Write recurring decisions down as principles — a decision made once and codified stops costing willpower and starts compounding.
The cross-book move that makes this library worth having: Parrish tells you to notice a default, Dalio tells you to encode the response once so the moment never gets a vote again.
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Typed edges. Anything below the line was authored on the other note and derived here.
extends →Don't rely on in-the-moment willpower — build environments and rules that make the good decision the automatic one.Same insight, industrialized. Parrish builds a guardrail per situation; Dalio builds a written, versioned, testable library of them and treats it as infrastructure.
← supported byEvery piece of knowledge should have one authoritative representation — duplication is where truth goes to diverge.
The software original of what Dalio does with life decisions: one canonical home for a decision, so it can be improved in a single place rather than drifting across copies maintained by diligence.
← requiresPain + Reflection = Progress: pain is information about the gap between reality and your model.Reflection is what produces a principle worth writing down. Skip it and you're just accumulating rules you never earned.
← supported byPlay long-term games with long-term people — compounding of money, trust, and knowledge only works if you don't reset the board.Dalio and Naval are both compounding maximalists, and this is where they agree without qualification: the returns come from not restarting, whatever the substrate.
← contradicted byImprovement usually comes from removal — subtract the harmful before adding the helpful.Two opposite theories of improvement. Dalio accumulates written rules until the machine is complete; Taleb argues the additions are where fragility enters and the removals are what actually compound. Worth holding unresolved rather than picking.