Joe’s most emphatic point about principles: the power is in the process, not the product. He attributes to Steve Jobs the principle of “wrestle with your principles” — the job is to continually experiment, test, and refine them. When people fail with principles, it’s almost always because they stop experimenting. They declare their principles and then forget them within three years.
The daily practice looks like this: pick one principle, run an experiment, notice what happened. Share what you learned. Run two or three experiments a day. No principle will feel great 100% of the time — Ray Dalio’s transparency principle surely lost them money or a good person at some point. The point isn’t perfection but ongoing relationship with the principle, constantly discovering what it means in new contexts.
Joe’s own “wonder” principle evolved from “what are you curious about right now?” to “what’s the question?” to simply “wonder!” — each iteration getting closer to the essence. That evolution only happened through years of daily experimentation.
“The power of having principles is less about the principles you have and more about the process.”
“It’s a process of learning. It is not a process of knowing.”
Related Concepts
- Experiments make knowledge embodied
- We are always running experiments
- Principles drive action; values describe morality
- Principles automate decision-making into effortless choices
- Principles in organizations must emerge bottom-up through shared experimentation