How to Create Your Own Secret Rules
Defining Yourself via Personal Boundaries
It is relatively easy to become content with your own life, especially when living the 9-to-5 routine. Life becomes stable and the urgency to strive for more dissipate as the recurring money influx comes in.
Some people might stay content with this simple lifestyle, but I can’t. The second I got my steady job, I upgraded my lifestyle, spending more money, and became lazy at an alarming rate. I stopped improving my life, my skills, and I had no longer any drive to develop them further. It became boring and predictable a matter of days.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the work I do, but the lifestyle of “go home and consume” is not a fulling one. There is more to life than this perpetual cycle of nothingness.
The only way to break this cycle is to make conscious and calculated decisions. You need to ask yourself every day if your decisions and actions serve your life. Otherwise, you are going to be stuck in this automatic pilot and wondering how fast did you squander your life away.
You have to decide that life does not happen to you but that you make things happen for you.
One of the pillars of this new lifestyle is to develop your own set of rules that will guide you on your path. Not only you’ll break the cycle of your monotone life, but you will transform yourself into a high-value and attractive man. Simply because you’ll improve how you allocate your time, you’ll dedicate yourself to your wellbeing, and you’ll start respecting yourself more.
How to Create your Own Rules
Any man on his mission, or thriving to improve himself, has his own sets of rules, whether it was expressed through writing or whether it is lingering in the back of his head. He controls the input and the output in his life by delimiting his boundaries. He knows when to move away from situations that could downgrade his life and when to move forward with situations that could improve his life.
Defining your boundaries
As an acquaintance of mine said
You have to figures out what you say YES to in order to figure out where to say NO.
This is an important part of the process. Being aware of the things you allow without consideration into your life, and deciding what is worth keeping and what is not.
Maybe you allow people to be passive-aggressive with you without defending or putting a stop to it. Maybe you are too serviceable and give your time away to other people without considering if it serves you. Maybe you just watch too much TV or drink too much alcohol, and you need to put an end to these unhealthy behaviors.
Whether it is self-imposed or imposed by your environment (family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, or society), it does not matter. By creating your own set of rules, you’ll establish the limits you don’t want to cross and the limits of behaviors you will tolerate from other people.
Why would anyone care about your time if you don’t care about your time?
Defining your aspiration
One other way to create guiding rules is to imagine yourself in the future by asking questions like:
- What kind of man do you want to be at 30, 40, 50, or 60 years old?
- How does this man act?
- How does he live is life?
- How social he is?
- How much money does he have?
- How healthy is he?
- What kind of people does he surround himself with?
- How confident is he?
Let your mind wander on these questions or forcefully answer each one of them (or more).
From that vision you’ve created in your mind, how can you move toward that direction? What’s your action plan? What kind of behaviors will meet this idealized version of yourself?
Create rules from that vision. They will make you start living with intention and control. They will guide you navigate the world by prescribing yourself expectations, behaviors, and requirements to master oneself.
Example of rules
I have developed my rules under the commandment template. They are actionable and simple rules. They are limited in number (around 10) and they portrait an ideal to strive towards. They are your personal standards, values, and principles you will base your life on. They determine what kind of behaviors are acceptable and what kinds are not acceptable.
I’ll give you 2 examples from my own personal commandments (no more as I want to keep it a secret). One is a positive commandment (What should I be doing) and the other is a negative commandment (What should I not be doing).
As you will see, there is the commandment in bold, one sentence explains why this commandment exists, and a simple description detailing the behavior to achieve this commandment. You make it as complicated as you want, but the shorter it is, the easier it is to remember. It is also important to mention that the name and description will change over time. As you experience life, you will be able to define those rules more clearly and more accurately. There are not set and stone, these are just guidelines.
Thou Shalt Keep his Environment Minimal and Clean
For a peaceful and stress-free life
The Man’s environment should always be pleasing to his eyes and everything he owns should be of use to him. The Man knows his environment is a reflection of his mind so he takes care of it every day.Thou Shalt Not be Unattractive
Avoiding disdain from others
The Man abstains from unattractive behaviors such as neediness, self-deprecation, and placating oneself. He always says less than necessary and he never gossips, complains or argues with other people. The Man controls his emotions and makes use of them only when necessary.
Technics To Implement Your Commandments
There is no magic bullet to follow through your commandment (or rules), but here are some technics that could help anchor them in your brain and make them second nature.
- Read each commandment every day, both the title and description.
- Write them out every morning.
- Maintain a journal and write a which commandment you follow through in your day.
- Focus your energy on one commandment at the time. One commandment every week (or every day if you desire ) and make sure to practice it during that week.
- Make an audio/video where you read them all and listen to it every day.
Conclusion
We have seen two ways to create your own set of rules.
- Define what are your boundaries by understanding situations where your primal response is YES but where it would be preferable for you to say NO.
- Project yourself in the future, determine your desired behaviors, and build a path that leads to this person.
It is a step forward to a more controlled and intentional life. One you will experience on your own term instead of other people’s term.
