The Creed on One Page

Two versions. The left is what I said for fifteen years. The right is what survived being checked. Both are in use: the short form starts a conversation, the long form finishes one, and quoting the short form is a claim that the long form's conditions hold.

1. One cannot act upon that which has not been defined.
2. Define every variable to its deepest identifiable condition.
3. Don't make the specific unnecessarily vague.
4. The more we standardize the variables and reduce ambiguity, the less complicated things become.
5. Do the same thing the same way every time and you'll get a consistent result.
6. Almost everything in life can be reduced to a quantifiable formula. When X happens then the user does Y. If A = B, then C = D.
7. If it lives in your head, it should live in the "system."
8. We shouldn't PULL information, we should PUSH information.
9. An efficient system minimizes the amount of user input while maximizing the amount of automated output.
10. The more we reduce life's decisions to quantifiable formulas, the more automated we can make the simple tasks — freeing the human mind for true, ambitious deep thinking.
11. Where a data-based decision will not produce a genuinely better result, leave it manual.
12. Identify your bias, then set it aside.

1. One cannot act together upon that which has not been defined outside of somebody's head. One person, acting alone on a problem they have seen a thousand times, can and should.
2. Define every variable to the depth at which further decomposition would no longer change what anyone does with it. That depth is set by the decision, not by the variable, and it moves when the decisions move.
3. Don't make the specific unnecessarily vague, where you know the specific, the reader needs it, and no second reading is wanted. Records of fact, not statements of value.
4. Where cause and effect are knowable, standardizing the variables and reducing ambiguity shrinks the number of situations anyone has to understand, and makes deviation visible. Where cause and effect are clear only in retrospect, it suppresses the variation that is the only instrument you have. Every standard needs a path for the case that does not fit, and the rate at which that path is used is the measurement that matters.

5. Do the same thing the same way every time and you will get a predictable distribution, not an identical result. The spread that remains is the process, and it is a measurement rather than a failure. Change the way deliberately, as a designed act, and never let it change any other way.
6. Almost everything in life can be reduced to a quantifiable formula, where the conditions are observable, the mapping holds still, and nobody profits by manufacturing the trigger.

7. If it lives in your head, it should leave a trace outside your head: written where the knowledge is explicit and merely unrecorded, recorded as a demonstration where it can be shown but not told, and handed to a successor in person where it can be neither. The system holds the trace, not the knowledge.
8. Nobody should have to already know that a fact exists in order to receive it. So push what changes an action, to the one person whose action it changes, on a channel reserved for that kind of thing. Everything else is made findable, not sent. Attention is the budget, and every push spends it whether or not the push was worth making.
9. An efficient system minimizes the amount of user input while maximizing the amount of automated output, subject to two limits: it does not remove the contact a person needs to keep a working model of the situation, and it never presents a guess in the same form as a certainty. Where the system is inferring, it shows what it inferred and from what.

10. The more we reduce life's decisions to quantifiable formulas, the more automated we can make the simple tasks, and the more capacity is released. Where that capacity goes is a separate act, undertaken deliberately, defended against the many claimants who are better equipped than you to collect it. Released and unallocated, it goes to them. Directing it toward true, ambitious deep thinking is a choice about what a life is for, and I am making that choice rather than reporting a result.
11. Before leaving a decision manual, name what you know that is not in the data, specifically enough to be wrong about. Capture whatever can be captured. Leave manual only what remains, and say which reason applies: the information cannot be captured, or it could be and you value something more than the accuracy. Both are legitimate. They are not the same, and only the first is a claim about the world.

12. Identify your bias, then set it aside. Where you cannot set it aside, name its direction, so that the pattern of what you do and do not do is legible to somebody else.

13. Before changing how work is done, name what the current arrangement does for the people doing it, and count that as part of the design rather than as resistance to it.
14. A rule that governs a person should be readable by that person and reversible by them. Otherwise it is not a formula they installed. It is a condition they live in.

If the fourteen have to collapse to one, it is not any of them. It is the thing all of them turned out to require:

2.0, 2026. Eleven of twelve narrowed. Nine gained a domain condition, six an ongoing cost, three an obligation toward the person the rule acts on. Rule 8 rewritten rather than narrowed. Rule 5 had its central promise withdrawn. Rules 13 and 14 added, from the sociotechnical systems literature and from the observation that the method is indifferent to whose interest it serves. Nothing was abandoned.