Simple Rules To Go By.

I am at heart a simple guy.

You may not believe this, but it's true.

And as a simple guy, I live by simple rules; those rules guide MOST - not all - of my decisions. I go by those rules because they have a proven track record of success for me.

They may not work for you; your mileage may vary.

But I get asked more often than you'd think "How did you make that decision?" (in various ways) and so I decided to let you guys in on it.

So, here are my simple rules, with a bit of explanation for each.

• Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance. You can never plan for every eventuality - but you can TRY, and the more of a solid plan of action you have, before you do ANYTHING, the more likely you are to do well at it. If you want to go to a movie, the guy who knows how much tickets cost and what time the box office opens is more likely to get in than someone who doesn't know either and shows up after the movie starts.
  
• It's better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it. My wife hears this all the time. A surplus is always better than a deficit. Yeah, you may not need something, but once you have it you guarantee you won't come up short in a pinch. This applies to savings, to material goods, to whatever.
• There is no right way to do the wrong thing. This one's tough; sometimes the wrong thing is a hell of a lot easier than the right thing. But nobody ever promised it would be easy, and if you pick the lesser of two evils - like, say, in this election - the thing to remember is that you're still choosing an evil.
• Never replace a monumental fuckup with a different monumental fuckup just because it's different. "Change" in and of itself - despite what you hear from politicians (both candidates, for example) - in not necessarily the best course. The point is BENEFICIAL change - and it's on you to examine things and choose which change that is, for you.
• Opinions and friends are worth what you paid for them. If some stranger I don't know comes walking by me and says something personally insulting, I'm not going to be hurt, because that person doesn't know me; I have nothing invested in them. The opinions of a friend in whom I have invested years of relationship work mean far more to me, because I have put in tons of investment in that relationship, and they have done likewise. If someone who's known me for years, and expended tons of effort to maintain our relationship, tells me they're really pissed at me about something, it's time to take a serious step back and look at things. I may still disagree - but I WILL look to make sure.
  
• There's no such thing as a contradiction. If you hit one, check your premises - one of them is wrong. That's simple enough, hmmm?
• Question everything, even yourself - always. Because there's no such thing as too much double-checking - and you WILL - not might, WILL - find mistakes later on that you didn't see at all the first time you looked over something.
• Pick your battles - not the ones you "can" win, but those you SHOULD win. Sometimes you get in a situation where you could win a battle if you really want to, but it wouldn't really accomplish anything; and sometimes there's a battle that you couldn't win if you tried - but it's still worth fighting to the death over. It behooves you to know which is which.
• When in doubt, look it up. There's no shame in fact-checking yourself. You guys may have noticed - damn well should have if you read my blog regularly - that I often show up with platoons of facts and figures arrayed for your perusal; this is because rather than guess, rather than offer unsupported conjecture, I look it up - and then I KNOW. And Knowing Is Half The Battle, LOL.
• Make judgements based on facts; emotions lie. Your reason is your ability to understand the world. If you attempt to predicate your reason on emotion, it will fail, and you will find yourself on the losing end of many, many arguments. Facts don't lie; they simply exist, and basing your reason on what exists is the only solid ground you can have in this life.
  

There are others, but those are the biggies - and if you go by those rules, you will not often find yourself up shit creek with no paddle and a hole in your canoe. They can't cover EVERY situation - but if you think about them, you'd be surprised at how well they DO cover things; and that makes them useful.