interests
- In parenting: communicating the intrinsic value of the child as a self-directed individual vs communicating the requirements of culturally-directed behaviors
- For religious institutions: to adhere to traditional doctrine of previous historical context vs to update doctrines to resonate with new generational context
All of these choices, whether great or small, are habits we do daily and weekly which we repeat and which give consistent results. If you are consistently creating a result you don't like - maybe a change in habits would create a different result. And if you struggle to change those habits, then likely there is an error in your guiding principles between the outcome you say (to yourself and others) that you value, vs where your actual priorities are - unarticulated though these priorities may be, your priorities will be revealed by the reality you create.
Find the roots of your principles.
Take ownership of the things you value, and do not tell yourself or others that you prioritize that which you do not - OR start prioritizing those things you claim to value.
Make the sacrifices you desire.
Remember there are no absolutes.
Do not defy reality, but work with and within reality - this is what it means to have realistic expectations of yourself and others.
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