• iTunes Podcasts Link
• Stitcher Link
• Anchor.fm Link

A Personal Constitution in 4 Words

For the past few months, I've been obsessed with something I read in Stephen Covey's classic 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He calls it a "personal constitution", and it's basically a governing document for, well, you! It consists of your core values and operating principles, and essentially acts as the thing you refer to when you need to make tough decisions in life.

I'm not anywhere near finished with my own constitution. And in a way, you're never finished. It's a living document—much like most countries' constitutions.

But I do have a 4 word phrase—well, 2 phrases, actually—that I think serve as the kernel of a good constitution for me.


Read about them (for free) here.

Other Interesting Ideas

• "Mean People Fail" by Paul Graham

  I'm not sure if I completely agree with Graham, but his article is well written and throught provoking:

  "For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.
  That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things....When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. The exciting thing is that their m.o. seems to be spreading. The games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world, and this is reversing the historical polarity of the relationship between meanness and success."

• The Ethical OS Toolkit

  As apps become more and more a part of our lives, we should be careful not to make them a place bereft of ethical considerations. This is a great start for ensuring that doesn't happen. It definitely makes you think.