Why I Spent a Year Writing 365 Principles for Human Flourishing in the Age of AI
On January 1, 2023, as the world was just beginning to buzz with a mixture of awe and trepidation about new Generative AI tools, I embarked on a seemingly unrelated, deeply personal project: to articulate one core principle for human flourishing a day for an entire year.
For two decades, I’ve read and taken extensive notes on about a hundred books a year, a self-imposed curriculum spanning cognitive science, decision-making, systems thinking, strategy, psychology, habit formation, and ancient philosophy. This was my effort to build what Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s brilliant partner, called a "latticework of mental models."
Munger's core idea is that to truly understand our complex world, one cannot rely on a single discipline. As Julian Huxley said, "life is just one damn relatedness after another." To grasp this interconnectedness, one must acquire the big ideas from many different fields. These models form a mental "latticework" for gathering, processing, and acting on information.
Then came Generative AI. The immediate temptation for some is to see this as an off-ramp from the hard work of deep learning. "Why read so much," one might wonder, "when an AI can just give me the summary?"
My year-long project revealed the opposite. In the age of AI, deep, broad, and continuous learning is the very foundation of our ability to lead, not be led by, these powerful new tools. As Munger famously said, "In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time—none, zero.” AI is an amplifier; what it amplifies most effectively is the quality of the human mind directing it.
But why did this act of documenting key principles seem to matter more than ever?
We all operate with an internal set of rules and mental models. When these remain implicit, they are often inconsistent and unexamined. The act of articulating principles transforms a vague internal sense into a dynamic tool for thinking and flourishing.
Principles Orient Self-Reflection (The Clarity Compass): Keeping a list of principles orients us to exemplars for reflecting on our behaviors, enabling an ongoing process for updating our "autopilot" as we learn.
Principles Externalize Memory (The Cognitive Load Lifter): Writing principles down creates an external, reliable "hard drive" for your operational wisdom. This strategic offloading of cognitive load frees your mental bandwidth to focus on the novel aspects of a challenge.
Principles Bridge Theory and Practice (The Intuition Builder): A principle's true value is unlocked only when it is put into practice. This cycle of application and reflection transforms a principle from a dry statement into a deeply ingrained, intuitive pattern recognition. Principles without the experience of their implementation are merely trivia.
Principles Are the Highest Form of Information (The Distilled Wisdom Engine): In a world of noise, principles are the signal, the highest, most distilled form of personal information.
Principles are Not the World (The Map is Not the Territory): A principle is a map, not the territory. It’s an approximation of reality, learned only to be unlearned and refined through experiment.
From Personal Project to a Framework for the AI Age
What began on January 1, 2023, as a personal project soon took on a new urgency. As AI's capabilities grew, I realized that the principles I was collecting were not just a personal latticework of mental models; they were the essential diagnostic tools needed to navigate this new technological landscape. The project evolved, becoming what it is now: Principles for Human Flourishing in the Age of AI.
This evolution led directly to the development of my own framework for Generative Work that I write about on my blog today. It emerged at the very intersection where my established principles met the new reality of AI. An understanding of cognitive load revealed the danger of outsourcing, deliberate practice warned of skill atrophy, and decision-making in complex situations highlighted the risk of using AI without reflection. The broad collection of principles for flourishing provided the foundation, the worldview, that informed the creation of the more specific principles for working with AI.
How Your Practical, Battle-Tested Knowledge Becomes a Superpower with AI
This deep, principled knowledge, born from relentless reading and the deliberate practice of applying it, becomes a superpower when working with AI in four key ways:
Intelligent Interrogation: A shallow understanding leads to basic prompts. A deep knowledge allows you to engage AI in a far more sophisticated dialogue, pushing it beyond its default responses.
Synthesizing Across Silos: A human mind steeped in diverse principles can provide the cross-domain wisdom to connect and apply information meaningfully.
Discerning Quality and Identifying Blind Spots: Your deep reading makes you acutely aware of what is known, what is unknown, and what is simply nonsense. This is crucial for managing an AI that can generate confident-sounding falsehoods.
Fueling Deliberate Practice: Your learning identifies the frontiers of your understanding. You can then use AI as a powerful partner to create practice scenarios and accelerate the refinement of your own principles.
The Uncomfortable Truth: No Shortcut to Wisdom
The allure of AI is its apparent effortlessness. But as Munger and Buffett’s legendary commitment to reading demonstrates, there is no shortcut to genuine understanding. AI can augment our abilities, but it cannot replace the deep, often challenging, work of acquiring and synthesizing knowledge ourselves.
The message is not to read less because AI is here. It’s to read more, read wider, and read deeper. Build your own latticework. Forge your own principles. Because in the age of AI, the depth of your human knowledge, and your ability to lead with it, will be your most distinguishing and powerful asset.
Reading and distilling wisdom into core principles in natural language is becoming the entry fee for effective AI partnership. The AI can access a universe of data. But you, armed with your uniquely human, experience-forged, and clearly-articulated principles, are the one who must provide the wisdom.
Start small. What’s one principle from your own latticework that you can consciously put to the test today? How might acting on that single, clear principle sharpen your next interaction, whether with a human colleague or your new AI partner?
