Truck Tenets is a series I've been wanting to do for a while. Like, a while — I've got draft posts dating back to 2016. It's only by my sheer inability to see anything through to completion that none of them have seen the light of day…until now.

The idea behind the series is pretty straightforward: there are ideas that I live my life by, why not talk about them? Some are high-level and abstract, like "Less is more", and others are more concrete, like "Don't eat gas station sushi in land-locked countries"*. Some of them come directly from my experiences with the truck, and others just as a matter of living and doing Normal Human Things™.

Talking about these things isn't particularly new for me. Even when I'm not talking directly about what I believe in, the ideas that motivate my decisions are there, lurking in pithy asides and footnotes and implied subtexts.

I'm not going to pretend that the concept of having 'guiding principles' is even remotely novel or exciting, it comes up in one form or another in pretty much every one of the self-help-life-hack-be-better books I've ever read. Some examples:

From Atomic Habits:

Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity. What you do is an indication of the type of person you believe that you are—either consciously or nonconsciously.

From Getting Things Done:

Priorities should drive your choices [...]. In order to know what your priorities are, you have to know what your work is.

[...]

Horizon 5: Purpose and Principles This is the big-picture view. [...] Why do you exist? What really matters to you, no matter what? The primary purpose for anything provides the core definition of what the work really is. It is the ultimate job description. All goals, visions, objectives, projects, and actions derive from this, and lead toward it.

And naturally, from Principles:

Every day, each of us is faced with a blizzard of situations we must respond to. Without principles we would be forced to react to all the things life throws at us individually, as if we were experiencing each of them for the first time. If instead we classify these situations into types and have good principles for dealing with them, we will make better decisions more quickly and have better lives as a result.

Though really any section from Principles would work - it's quite literally what the book is about.

Anyway, all I'm trying to say is that I recognize I'm not covering any new ground here. After all, the idea is pretty intuitive: making plans and decisions is a lot easier when you have a consistent system for evaluating them.

Despite this, it's painfully clear that plenty of people haven't the slightest idea what principles are guiding their decisions. I see this in friends, family, coworkers, acquaintances, customer support folks I've had heart-to-hearts with, and cute pups at the local dog park - inconsistencies in decision-making because one doesn't have a clear idea of what's really important to them.

Now, I'm not going talk concretely about what my 'Truck Tenets' are in this post, since each subsequent ramblefest will tackle a different tenet. I will say that I think this is a particularly good time for me to be writing them though; being divorced from the truck for the past few months has given me new perspectives on where certain ideals of mine have come from.

*This last one isn't all that relevant, since I haven't had any seafood in three or so years.