Rule 1 - Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

⁃ Stand up straight with your shoulders back to 1. Signal outward your sovereign status and appeal and 2. Make yourself feel more confident and become more sovereign in your daily attitude.

Rule 2 - Treat yourself as if you were someone you were responsive for helping.

⁃ People are more likely to be more careful of administering their pets medicine than themselves. That is the same as putting the gas mask on someone else before yourself. You have to help yourself before you can hope to help others.

⁃ Walk the path between chaos and order for maximal growth

⁃ Do not wish for an easy life, wish for a hard one and the strength to overcome it. Don’t wish for it to be easy, wish for the strength to overcome a hard life

⁃ ” He whose life has a why can bear almost any how” - Nietzsche

⁃ Start with yourself. Take care of yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your being.

⁃ You could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsive for helping.

Rule 3 - Make friends with people who want the best for you

⁃ Assume first that you are doing the easiest thing, and not the most difficult.

⁃ It is not possible to help those who do not want to be helped.

⁃ If you would not recommend a friend to others, do not continue to be their friend.

⁃ Surround yourself with people who support your upward aim.

⁃ Make friends with those who want the best for you.

Rule 4 - Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

⁃ No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your accomplishments, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent.

⁃ We seem to sometimes criticise ourselves by singling out a skill and comparing ourselves to someone who is great at that skill. We make our seem as if that skill is the most important skill in the world, and we therefore are bad because we are horrible by contrast. This is not a great way to compare yourself (or measure yourself). You have something others don’t. You’re good at something that others aren’t.

⁃ “Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and but in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak”.

⁃ Treat yourself as your own employee, and be a great leader who rewards they employee when it has done something good. Negotiate with yourself. ‘if we do this, we’ll get this’ - and listen to what you want as a reward.

⁃ Try to make your life a little better every day by performing small tasks and rewarding yourself for doing them, so that you’re likely to do more. This creates momentum, and in the end; compound interest. This is how you change your life.

⁃ “Life doesn’t have the problem. You do”. If your life isn’t going too well, perhaps your current knowledge is insufficient. Or your value structure needs redoing. Or you are clinging so tightly to your desires that your don’t see what you really need.

⁃ We only see what we aim at - the rest of the world is hidden. If we aim at something different, we will see different things. That is something our mind does to aid is in our pursuits.

⁃ You cannot aim yourself at anything if your are completely undisciplined and untutored.

⁃ Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, and not who someone is today.

Rule 5 - Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

⁃ I could not truly relate to this chapter, so there is a lack of notes. I found the information fascinating, but not necessarily something that I found a need to write down for future review.

⁃ However, to summarize; raise your child(ren) properly.

Rule 6 - Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.

⁃ Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Are you doing everything you possibly can to improve? Have you taken advantage of every opportunity?

⁃ Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.

Rule 7 - Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).

⁃ The successful delay gratification - they bargain with the future.

⁃ “If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality in your favor”

⁃ Once you have placed “make the world better” at the top of your value hierarchy, you experience ever-deepening meaning.

⁃ Expedience is to hide your skeletons in the closet. Avoiding responsibility. Expedience transfers the curse on your head to someone else, or to your future self, in a manner that will make your future, and the future generally, worse instead of better.

⁃ Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.

⁃ Expedient: a means of attaining an end, especially one that is convenient but possibly improper or immoral.

Rule 8 - Tell the truth - or, at least, don’t lie.

⁃ If you bend everything totally, blindly and willfully towards the attainment of a goal, and only that goal, you will never be able to discover if another goal would serve you, and the world, better. It is this that you sacrifice if you do not tell the truth. If, instead, you tell the truth, your values transform as you progress.

Rule 9 - Assume the the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.

⁃ Do your best to truly listen. Do your best to understand the other person as well.

⁃ You can better understand someone if you only speak after you’ve summarized his points to his satisfaction.

⁃ If you listen, instead, without premature judgment, people will generally tell you everything they are thinking - and with very little deceit. People will tell you the most amazing, absurd, interesting things. Very few of your conversations will be boring. And if you find that they are, you probably aren’t listening like you ought to.

⁃ Listen to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.

⁃ Remember that the Oracle of Delphi spoke so highly of Socrates for this reason. She described him as the wisest living man, because he knew that what he knew was nothing.

⁃ Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.

Rule 10 - Be precise in your speech.

⁃ Especially regarding problems; make sure to define the issue you have exactly, or you will end up discussing everything - and you can’t have a discussion about everything.

⁃ Let nothing remain unsaid. Articulate your thoughts and issues precisely.

Rule 11 - Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.

⁃ This chapter was mostly about gender and the roles of men and women. Focusing mostly on the aspects of what is required of them, and between the lines how to be an appealing mate.

Rule 12 - Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

⁃ Appreciate the little things. Sometimes something occurs, and if you pay attention, you get to appreciate life a little more.