Rule Over Self Book
During my time in graduate school at Harvard, I wrote down a series of private reflections and reminders outlining my philosophy for turning thought into action and becoming a better thinker.
The way we think determines our reality, and as such, many of us are trapped in our own thought prisons. Our enemy is within - in how we think, how we act based on those thoughts, and in how we perceive ourselves and our abilities.
As Albert Einstein put it nearly one hundred years ago: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” The way we think can make us or it can break us. Rule Over Self takes you on a three-part journey of learning, thinking and action.
LEARNING. Unlocks mental models to see the world with new eyes and shows how to understand yourself at a deeper level.
THINKING. Develops more structured ways of thinking and learn how to think about thinking.
ACTION. Turns thoughts into action and unlocks the keys to transform your ideas into reality.
I have open sourced the book that means it is available for free to the public.
Rule Over Self: Prologue
After his native country, Syria, was reduced to a Roman providence, Publius Syrus was forced to move to Rome at the young age of twelve. Passing his early life in slavery, he understood better than anyone else what freedom meant, and there was nothing he craved more than liberty. Despite his circumstances, he was determined to carve out a different futu…
Rule Over Self: Introduction
Imagine a group of people imprisoned in a cave since childhood. With no knowledge of the outside world, the only things they see are shadows of objects projected by the light from a fire outside the cave. The reality for those prisoners is a construction, based solely on the shadows they see and mistake to be real.
Rule Over Self: Part 1 — Learning
Learning is the prerequisite for thinking and doing. We grow because of our ability to learn. Somewhere along the way, however, we stop learning. Maybe it was in school because of the process of memorizing and repeating content that our teachers imposed on us. Maybe we didn’t understand something and fell behind. Maybe we are still learning, just not as …
Never Stop Learning
Growing up in Massachusetts, Abigail Smith could not attend school until she was eleven due to chronic illnesses. Although she lacked a formal education, her mother and grandmother instilled in her the trait of a lifelong learner. She studied subjects such as French and Shakespearean literature, John Milton’s works, and everything in her father’s librar…
Escape Your Prison
Virginia House of Burgesses, May 23rd, 1775 — one year before the Declaration of Independence: “It is in vain, sir … there is no peace,” he shouted, standing, one hand in the air. “The war has actually begun!” American attorney and orator Patrick Henry was enraged. Liberty was at stake as the British Crown increasingly interfered with the lives of the t…
Embrace Change
For the majority of world history, China was on equal footing with the Western world. The compass, papermaking, gunpowder, and printing all originated from China. Then China’s economy began to stagnate and decline compared to the rest of the globe. By 1913, the United States’ GDP per capita was ten times that of China. In 1978, with its economy on the b…
Adjust the Sail
It had always been the dream of Niccolò Machiavelli to be involved with politics. Italy at the time was composed of feudal and separate city-states. At the age of 29, his dream became real when he obtained a job with the Florentine republic. For the next fourteen years, while meeting and advising political leaders all over Europe during his diplomatic m…
Kindle Your Imagination
For most of its history, Europe had been in a state of war. World War II was the culmination of centuries of bloody warfare and destruction on the old continent. The two world wars had killed and displaced millions of people. At the end of the war, Europe was devastated, with shortages of food and raw materials and high unemployment.
Invest In Yourself
When Elon Musk was asked how he built SpaceX, the space exploration startup that aims to make humanity a multi-planetary species, his answer is two-fold: reading a lot of books and talking to a lot of people. “Once he has a goal, his next step is to learn as much about the topic at hand as possible from as many sources as possible,” revealed Jim Cantrell…
Level Up
Before the invention of the printing press, the process of copying a book by hand took a long time. Because of that, owning a book was an enormous privilege. To produce a book, someone had to painstakingly copy each individual word into a second book.
Examine Things Deeply
As emperor of the Roman Empire from the year 169 to 180, Marcus Aurelius sat down to write, every other day, for the rest of his life. Not for anyone else, but for himself. In a series of notes inspired by Stoic philosophy, he reflected on his challenges. He developed his personal operating system that he used to navigate his chaotic world. Although he …
Explore The World
Venetian-born merchant Marco Polo joined his family on their journey to China in 1271, and it was another 23 years before they returned. It was a long trip that impressed young Marco in a way that he would never forget. During his journey, he served as a personal aide to the mighty Kublai Khan, grandson of Mongol leader Genghis Khan. On his various miss…
See The Forest, Not The Trees
At the turn of the 19th century, the electric car was so popular that electricity powered more than one-third of all vehicles. William Morrison had built the first electric car in the United States in 1891. By 1897, New York taxis got electrified by the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company of Philadelphia.
Develop A Complete Mind
The value of art and science on its own is obvious to many people. It is less common to see artists that are also scientists or vice versa. Even if we have a bias toward one of those fields, we should not forget to neglect the other one. There are many insights to be gained by being both artist and scientist. But first, let’s examine the value of each o…
Discover Your Purpose
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Elon Musk knew early on in his life that he wanted to move to America in order to solve big societal issues. For him, the United States was the country where great things happened. After a brief stint studying in Canada, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied physics and business.
Rule Over Self: Learning Takeway
Learning is an integral part for our growth. There are many ways to learn to grow as a person and increase the scope of our worldview. It is encouraging to know that today with the internet, the possibilities of learning have increased dramatically. Yet this part only offers a glimpse as many more ways of learning that were not discussed here at length.
Rule Over Self: Part II — Thinking
Every day we have thousands of thoughts swirling in our head. Thinking plays an important part in our life. It can make us or it can break us. It can be challenging to maintain clarity amongst all those different thoughts and easy to fall prey to negative thought patterns and stay prisoners of our thoughts.
Watch Your Thoughts
When English political philosopher John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government in 1689, his work went unnoticed. He was unsatisfied, as the first edition contained many errors. He complained to his publishers, but even the second and third edition he was unhappy. His text was of importance! It discussed the basic principles of natural law, whic…
Think For Yourself
In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson published an essay that would inspire generations of thinkers to rely on themselves. In his essay entitled Self-Reliance, he encouraged his readers to trust their own voices instead of giving too much weight to the voices of others. “Trust thyself,” he exclaimed. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” What distinguished…
Simplify
“Bull,” a suite of eleven lithographs created by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso in 1945, has become a masterclass in how to simplify any artwork from the academic to the abstract. In his series, he visually dissects the image of a bull to discover its essence. The first image shows a realistic rendering of a bull, it growing more abstracted with every it…
Challenge Yourself
When Nicolaus Copernicus published De Revolutionibus in March 1543, after more than a decade of revisions, it challenged the widely held belief that the Earth stood at the center of the universe. Initially, it met with no resistance from the Catholic Church. The Church neglected it, but did not disagree with it. In 1616, however, after a wave of Protest…
Clear Your Mind
At a dinner party sometime in the 18th century, French philosopher Denis Diderot lost his train of thought. While engaged in a debate, he didn’t know how to respond to the topic at hand. Wrapped up in his thinking, he didn’t know what to say. Disappointed and defeated, he left the party. While walking downstairs, the retort suddenly came to him, but it …
Be Like Water
Long before Abraham Lincoln was appointed President, he battled with severe depression. “No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character,” said his colleague Henry Whitney, “was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy.” Someone described Lincoln as one of the most diffident and worst-plagued men. Lincoln used jokes as a way to ke…
Decide Positively
When Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, quit his job on Wall Street, his former boss asked him to go for a walk to rethink his decision. On a long walk in Central Park, he tried to persuade Bezos. Sadly for his boss, Bezos saw an opportunity that he could not refuse — what was happening on the internet was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Build Your Body
When Teddy Roosevelt grew up, he did not have the physical preconditions that would be indicative of his future success. He was nearsighted and had asthma. One day, his father told him, “Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. I am giving you the tools, but it is up…
Develop an Abundance Mindset
We used to live in a zero-sum, linear and local world. In our world of smartphones and connected devices, of constant updates and new versions, a world that is seemingly marching without respite toward greater complexity, it is difficult to imagine that old world and what it meant to live back then.
Choose Your Company Wisely
When Diogenes, one of the fathers of Cynic philosophy, lived in Athens, he criticized many cultural conventions of the city. He lived a simple life and criticized social values in the towns that he regarded as corrupt. He made it his life’s goal to criticize established customs. He lived a homeless life, having a habit of eating and sleeping wherever he…
Stay Humble
One year after the 2008 financial crisis, Queen Elizabeth II visited the London School of Economics to inquire about the origin of the crisis. Experts were worried that the crisis could lead to an economic depression worse than the Great Depression.
Think By Doing
As a student of philosophy under Karl Popper at the London School of Economics, investor George Soros was very contemplative. Thinking played an important part in his life, but he didn’t know yet how to direct his thinking, so he wasted a lot of time replaying certain ideas in his head.
Rule Over Self: Thinking Takeaway
Thinking, like breathing, is such an elementary part of our life that we rarely think about it. The plethora of questions that can be explored when it comes to thinking are endless. Now we can appreciate the power that thinking can have over our life and utilize the tactics we’ve learned to improve our thinking. Thinking amplifies our learning and actio…
Rule Over Self: Part III — Action
Action is how we apply our learning and thinking. Without it, our learning exists only in our mind, our ideas are merely wishes, and our learning only knowledge. We need to learn how to apply our learning and act on our thoughts. It is often that we create reasons why we can’t apply our learning and thinking. “I don’t have time,” “I would, but …” and the…
Take Initiative
“Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.” — William Hutchison Murray
Fight the Old Guard
Flight was one of humanity’s oldest aspirations. As one of the first people to think about how to turn that aspiration into reality, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out the logistics of flying in his notebooks. His drawings resembled a parachute or helicopter. Aristotle and Newton tried, but never figured out how to fly. Ancient Romans tested flying by attac…
Find Your Medium
In the 1860s, Claude Monet and his friends, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-August Renoir, and Paul Cézanne, were trying to sell their art. Broke and hungry for attention, they met every evening at the Café Guerbois in Paris, where they deliberated and discussed how to distribute their art. Their art was different, so different it didn’t fit into the…
Face Your Fears
When DeWitt Clinton and his team implemented its grid system in Manhattan, it was initially met with criticism for its monotony and rigidity. His plan required changes in how roads were funded and built. It also required a multigenerational commitment. The team surveyed the streets of Manhattan and decided to lay out the future streets in a gridlock, si…
Focus
At 90 years old, Jiro is not your typical restaurant owner. He is chef and owner of the Japanese restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro. Devoting himself to his craft for his entire life, he is considered one of the best sushi chefs in the world. Patrons from across the globe pay top dollar, reserving a seat months in advance, and travel thousands of miles just to…
Fail Forward
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeeded.” — Michael Jordan After his family was kicked out of their home, seven-year-old Abraham Lincoln needed to find work to support t…
Ying and Yang
Everyone understands the importance of routine and serendipity. However, it is the merging and balancing of the two that is important to grasp. In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang are seemingly opposite forces that are still complementary and interconnected. In the same vein, the balance of routine and serendipity are essential to being creative in your…
Figure Out What Is Needed
During the Great Depression, racing horse Seabiscuit had a tough time winning. Of his first seventeen races, he lost them all. As a frequent loser, the horse became a joke. Seabiscuit’s owner thought the horse was too lazy and focused on his other horses. Even after Seabiscuit began winning a few races, his owner was still not impressed. Eventually, he …
Create Opportunities
When English street artist Banksy observes the world, he pays attention. His works of political and social commentary stem from observing what is going on around the world and then seeing what other people do not. He displays his art on publicly visible surfaces, drawing what the public has yet to observe. His art is accessible and filled with wit and me…
Cultivate Patience
From Palermo to Paris, from Frankfurt to Budapest, 1848 went down as the most volatile series of political upheavals in European history. What began in Sicily as a political uprising in January of that year quickly spread to Naples, and merely one month passed by before people were fighting on the streets of Paris. The wave quickly spread to Munich and …
Leverage Your Resources
In December 1776, six months after the Declaration of Independence had been adopted, things were looking dire for General George Washington’s Continental Army. In fact, failure seemed just around the corner. As the underdog, the American army lacked guns, ammunition, and artillery. It lacked clothing, tents, blankets, and steel for bayonets.
Never Give Up
“We had about a week’s cash in the bank or less, and there was very little time in the year to resolve these things,” Elon Musk recounts, “I mean there were two or three business days left in the year.” Tesla Motors, the electric car company he co-founded, desperately needed funding to stay alive. After the financial crisis had cast a dark shadow over th…
Rule Over Self: Action Takeaway
Action is what makes learning and thinking possible. There are hundreds of potential obstacles that stand in our way. We cannot possibly know the solution to every obstacle in advance. What matters more is that we develop a mindset that primes us for action. We need to understand that with persistence, we can overcome every obstacle.
Rule Over Self: Epilogue
As a collection of ideas that were divided into three parts, it is important to appreciate every part on its own and the power it has to help us grow. If we improve on how we learn, think, and act, we are closer to unlocking our potential. We have learned the importance of learning, thinking, and doing, and the interconnectedness between the three when i…