Twelve
Principles
The working rules I actually run on — and why they've survived.
Download the PDFThese aren't affirmations and they aren't a programme. They're the rules I've kept over a decade of building, failing, and building again. Some I arrived at myself. Some I picked up early from people I learned from and kept because they held up under pressure. I've written them for building a business, because that's the thing I know how to do.
Decide what you're building.
Direction before activity. Most businesses are a series of reactions to whatever arrived that week, and it shows up later in the architecture. If you can't describe the thing you're building, you aren't building it — you're maintaining it.
Complaint is not a plan.
If you can change it, change it. If you won't, stop discussing it. The energy spent narrating a problem is almost always greater than the energy required to fix it.
Stay current, or work from old information.
This field moves faster than experience accumulates. Ten years in doesn't protect you from being three years out of date — it makes it easier not to notice.
Thinking is physical.
Judgement degrades when you're sedentary, tired or wound up, and discipline doesn't compensate for it. Move first, decide second. The useful ideas rarely arrive at a desk.
Give it away first.
Teach what you know before anyone has paid you for it. It's the only reliable way to find out whether you actually understand it — and the only reliable way for anyone else to find out whether you're worth listening to.
Cheap is expensive.
Under-investing in your own capability costs more than it saves. The bill just arrives later, in worse work, and by then it's harder to trace back to the decision that caused it.
Simplify everything.
Complexity is easy to add and hard to remove. Every extra tool, step and handoff is a place where a business leaks time, money and attention. The job is fewer moving parts, not more capability.
Good enough isn't.
Your standard is whatever you're willing to ship. It isn't set once in a values document — it's set again every time something goes out of the door.
Busy is not the same as effective.
Activity is easy to generate and easy to mistake for progress. The question was never how much you did. It's what moved.
Own all of it.
Including the parts that weren't your fault. Responsibility isn't about blame — it's the only position from which you can actually change anything.
Never ask for what you won't do.
If you wouldn't do the task yourself, handing it to someone else isn't delegation. People read what you tolerate and what you avoid far more accurately than what you say.
Commit, or don't start.
Half-committed work costs almost as much as committed work and returns very little. Decide properly — then stop reopening the decision every time it gets difficult.
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