Strong, good, & free

4/17/2025

I am imperfect and often fail to embody these values as well as I would like. But I strive to. And sharing them publicly has helped me cement them into my identity more deeply, and feel a healthy pressure to live up to them.

I think taking a principled approach to life leads to a more satisfying and fulfilling existence.

The challenge is, there are an infinite amount of reasonable-sounding principles. And the whole point of having principles in the first place is to reduce cognitive load when confronted with the many decisions you must make in life, to improve your likelihood of making good ones.

Therefore, I believe there's merit in defining just three - the most foundational and generally applicable. This makes them easier to remember and live by.

After some thought, I believe the following are those three. They cover the most ground and feel the most right to me.

Note: If I were to re-write this today, it might be "Strong, loving, & free." They manifest similarly, but I think love is upstream of being 'good.'

To be strong

Physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Strength is the ability to overcome and persist against resistance.

What strength looks like

Physical strength is the most obvious and intuitive. Is your body healthy? What is your body fat percentage? Can you lift heavy things? Can you run for miles?

Emotional strength is less visible. It's the ability to remain calm and stable in the presence of strong, often painful emotions. Fear, sadness, anger, shame, insecurity, overwhelm. When things go wrong, and the pressure is on, and your emotional state is red-lining, are you able to experience that painful emotion and yet stay present and focused on the task at hand? Do you remain effective despite your body's heightened state?

Emotional strength is not an absence of emotion. Mike Tyson is an icon of mental toughness. He was one of the most brutal and destructive fighters in boxing history. And he, famously, used to cry before each of his fights. Tyson was an incredibly emotional person. And yet, he consistently showed up and executed on his job - despite his intense, seemingly disabling emotion. In fact, when you watch interviews of professional fighters, almost all of them say they experience intense emotions before fights. But they remain focused and operate effectively despite their internal condition. To me, that is the essence of emotional strength.

Imagine a ship - holding its course, cruising calmly through a vicious storm, with 50 foot tall waves crashing over it. The ship feels the pain. The boards start to become loose. The deck is taking on water. But the ship knows its job, and continues to sail.

And finally, spiritual strength. I view this as your ability to sit down, alone, in a quiet room, and experience your thoughts. It's your ability to know, with clarity, who you are, what you value, and what your purpose is on this planet. Questions that have no absolute answers, and can thus be painful to explore. Religion may give you a head start, but only you can ultimately answer them, and it is a very hard thing to do. Many people live in a way to avoid these questions at all costs - because they are painful.

How to cultivate strength

Strength can only form where there is resistance. Therefore, in order to cultivate it, you must invite and embrace resistance in your life.

The correlation is almost perfect. The more pain/discomfort you experience, the more strength you will develop.

The mind and body are very good at adapting to the load you place on them. In sports and fitness, there is a concept called "progressive overload." It's the idea that to most efficiently trigger the body's adaptation process, you should incrementally increase the load placed on it, little by little, over an extended period of time.

Thus, cultivating physical strength is simple - put strain on your body, and increase that amount of strain incrementally over time. This causes small, managable amounts of damage to your body, and activates your body's natural system of repair and adaptation.

The same holds true for the mind. To cultivate emotional strength, the strategy is the same, regularly introduce and embrace emotional strain. Over time, your mind will adapt in much the same way that your body does, naturally making you a stronger person.

To become spiritually strong, you must regularly confront the hard and painful questions of life, and define answers for yourself, with no evidence they are correct. Who are you? What are your values? What is your purpose? Are you failing? Why do you behave the way you do? Are you a good parent? Spouse? Boss? Are you fulfilling your duties to the best of your ability? Are you the cause of pain in others? Could you do better? Was it your fault?

Cultivating spiritual strength may be more difficult than the other two types of strength combined. You will experience pain of a quality that is less tangible than the others, and yet somehow, more destabilizing and uncomfortable to experience. You will be forced to take a sober look at yourself and your life, and see yourself for exactly who you are. Perhaps the ultimate test of strength is one's ability to face the man or woman in the mirror.

To be good

"Good" can't be universally defined. It's something that you have to figure out for yourself. If you subscribe to a religion, then it may already be defined for you - great, you have a head start. But I think it is important to sit down and thoughtfully define what good looks like to you, personally.

To me, the best definition of what it means to be good is: improving the condition of others, with no ulterior motives or expectations in return.

And to take it a step further, I think it means doing that consistently, including while it is inconvenient, and comes at a personal cost to you.

Goodness, to me, is roughly a synonym to love.

Nice != Good

Niceness is a poor proxy for goodness. They look similar, but underlying intention is the distinction. Where does the niceness come from?

Niceness is merely a way of engaging with other humans. There are endless reasons for why you might behave nicely. And, it is often used as a strategy, whether consciously or unconsciously, to achieve some end.

You might behave nicely because it is culturally expected. You may do it out of habit. You may do it out of weakness — fear of the interpersonal repercussions of not being nice. You may do it out of selfishness, for personal gain, to gain the approval of others, to gain influence, to be awarded some promotion, to fit in, to manipulate others into giving you what you want... and the list goes on.

Strength is required

To be good, you must be strong.

Strength is a fundamental dependency of being good. If you define goodness as your ability to serve and support other people, then it is your moral obligation to develop strength so that you are able to serve, support, and protect others effectively - especially those who are vulnerable and unable to help themselves.

Imagine a firefighter, storming into a burning building, to save a child trapped on the third floor. This might be the ultimate symbol of what true goodness looks like. It's an act that requires tremendous strength - emotionally, physically, and spiritually - and comes at the ultimate personal cost to the man or woman charging in. Entering a burning building means you've accepted the potential of your own very painful death. You've accepted the possibility that you may never go home to see and embrace your loved ones again. And despite those mortal risks, you step into the flames.

Life doesn't always present such dramatic opportunities for heroism. But it presents lots and lots of small ones. And the stronger you are, the more good you can do.

I don't think this means neglecting yourself, or valuing yourself below others. In fact, the opposite is true. The more deeply you value yourself, the stronger you will become, the more competency you will develop, the more resources you will acquire, the more bandwidth you will have, and ultimately, the more fit you will be to serve others and do good.

You must "fill your own cup" before you can serve others.

Are you good?

How often do you strive to positively impact others? And do you do so consistently, including while it is inconvenient and will bring no personal benefit in return? (Aside from, perhaps, the intrinsic satisfaction of knowing you are doing good.)

Corollary: Being used is an expected cost of love

If you strive to serve others, you will, in fact, be used. You'll be taken advantage of. Others will exploit your loving nature for their benefit.

And... that's ok.

It is an expected cost. Smile, move on, and, crucially, continue exposing yourself to this risk, regardless of its inevitability. Being loving, and doing good always accepts personal cost. And this is just one such cost that you, a generous and loving person, will pay time and time again. C'est la vie.

To be free

Freedom to:

Spend your time as you wish
With the people you choose
In a place that you love
Doing worthwhile things

Why freedom?

This one feels more variable than the others, in the sense that it is heavily dependant on your personality and values.

For me, there is something that feels deeply, viscerally important about it. When I was a kid, whenever an adult would ask what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was "financially independent."

I think this came from observing lots of adults who were unhappy with their lives, because they weren't truly living their own. They were simply filling a role in someone else's masterplan. A cog in the wheel.

The reality is, unless a super intelligent AI solves the problem of human aging and mortality within the next ~50 years, if you are reading this, you are going to die. And that means you have a finite amount of time to embrace and experience this weird experiment you've been involuntarily signed up for.

I don't know if I will be here for 30 years or 100. But I'd like to experience however much time I have left as fully and deeply as possible while I am.

Attaining freedom

The key to attaining freedom is in carefully defining what you want.

Most 'wants' are universally shared among most people. Time, money, and the things they can be traded for, are universally valued resources, and are therefore difficult to acquire.

They exist in marketplaces, with bidders and sellers, where you must outbid the competition to obtain the desired resource. In other words, you must overpay relative to what everyone else is in the market is willing to pay.

Corollary: Overpaying requires strength

Overpaying is painful. It may look like:

Working long hours
Spending less time with the people you love, doing the things you love
Taking risk & accepting the emotional discomfort of uncertainty - will your efforts ever pay off?
Accepting the possibility of failure and all of its social, emotional, and material repercussions

Strength, once again, is a core dependency.

Choose wisely.

The life you choose to desire will dictate how you spend your time. And your time is the only resource of any fundamental value that you will ever possess. Choose very carefully.

Strong, good, and free

They aren't absolutes. Each is a personal journey. You can always be stronger, more good, and more free than you are today.

The point isn't perfection, but direction.

To be human is to be imperfect — and it's the imperfection that gives life purpose. It gives you a path forward; the opportunity to strive to improve each day.