Principles on Today Purpose

Ten steps to a happier life

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ten practical shifts from Pieter Hintjens — founder of the ZeroMQ project — for becoming happier and making the people around you happier too. No money or magic required, just a change in how you see the world, yourself, and others: “Happiness… comes from your own actions” (the 14th Dalai Lama).

1. Invest in your senses

Feed body and mind well — cook your own food and make it taste good. Notice beauty on purpose: photograph what strikes you, play music that moves you, wear clothes that feel good, walk the city at night in the rain. Texture, not just achievement, is part of a good life.

Luck & compounding

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Luck looks random from the outside, but you can systematically make more of it. The mechanism is compounding: start many small things early, and some of them pay off in ways you couldn’t have planned.

The luck chain

Justin Kan traced his success back through a long chain of “I was lucky that…” — lucky where he was born, lucky about a neighbor who became his cofounder, lucky about a forwarded email the day before a deadline (Luck). Each link looks like chance; the pattern is that he kept putting himself in the path of opportunities.

Win the life game

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A compact set of life-operating principles I keep returning to. The unifying idea: the scarce resource is time, so bias hard toward meaning and toward acting now.

The three rules

Win the life game (Graham Weaver, life principles):

Play the game that stirs your blood — do what you love.
Play with people you admire — choose who you spend your life around.
Play the game now — the worst answer is “not now” (so when?).

These three are the external game. Weaver’s own later talk argues the external game is only half of it and that the half most people skip is the interior one — see win without crushing your soul.