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Dear Reader,

What you’re about to discover on this site are my five rules of life and a series of essays about how to translate these laws into everyday being. They are written in a style as letters to my young daughters. Not to the kids they are today. To the grown-ups they’re going to be. They’ll read them when they’re old enough to need them. Other people will read them too. That’s fine. Nothing in here is a secret.

Here’s the problem I’m trying to solve. Nobody hands you a manual for being alive. School teaches you facts. Your friends teach you what’s cool. The internet teaches you what’s hyped. But nobody sits you down and tells you how the whole thing works. How you work. Why some people get stronger when life gets hard, and why some people get stuck. Why you can want something badly and still not do it.

I spent a long time looking for that manual. I found pieces of it in physics. I found pieces in biology. And I found pieces in some very old ideas from people who lived under extraordinary circumstances and from many different times, but all trying to solve this very same problem. The pieces fit together. East and West. Pacific and Atlantic. The science of today was validating the ancient ideas I read about.

So I boiled it down to five rules. Each rule has one idea, one story, and one practical tip to try. After the five rules are the letters. Those take the rules and apply them to real problems.

Tough circumstances beyond your control, etc.

I’ve tried to keep the technical details as scant as possible. But the most important rule is: If a rule doesn’t work when you try it, throw it out. (That’s actually rule five.)

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with rule one. It’s about what you are. And it’s not what you think.