Every few years, life forces you to confront a fundamental question: what principles actually guide your decisions when everything else falls away?
For me, that moment came during a particularly challenging period when I was juggling a demanding tech career, a medically complex child, and the growing realization that the standard advice about success and happiness wasn't working for my actual life. The motivational quotes and productivity hacks felt hollow when faced with real complexity.
That's when I started distilling my approach to decision-making into something more fundamental - not rules imposed from outside, but principles that emerged from honest reflection about what actually mattered when the stakes were real.
These five tenets aren't revolutionary or unique. They're not meant to be. They're simply the operating system I've developed for navigating both professional challenges and personal growth, refined through years of testing against actual problems rather than hypothetical scenarios.
- Always seek knowledge
- Respect the body, mind, and spirit of yourself and others
- Intentionally harm no living creature
- Own up to your failures
- Always try your best
The Tenets
Why Personal Tenets Matter More Than You Think
In the tech world, we're obsessed with systems, frameworks, and best practices. We spend hours debating code architecture and deployment strategies, but rarely apply the same systematic thinking to how we approach life and career decisions.
Personal tenets serve the same function as architectural principles in software development - they provide consistent decision-making criteria when you're facing trade-offs, time pressure, or competing priorities. Without them, you end up making decisions reactively, based on whoever shouted loudest or whatever feels urgent in the moment.
The difference between people who seem to have their act together and those who feel constantly overwhelmed often isn't talent or luck - it's having clear principles that guide choices before those choices become crises.
Tenet 1: Always Seek Knowledge
Curiosity is a career strategy, not just a personality trait.
This isn't about becoming a perpetual student or collecting certifications for their own sake. It's about recognizing that in a rapidly changing world, your ability to learn new things is more valuable than your knowledge of specific things.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Read outside your domain. Some of my best technical insights have come from books about psychology, military strategy, and urban planning. Cross-pollination of ideas creates breakthrough thinking more often than staying within your specialty.
Ask better questions. Instead of "How do I solve this specific problem?", ask "What class of problems does this represent?" and "What would need to be true for this to not be a problem at all?" Better questions lead to better solutions.
Learn from failures - yours and others'. Post-mortems aren't just for system outages. When projects fail, relationships break down, or initiatives stall, there's usually a pattern worth understanding. The fastest way to grow is to study what doesn't work and why.
Teach what you learn. Knowledge that you can't explain to someone else isn't really knowledge - it's just information you've memorized. Teaching forces you to understand concepts deeply enough to translate them for different audiences.
The Knowledge Trap to Avoid
There's a difference between learning and learning theater. Collecting courses, books, and certifications without applying them is just expensive procrastination. Real learning happens when you use new knowledge to solve actual problems or make better decisions.
The goal isn't to know everything - it's to know how to figure out anything you need to know. Focus on building learning systems rather than accumulating facts.
Tenet 2: Respect the Body, Mind, and Spirit of Yourself and Others
Sustainable performance requires sustainable practices.
Early in my career, I thought respect for others was just basic politeness, and self-respect was something you earned through achievement. Both perspectives were incomplete and ultimately counterproductive.
Respecting Others in Professional Contexts
Assume positive intent, but verify with data. When someone makes a decision you disagree with, start by assuming they have reasons you don't understand rather than assuming incompetence or malice. Then dig deeper to understand those reasons.
Value different working styles. Some people think out loud; others need to process internally before speaking. Some prefer detailed written specifications; others work better with high-level goals and autonomy. Effective collaboration means adapting to these differences rather than forcing everyone into your preferred style.
Recognize the full human behind the professional role. That difficult stakeholder might be dealing with budget pressure you don't see. That quiet team member might be brilliant but come from a culture that values listening over speaking. Context changes everything.
Respecting Yourself
Your energy is finite and precious. Saying yes to everything isn't being helpful - it's being irresponsible with your most valuable resource. Protect your energy like you'd protect any other critical asset.
Set boundaries around your well-being. Working late occasionally is part of professional life. Working late constantly is a systemic problem that won't be solved by individual heroics. Know the difference and act accordingly.
Invest in your foundation. Quality sleep, regular exercise, and mental health maintenance aren't luxuries - they're infrastructure. When the foundation is solid, everything else becomes easier.
The Integration Challenge
The hardest part of this tenet is that respecting yourself and respecting others sometimes seem to conflict. Learning to advocate for your needs while remaining considerate of others' needs is one of the most valuable skills you can develop.
The key is understanding that healthy relationships require both parties to maintain their well-being. Self-sacrifice that leads to resentment or burnout ultimately serves no one.
Tenet 3: Intentionally Harm No Living Creature
Consider the impact of your actions beyond the immediate and obvious.
This tenet started as a personal ethical stance but evolved into a practical framework for decision-making in complex environments where unintended consequences are common.
In Professional Settings
Build solutions that help rather than exploit. Whether you're designing user interfaces, writing algorithms, or creating business processes, consider who benefits and who bears the costs. Dark patterns in UX design might increase short-term metrics, but they erode trust and ultimately harm both users and the business.
Avoid solutions that create problems for future teams. That quick hack that ships the feature on time might save your sprint, but if it creates technical debt that will take weeks to untangle later, you've just shifted the pain to future developers. Sometimes the most compassionate choice is to take more time upfront.
Consider the human cost of technical decisions. Automation that eliminates tedious work is generally good. Automation that eliminates jobs without considering the impact on affected people is a missed opportunity to solve problems more thoughtfully.
In Leadership and Mentoring
Give feedback that builds rather than breaks. Critique the work, not the person. Focus on specific behaviors rather than character judgments. Frame problems as learning opportunities rather than personal failures.
Share credit generously and take responsibility for failures. When things go well, highlight the contributions of team members. When things go poorly, look first at what you could have done differently as a leader rather than pointing fingers at individuals.
Mentor with the mentee's goals in mind, not your own. The point of mentoring is to help someone else succeed in their chosen direction, not to create a mini-version of yourself.
The Complexity of "Harm"
Sometimes avoiding immediate harm creates larger problems down the road. Sometimes being honest causes short-term discomfort but prevents long-term damage. This tenet isn't about avoiding all conflict or difficult conversations - it's about considering the full impact of your choices.
The question isn't "Does this cause any discomfort?" but rather "Does this cause unnecessary harm, and what are the alternatives?"
Tenet 4: Own Up to Your Failures
Accountability is the foundation of trust and growth.
In an industry where things break constantly and requirements change daily, how you handle failures often matters more than how you handle successes.
The Anatomy of Good Accountability
Acknowledge what happened without minimizing or deflecting. "I missed the deadline because I underestimated the complexity" is different from "I missed the deadline because the requirements weren't clear" or "I missed the deadline because I got pulled into other priorities." Own the parts that were your responsibility.
Analyze the system, not just the incident. Individual failures usually point to systemic issues. What processes, communication patterns, or assumptions contributed to the problem? How can those be improved to prevent similar issues?
Focus on learning and improvement rather than punishment. The goal of accountability isn't to feel bad about mistakes - it's to extract maximum learning value and prevent recurrence. Shame doesn't teach; reflection and adjustment do.
Make concrete commitments about future behavior. "I'll do better next time" is vague and unconvincing. "I'm going to start breaking down large estimates into smaller chunks and reviewing them with the team before committing" is specific and actionable.
The Professional Benefits
Owning failures paradoxically makes you more trustworthy, not less. Teams want to work with people who can be honest about problems early rather than hiding them until they become crises. Managers want to promote people who can be counted on to surface issues and take responsibility for solutions.
People remember how you handle difficulties more than how you handle successes. Everyone looks good when things are going well. Your response to problems reveals character and competence in ways that success stories can't.
When Others Don't Own Their Failures
You can't control whether others take accountability, but you can control whether you enable their avoidance. Don't cover for people who consistently shift blame or fail to learn from mistakes. Don't let their poor accountability compromise your own standards.
Sometimes the most respectful thing you can do is stop protecting someone from the natural consequences of their choices.
Tenet 5: Always Try Your Best
Effort is the variable you control; outcomes often aren't.
This is the most misunderstood of the five tenets because it's often confused with perfectionism or unsustainable overwork. But "your best" isn't a constant - it varies based on your capacity, the context, and what else is competing for your attention.
Contextual Best Effort
Your best on Monday morning after a good weekend is different from your best on Friday afternoon of a difficult week. The goal isn't to maintain peak performance constantly - it's to give appropriate effort given your current capacity and the importance of the task.
Match effort to impact. The internal tool that three people use doesn't need the same level of polish as the customer-facing feature that affects thousands of users. Efficient effort allocation is a skill, not a moral failing.
Know when "good enough" is good enough. Sometimes shipping an 80% solution quickly is more valuable than spending three more weeks to reach 95%. The art is knowing when you're in which situation.
Sustainable Excellence
Best effort includes taking care of yourself. Working yourself into burnout isn't giving your best - it's guaranteeing that your future contributions will be diminished. Sustainable performance requires sustainable practices.
Quality over quantity, but ship regularly. Perfectionist tendencies can prevent you from getting feedback that would actually improve your work. Sometimes "try your best" means shipping something imperfect so you can learn what "better" actually looks like.
Learn to distinguish between effort and results. You can control how much thought, care, and attention you put into something. You can't always control whether it succeeds, whether others appreciate it, or whether circumstances change in ways that make your work irrelevant.
The Long Game
Your reputation is built on the cumulative effect of your efforts over time, not any single project or achievement. People notice who consistently shows up, who can be counted on to think through problems carefully, and who maintains standards even when it's inconvenient.
The compound effect of consistent effort is one of the most powerful forces in career development. Small differences in approach, compounded over years, create dramatic differences in outcomes.
How These Tenets Work Together
These aren't independent rules - they're interconnected principles that reinforce each other:
Seeking knowledge makes you more effective at avoiding harm because you understand the broader implications of your actions.
Respecting yourself and others creates the psychological safety needed for honest accountability when things go wrong.
Owning failures provides the feedback needed to continuously improve your ability to try your best.
Trying your best includes the effort to learn, respect, avoid harm, and take responsibility - it's not just about working hard, but working thoughtfully.
Adapting Tenets to Your Context
Your operating system will be different from mine, and it should be. These principles emerged from my specific experiences, values, and circumstances. The process of developing them is more important than the specific content.
Questions for Developing Your Own Tenets
- What decisions have you been most proud of, and what principles guided them?
- When you've compromised your values, what were the circumstances and consequences?
- What trade-offs do you make consistently, and are they serving your long-term goals?
- What would you want people to remember about how you approached challenges?
Testing and Refinement
Like any system, personal tenets need to be tested against real-world conditions and refined based on results. Principles that sound good in theory but break down under pressure aren't actually principles - they're aspirations.
Pay attention to when following your tenets is difficult, when they seem to conflict with each other, and when they lead to outcomes you didn't expect. These friction points are opportunities for learning and adjustment.
Living Principles in Complex Systems
The real test of personal tenets isn't how they work in isolation - it's how they guide decisions in complex organizational environments where you can't control all the variables.
Sometimes you'll work for companies whose values don't align perfectly with yours. Sometimes you'll face deadlines that make your preferred approach difficult. Sometimes you'll encounter people who don't share your commitment to mutual respect or personal accountability.
Your tenets aren't meant to insulate you from these realities - they're meant to help you navigate them with integrity. They provide consistency in your approach even when external circumstances are inconsistent.
The goal isn't to find perfect environments where following your principles is easy. It's to develop the judgment and skill to live your values even in imperfect situations, while recognizing when a mismatch is too fundamental to bridge.
Your Personal Operating System
These five tenets have served me well across different roles, industries, and life circumstances. They've provided consistency during periods of change and clarity during moments of confusion. They've helped me make better decisions and recover more effectively from poor ones.
But they're my tenets, derived from my experience and values. Your journey will require your own principles, tested against your own challenges and refined through your own failures and successes.
The question isn't whether you agree with these specific tenets - it's whether you have any conscious principles guiding your decisions at all. In a world full of competing demands and conflicting advice, having a clear operating system for life and work isn't just helpful - it's essential.
What principles will you choose to live by?
