Background Ops #9: Hard Rules
USE THIS RULE IF YOU’RE OVER-COMMITTED OR SCATTERED
“Use this rule if you’re often over-committed or too scattered.
If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, say “no”.
When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” — then say “no.”
When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!””
— Derek Sivers, “No “yes.” Either “HELL YEAH!” or “no.”, 2009
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TSR’S SERIES ON BACKGROUND OPS, ISSUE #9: HARD RULES
Sir Alfred North Whitehead observed in 1910 —
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
Thus far in Background Operations, we’ve focused primarily on the this sentence of Whitehead’s —
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
But let’s now turn our attention to the second part —
“Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
Derek Sivers is certainly one of the people I admire most in the world — in 1997, he founded what would become the world’s largest independent music distributor online, CD Baby.
After CD Baby was acquired for $22 million in 2008, Sivers became something of an intellectual and cultural force, becoming a beloved writer in the tech space, giving some very well-regarded Ted talks, and meeting and sharing insights with a lot of fantastic people all around the world.
Both at CD Baby and afterwards, Sivers was able to create really unique and memorable experiences for his customers and the public at large — and to have a fantastic life in the process.
A large part of that? Adopting a single hard rule for decisionmaking.
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HYON
Sivers’s “Hell Yeah or No” rule got adopted by a lot of people — and I’ve yet to hear a single person regret adopting it.
As you become more successful, inevitably more opportunities appear. To continue really bringing exceptional performance and dedication to all of them, it becomes essential to think really carefully about project selection.
In the past at TSR, we’ve talked about how project selection is — counterintuitively — very much at the root of speed of execution and consistent outperformance.
Sivers’s test is a simple one — by only saying yes to opportunities he felt 10/10 excited by, and turning down things that he was only, say, 6/10 excited for, he freed himself up to bring his very best performance to those activities he did select.
Likewise, it’s never as much of a grind or slog to execute on opportunities you’re genuinely excited for — the hours pass faster and more enjoyably, require less downtime to decompress and recharge after, and result in less procrastination or aversion.
This of course is very logical and makes a lot of sense — but most people never think through how they could very simple rules like this in order to very much improve their decisionmaking.
Let’s look at some specific cases, and then learn general best practices for setting hugely beneficial hard rules in one’s life.
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CLIENT STANDARDS
Everyone who is involved in any sort of client work — freelancing, contracting, or consulting — eventually sets client standards for themselves.
It’s pretty universally understood and agreed that bad clients wind up causing the vast majority of a freelancer’s stress and aggravation, and often end up costing money in the end.
You know the type — a client with an unclear spec or scope, who keeps changing the spec or scope, fails to turn things in on time, is disorganized, is discourteous, pays late or not at all, and is otherwise unpleasant to work with.
Everyone who freelances for more than a year or two eventually starts spotting the warning signs of bad clients and turning them down. This is a very sound business practice — and critical for one’s mental health and professional well-being, too.
But I think most freelancers, contractors, and consultants stop too soon.
I stopped taking new consulting clients a few years ago, and stopped consulting at all recently, but I still fondly remember the single best decision I ever made in consulting.
I thought about it some… bad clients cost more money than they’re worth and account for the vast majority of aggravation. That’s true. I’d already learned to spot and had stopped taking bad clients by this point.
But as I thought about it more, I realized that I had some clients that were just okay. There was nothing wrong with them. They didn’t cause any major problems. They were professional enough, courteous enough, and paid on time.
I thought about it and asked myself, what’s the next level up from this?
And then it hit me — what if I only worked with people I really admired?
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THE ADMIRATION TEST
It became my new rule — from then on, I was only going to work with people I tremendously admired on every level.
I’ll be honest — it was very hard, at first, to turn down lucrative work.
But very quickly — really, quicker than you’d think — the benefits started tremendously accruing.
Now, my test for admiration is a pretty strict one —
If I worked with this person intensely 10+ hours per day for 14+ days straight and I was taking 3 days off to go relax on the beach, would I want them to go with me rather than be alone?
I’m naturally a bit of an introvert anyways — the default is that I’d rather be alone with a book or a poem than be with another person anyways, let alone after a very intense stressful period together.
As I thought about formulating this rule, it made a lot of sense to me. If I only worked with someone that I’d be overjoyed to spend time with anyways, it would be a joy rather than a hassle to grab an off-scope breakfast, lunch, or dinner; catchup calls would be no sweat; I wouldn’t need to pay excessive attention to hours or manage my time and bandwidth particularly strictly.
Most people, of course, don’t pass this test. Even some very good people don’t pass this test.
But I gradually came to work more with people like Kai Zau — now my business partner at Ultraworking — who is just always a joy to be around, really a fantastic guy on every level.
I did some work that was straight from the depths of hell with Greg Nance — a great guy and really a champion on every level. There were a couple times where Nance and I put in 10+ intense hours together in downtown Shanghai, and then, instead of grabbing a taxi, took a long multi-hour walk back to Yangpu together for the heck of it.
Long after I’d more-or-less quit consulting, I was very happy to work with Angela Cheung on whatever came up — just an ace of a person, always bringing a mix of joyful creative ability and immense practical insight.
I really can’t stress just how beneficial this rule was to my own life, and I’d certainly encourage you to adopt it as soon as possible if you’re doing any sort of client work —
Worst: working with bad clients.
Okay: working with okay clients.
Best: only working with people you truly admire on every level.
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THE VALUE OF HARD RULES
As Whitehead put it,
“Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
Thinking is expensive. Hard rules serve to greatly reduce the amount of thinking needed.
When someone inquired about my availability for a consulting engagement, the first thing I would try to do is figure out if I incredibly admired them.
My test was —
If I worked with this person intensely 10+ hours per day for 14+ days straight and I was taking 3 days off to go relax on the beach, would I want them to go with me rather than be alone?
Sivers did that in regards to opportunities he was offered — speaking engagements, conferences, projects —
“When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” — then say “no.””
Hard rules greatly simplify decisionmaking. They serve to make a single first cut before needing to look at all the variables. If they’re carefully thought through and based in sound practice, they radically decrease the amount of time needed to make decisions, and lead to many more correct decisions.
This is obviously very valuable for project selection and client selection, but I think many domains are available for setting hard rules. Let’s look at a few rapidly before getting into general guidance.
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ANATHEMA AND NUTRITION
I personally think that rules like “eat healthy” or “eat clean” are hard to uphold — there’s a lot of subjectivity involved, and it’s easy to agonize over them.
You know what’s much easier?
“Never drink soda, ever.”
Over the last 10 years, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of permanently quitting a number of behaviors that are generally unhealthy without producing commensurate gains for their unhealthiness.
In particular, I found anathematizing certain things from consumption — ever — to be very useful. “Anathema” means “completely forbidden.”
I think people get into trouble because they set hard rules, because they make them too difficult to abide by and fail. When I started anathematizing certain foods, I did the opposite — I quit things I disliked first, while keeping the things I liked the most.
Here’s how my reasoning went — I never liked cookies or pastries very much. Some people do, and that’s fine. But in my case, I never really enjoyed them. I liked ice cream, ice cream was good, but I never liked cookies or pastries.
Sometimes, though, I’d find myself eating cookies just because they were around. I thought about this one day and said, “You know, that’s kind of stupid. Every single time I want something sweet, something calorically dense, or just some fat and carbs… I should eat ice cream instead of having cookies.”
So, a couple years ago, I quit cookies. Forever. I had a last cookie at a nice cookie shop, took a photograph of it, enjoyed it, and haven’t had a cookie since.
Was it hard?
Not at all.
Whenever I wanted sugar/calories/fat/carbs, I’d have ice cream.
Slowly — usually with months in between instances of it — I quit cookies, then pastries, then candy, then all forms of potato chips.
Was it hard?
Not at all.
Well, actually, once — I remember being out with Taylor Pearson in Austin and rather hungry after having nothing to eat all day and going swimming. We went to a Mexican restaurant with some really nice-looking tortilla chips. Holding off on those until my food came was hard.
But that was only once. That is, it wasn’t particularly hard.
All the while, I’d eat ice cream if I wanted to.
After quitting cookies, pastries, candy, and chips, I left it at that for around another year. Eventually I added bread to the list — that was a little bit hard, but not really. I had an excellent feast of some nice brown and white breads with olive oil, spices, and good cheese before I quit. I added pizza to the list shortly after.
Maybe I’ll never add anything else to the list, though I suspect I’ll eventually put the rest of simple flour on the chopping block (pancakes, waffles) and maybe all deep fried food too. Maybe all processed meats. We’ll see. I’m not in a hurry, it’s a long-term health project. I wanted to start it as easy as possible.
You see, a good hard rule doesn’t neglect your needs and is sustainable. I never once felt like I was sacrificing because I was forced to choose ice cream instead of cookies, pastries, candy, or chips. And that was enough for the first 18 months of the anathema project.
Eventually, things like candy became not food to me. When offered candy, the question wasn’t, “Uhhh, should I have this candy?” It was, “Nope, don’t want candy, thanks.” Again, I could go have ice cream if I wanted something sweet. And there’s almost always a convenience store nearby in a major city.
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CLEAN SEPARATION
If you thought about it some, you could clearly apply the anathema rules to all sorts of things.
Take media consumption — if you’re like most people, you probably have anywhere from 2 to 10 websites you go to waste time at.
What if you quit the ones you liked least? There’s easy way to block websites from being accessible at all on a computer — on a Mac, the app SelfControl works wonders, and you can customize it to block websites for up to 30 days.
On an iPhone, it used to be harder, but you can use an adblocker like 1Block, pay the upgrade fee, and add individual websites to your block list. Android users have it a little easier, Android phones are easier to customize.
But what if you had some behavior you really liked to do sometimes, but which you sometimes blended very poorly into your work?
Hard Rules around a clean separation might be of value to you. When I was traveling less, I had a work computer and a play computer — I forget where I got this concept from, I know it was somewhere on Hacker News but I forget who I originally learned it from to credit them.
But the idea is pretty simple — have two computers. Do all your leisure activities on one of them, and only work activities on the other one.
When I went to my play computer, I’d always do it on the sofa instead of at my desk. When I upgraded laptops I made the old one my play computer — and I knew that whenever I was on that machine on the sofa, I wasn’t working. To procrastinate, I’d have to get up from my desk and go play games or surf the web on the sofa. Worked wonders. Procrastination went down immensely.
I kept thinking on how I could apply this when traveling, and eventually I hit on the idea of going to a gaming cafe when I wanted to. So again, I said I was free to go as much as I wanted, and I’d surf the web, check sports scores, or play a shooter game at the internet cafe. I wasn’t allowed to do that on my core work computer — it was only for working — but I could call it a day and head to the internet cafe whenever I pleased.
Now what this is doing, if you think about it, is it’s removing the inner mental battle of, “Uhh, have I worked enough? I want to take a break and screw off a little, but I shouldn’t, but I want to, but I shouldn’t…”
When you adopt clean separation type rules, all that agonizing goes away. At some point you decide to call it quits for the day or to take a long break at the internet cafe. If you’re not doing that, take a nap or make a snack or just keep working. But it turns a bunch of individual minute-by-minute agonizing-type-thinking into a single decision. “Do I want to go the internet cafe now?”
Clean separation rules work wonders.
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MOST PEOPLE DON’T HAVE EXPLICIT CRITERIA FOR WHAT THEY WANT
Thinking is, no doubt, expensive.
But there’s two things you could do with that knowledge.
The first is that you could not think very much at all, and accept whatever happens more-or-less randomly in the course of your life.
You could work at whatever job you get an offer at conveniently, take whatever clients want to pay you, say yes to any opportunity offered you, eat any food that happens to be around, be distracted by whatever is best able to capture your attention, and read whatever is currently being marketed or spreading through of current-day word of mouth.
That’s what most people seem to do.
Or you could sit and carefully think through things once, and establish rules for yourself that will lead to you getting the most out of your life.
The latter approach, believe it or not, actually requires less thinking overall. You only need to think hard about a particular domain or set of decisions a few times, draw out the essential common elements, and figure out what really matters to you.
That’s the first element of setting hard rules.
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WORKING TOWARDS HARD RULES
You could use soft rules, too — “try to eat healthy” — but in my experience, hard rules are much easier to abide by. It’s a lot easier to “never eat candy” than to “try to eat healthy.” With a hard rule, you know if you’re following it or if you’re not.
The value of a hard rule is that it’s not negotiable or debatable, which means the decision is made for you automatically. You should consider working towards them in any domain that has a significant impact on your life.
But with a couple notes of caution.
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GUIDANCE: HARD RULES SHOULD BE EASY TO FOLLOW
The “hard” in hard rules doesn’t refer to difficulty — it refers to concreteness and lack of ambiguity.
People get into trouble by trying to apply hard rules to quit whatever their favorite unhealthy behavior is, without thinking through what their needs are.
If your favorite junk food to eat is donuts, you shouldn’t start by quitting donuts. Just the opposite. Quit donuts last, if at all.
Good hard rules should result in you getting more of the behavior and decisions that lead to a great life. You don’t turn down mediocre freelancing work that you don’t believe in because you want less income; you turn down mediocre work you don’t believe in so that you can work on things you very much believe in and then you do exceptional work there. Done correctly and at the appropriate time in your life, it typically results in more income.
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GUIDANCE: GENERALIZED SKILLS
As we discussed back in Background Ops #1: Strict Limit, there’s general skills that are worth building.
I believe there’s something like a “generalized skill at quitting things” — really, it’s hard to quit things. Things are more addictive than ever.
Quitting some activity or behavior, even if it’s not serving you well, is a skill. It’s not easy or automatic. It’s useful to respect these general skills — you want to build up the “generalized skill at quitting things” on things that are relatively easy.
I didn’t mind quitting bread at all — I never really liked bread all that much, and felt worse after I ate it. But I didn’t tackle bread until I’d gone multiple years quitting things that I ate less often than bread. I added a bunch of healthier foods to the diet slowly and made sure I could conveniently get enough calories.
I only quit bread after I was relatively certain I could do so without failure or massive inconvenience — likewise, if you’re freelancing and trying to stay above water, you might want to first cut bad clients and improve your standards and output of work performance before trying to adopt an “only clients I really admire” standard. There’s actually some vetting skills, communicating skills, and starting-a-project skills that need to be acquired over time, and quitting bad clients is more critically important and urgent than only working with people you have maximum admiration for.
Life is, in some respects, very long. It might take a few years to gradually build your ability to scale back bad behaviors, install relevant alternative behaviors, improve your communication skills, self-management skills, and ability to design your environment and behavior over time.
It’s a process and it takes a while to get the generalized skills down. It’s not to be underestimated. It can be done slowly, and there’s no harm in doing it slowly.
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GUIDANCE: STUDYING ONESELF AND ONE’S NEEDS
Finally, if you’re considering adopting hard rules, you should really sit and figure out what needs a given behavior is meeting. There’s fairly a lot of people who eat junk food because they simply don’t eat enough volume of food and aren’t getting enough calories in general.
Particularly “clean” foods with a lot of fiber and protein are much more filling than simple carbohydrates or fats. Some people with naturally low appetites might find it hard to eat enough calories if they’re getting rid of junk — you’ll want to study yourself and understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. You might need to liberally add butter or olive oil to healthy dishes you make, or eat a calorie-dense food like avocados if you’re scaling back on simple carbs or deep-fried foods.
We all need, to some extent, leisure, relaxation, and recharging of various sorts. We might benefit at times from passive forms of consumption or entertainment. You should really honestly and open-mindedly explore why you’ve done whatever behaviors and analyze what needs those might have met. If you have an underlying need that you don’t meet in any way, the pull back towards unhealthy behaviors can be very strong.
Video games, in particular, can be addictive because they have very nice behavior loops with incremental mastery, constant rewards, and can easily scale to your skill as a player — the most popular video games have a much nicer shape of feedback loops than most real-world activities. If you were trying to quit video games, you might ask yourself where the sense of mastery and rapid rewards are going to come from — plenty of ex-gamers get addicted (in a positive sense) to something like quantitative marketing and business building, which also has nice feedback loops once you’re over some threshold of mastery. But if games are the only activity in your life where you get nice feedback loops of mastery and control, it might be difficult to quit them.
The desire for behaviors that require, demonstrate, and reinforce mastery, promote a sense of control, and generate flow state — these aren’t unhealthy things. If they particularly call to you, you’ll want to replace them as part of designing out your hard rules. Hard rules shouldn’t deprive you of getting a core physical or intellectual need met, but should rather ensure you get those met in healthier and more life-affirming ways for you.
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PUTTING IT INTO ACTION
Most of Background Ops takes some concerted effort to study and master. The process of really understanding training and building an excellent training base, this takes a while and most people recognize it.
Hard rules, like lots of operations, are both easy and difficult. The easy part is easy — you think your behavior and codify a hard rule for yourself, and then always follow it.
But it’s difficult, too, because human behavior is complex. To that end, I would recommend you —
1. Start thinking through why you do everything you do.
2. Gradually look to understand what needs a given activity is meeting.
3. Develop criteria for how you’ll meet those needs slowly, over time.
4. Build generalized skills like environment design, “the general skill of quitting things”, and introspection as to your motives on why you select activities.
5. Carefully select “hard rules” that make decisions for you automatically that are maximally healthy and life-affirming.
6. Ensure your hard rules are easy to follow. Don’t jump in too deep too fast.
Or, heck, just quit something. What junk food do you like least? Never again. Clean separation is a gem too — work computer and play computer.
Maybe it’s complicated or maybe it’s simple. Either way, installing carefully thought-through hard rules can certainly radically simplify decisionmaking and lead to much better and more life-affirming decisions across the board.
Next week, as promised, we’ll cover Creative Processes — from the Background Ops perspective. Until then, yours,
Sebastian Marshall
Editor, TheStrategicReview.net
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