Build Your Box

Setting life principles for oneself is crucial to living a fulfilling, stressless, and meaningful life. Life principles are the values and beliefs that guide our decision-making, behavior, and interactions with others. By establishing our own principles, we can ensure that we are living in alignment with our values. If you have heard, “This is how we do things around here,” realize that you are experiencing an organization, group culture, or someone’s principle. Keeping in mind that groups and organizations spend time spelling out their objectives and vision or principles, leaves us to note that establishing principles is also of extreme importance for an individual.

How does one set principles for oneself, and where do we start? Let me start by explaining where we should not start. Suppose we follow the teachings of Om Swami and the knowledge that he shared in his book Mind Full to Mindful. In the book, he explains life itself is empty, meaning that we are not to read too much into anything and should practice letting go quickly and often anytime we can. 

When we branch off religious beliefs and turn to science, we also learn, as Lavoisier will put it, that “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.” This is another statement to remind us not to overthink stuff. To remind us that we are passing beings and that we take and give and follow the ordinary course of life whether we like it or not. Therefore, it is beneficial to get on board and go with the flow instead of fighting against it and causing oneself unnecessary grief.

Many of the material things that we fight for and that we jump through hoops to acquire are all in vain. All things transform. Things you know today will change the next day. One day may be all cozy, and the next day will not be so great, and so forth and so on. Now that we learn not to overthink anything, let us explore how to simplifier our existence by setting our principles and living by them.

How does one keep up? How does one keep their sanity and remains sound and peaceful? How does one keep up with the ever-changing world determined to keep going and shaking us as it pleases?

To get to this peace, we can turn to the bible, where God states that we can find peace in him. This statement itself is a metaphor, prompting us to mirror God’s ways. If we follow the many stories shared in the bible, we learn that HE is the God of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The same statement is true for all religions by the way. Finding peace in God means trying to be more like him, and how we do that is by being consistent, building principles of our own, and remaining within the boundaries of these principles. By staying consistent with what we set forth for ourselves, we can consistently come through to the external world. Regardless of the shape, the world will take the next day because we will remain ourselves, and the world will adapt around us instead of us chasing the many aspects of the changing world.

How we begin setting the principle in the first place is to record and process lots of data. By feeding the brain lots of experience, we can train it to recognize the pattern and become better at serving us with our every life decision-making and better managing our demeanors in the external world.

I understand there is a paradox here because I mentioned having a lot of data to process and sort for analysis and pattern identification. If you are young, you wonder how you will even begin gathering these experiences that were supposed to form you, give you enough analysis for patterns, and help set up your life principles. Please bear with me, and I will elaborate. There is no need to feel disappointed because I stated that you need experience, and yet you have not seen enough or done enough in life to learn from your failures and build a trusted principles’ boxes, which brings me to my next point.

How does one acquire experience? You gain knowledge by going through the situation yourself, by watching others go through a problem and learning from other outcomes or seeking to learn from others not necessarily close to you physically. Other sources can be books or research findings. 

After compiling as much data, either through your own or others’ lessons learned or through research and books, you are ready to start analyzing and comparing the experiences and responses against your beliefs, emotional states, and values. You are better position to select the paths that make you feel good and fussy about yourself. By doing these exercises often, you will create a series of boxes that you can leverage to process the daily life adventures, fortunes, or misfortunes in small incremental batches and allow your thinking and creative brain to serve you better elsewhere.

The following are some steps to help create your principles. After you’ve gathered the necessary experience and lessons learned through either means, you can start by reflecting on what is truly important to you in life. What do you value most? This could include things like honesty, integrity, kindness, or personal growth. List your top values and consider how they can apply to your daily life. Once one of the core values reflects you the most, adopt it and define it further. These core beliefs will become what you will run each life scenario through the next time you face a challenge.

Sometimes it is beneficial to have a goal for oneself. What do you want to achieve? What kind of person do you want to become? Consider both short-term and long-term goals and make sure they align with your values, but goal setting is mostly a challenging area for most people, and it is not necessarily needed for this exercise. If you have a grand life goal, that is good, but if you don’t yet, don’t worry about it. Most people go through life without ever identifying a clear goal, but then they do just fine. However, if you are one with a clear plan of what you wish to contribute to the world, then add this goal to your values.

Next, you want to identify your strengths and weaknesses. I can’t stress this part enough. You must know your weakness and strength. Do this to save yourself time. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses can help you set realistic and achievable life principles. Be honest with yourself about where you excel and where you struggle. Weaknesses and strength exercises will help you set goals and principles that are realistic and achievable. For example, if you know that you are not good at doing math, you will not waste your time on things that require a great deal of math. If you can afford it, you will offload anything in this area to someone who is better at it and work on your strength. You may have heard the theory of buying one’s weakness before. This is a very efficient way to live. Since we cannot have all the time in the world and we cannot excel at everything in life, it is critical that we save time where we can, and how to better save time is to work on improving our strengths and hiring or buying our weaknesses.

If you know your strength and weakness and have gathered enough lessons learned from the world, you are ready to create your life principles based on your values, goals, and personal strengths and weaknesses. You can now create a list of principles that will guide your decision-making and behavior. These principles reflect who you are and who you want to be and will guide you for the rest of your life. You will primarily be ready for anything life throws at you.

Lastly, live by these principles. Once you have established your life principles, it’s important to live by them, don’t bind them for anyone or anything. Make a conscious effort to apply your principles to your daily life, decision-making, and interactions with others. Over time, your principles will become second nature, and you will be living in alignment with your values.

To illustrate, let me tell you how I came to these realizations. I was fortunate very early in life to have met an aunt of mine. She explained to me very early that in her line of business, things can go sought quite easily if you get too greedy because money will flow, and you can get in trouble sooner than you think. So, she had to learn quickly how to survive the many temptations of her line of business and still be able to live a decent life and sleep at night. She started by making a list of things she would say yes to and things she would say no to even when her life was on the line. She said this list helped her to sustain her tasks with pride when most of her colleagues dropped out, were sued, sent to jail, or had to seek other jobs. She later refers to this list as her box. I liked the term “box” so much that I kept it for myself.

I was fascinated by her story, and so I went on the journey to design a box for myself as well. I was a pre-teen, and this seemed like a fun activity at the time. Mind you, it was the most important exercise I’ve ever done. I started to identify very early what I despise, the companies I would like to keep, and acts that I would never stand by regardless of what I was to gain.

Another benefit I found later with setting these boundaries was that since the world is constantly changing, these boxes help me keep my values and my beliefs and stay in the world without losing myself.

If you have these boxes, there will be times when your best friend will hate you because you called them out on something and turned away and didn’t back them up for something they did and were expecting your support. However, later down the road, if the same situation presents itself and someone else behaves that way, and you pull out, your friend won’t be surprised because they will remember that they acted similarly once before and that you reacted just like you did today, and the friend will realize that you were not playing or being partial. In a nutshell, you will always be vindicated, regardless of the situation.

Nonetheless, if you embark on this journey, you will be tested dearly. There will be times when it will be tough to abide by these principles, but if you sustain them, you can live with yourself proudly.

One such example is the case of Johnson & Johnson (J&J) a well-known multinational corporation that operates in the healthcare industry, producing a range of products such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and health products. The company has long prided itself on its Credo, a set of guiding principles established in 1943 by former Chairman Robert Wood Johnson, which emphasizes putting the needs of its customers first, even ahead of shareholders. Mr. Johnson established this principle well before the company started making any profit. He promised himself that J&J would also put the consumers’ safety ahead of profit regardless of the loss.

And man, was J&J tested? One of the tests came with the famous Tylenol poisoning incident of 1982. Seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Extra Strength Tylenol capsules that had been laced with cyanide. J&J immediately recalled all Tylenol products from store shelves, offered replacement products, and worked with law enforcement to identify the source of the tampering. Although this incident cost the company over $100 million, it is widely regarded as an example of how J&J puts the safety and well-being of its customers above profits.

There have been other instances where J&J’s commitment to its Credo has been tested. For example, in 2010, the company faced a significant product recall due to quality control issues with some of its over-the-counter medicines, including Tylenol and Motrin. The recall, which affected millions of products and cost the company an estimated $900 million, was prompted by concerns that some of the products may have been contaminated with foreign particles. J&J’s decision to recall the products rather than take a chance on the safety of its customers again demonstrated its commitment to putting customers first, even at the cost of shareholder value.

You are probably thinking this is a company, so it is easy for them to set whatever principles, but guess what? Let me tell you that it is harder for companies since many people rely on their profits. As individuals, if you do this, you are just making your life easier. You will sleep better at night, and some may think that you are crazy. Others may even call you selfish, among many more names, but as your consistency demonstrates itself, they will come to understand you and you will live better with your decision and may even save you time because people will know in advance what you will say or think of any their actions.

By setting your life principles and living by them, you can ensure that you live a life that is true to who you are and what you believe in. It may take time and effort to establish and live by your principles, but the rewards of a fulfilling and meaningful life are well worth it.

It will become easier to communicate with society because you will have a track record of consistent actions, decisions, and behaviors. You will remove people who don’t align with your core principles automatically without ever needing to say a word.

Ultimately, you will be happy with yourself regardless of what others think of you. Remember to love yourself and stay true to your principles. “Do what must, come what may.”