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A Brief Sketch of My Principles

Given the importance of my personal philosophy to this blog, I want to provide a brief sketch of the broad principles that guide my life and how I think about them. Shaped by years of experience and reflection, these principles are organized using the ascending pyramid structure exemplified by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

The foundation of my philosophy is health optimization, which I break down into five essential pillars. These pillars work synergistically to provide the individual with the highest attainment of cognitive and physical health. Moreover, they provide the basis from which all higher needs can be pursued. The five pillars are as follows: sleep, nutrition, exercise, environment, and stress. In later entries I will go into detail about why I believe these are the most critical for health optimization. For now, I’ll simply state firmly that experience has taught me that when an area of my life isn’t going according to plan, I can usually trace it back to a deficiency in at least one of the five pillars.

Beyond the five pillars comes an individual’s sense of purpose and meaning. I would not scoff at one who grants a sense of purpose higher status than health optimization. Ultimately this is a case of the chicken and the egg. But all else equal, my sense of purpose and meaning has always felt more cemented when my health was at its most optimized. This sense of purpose is, for me, realized through two ongoing processes: enjoyment and self-improvement in one’s profession as well as belongingness to the community, with particular emphasis on the family unit.

The final tier of my hierarchy is the same as Maslow’s, appropriately referred to as self-actualization. This is the point at which the individual achieves their highest potential. While this could easily be defined differently depending on how one perceives self-actualization, I view it simply as the point at which there is little more they could do to improve upon their present circumstances. I do not in any way mean this in a hopeless sense, but rather as an accomplishment. Anyone with appropriate mental models exercised properly can reach this point (assuming the aforementioned five pillars and sense of purpose have been met). 

And there you have it. This is but the bare bones of the philosophy that governs my life, but I hope the reader understands in broad terms the conditions I believe are to be met to live a great life. In the end, is that not what we all strive for?

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