Simple Rules summary

Say you want to lose some weight, and decide to do a little internet research. There’s a huge variety of popular diet programs to choose from. However, they’ve all got one thing in common: a whole stack of rules that seem just about impossible to remember. Just getting acquainted with one takes days. How likely are you to follow through?

The first big advantage is that Simple Rules come in small numbers, so they’re easy to remember and adhere to.

There are certain tasks that individuals can’t perform alone – it’s hard to imagine one person building the Pyramids! In times like these, individuals come together as groups to achieve outcomes they wouldn’t have achieved as individuals.

And it’s not just humans that need groupwork: the animal kingdom thrives on it too. Consider the Japanese honeybee. A single bee stands no chance against a fierce and gigantic hornet that approaches the hive. But together, the bees can defeat the intruder. They cluster together around the hornet and vibrate their wings so fast that the attacker dies from overheating. This is called “thermoballing.”

Now that we know what Simple Rules are and why they work, let’s consider the different types of Simple Rules. There are six of them in total. The first three are rules of thumb that help you make better decisions: boundary rules, prioritizing rules and stopping rules.

Boundary rules guide you if you have to make a typical yes-or-no decision. Imagine you’re a burglar: How do you decide whether to break into a house? Of course, you’ll want to go for an unoccupied house – but how can you tell?

After exploring the Simple Rules that help us make the right decisions, we’ll now consider the three rules that can help you do things better.

It starts with how-to rules. Their most important feature is that they’re not too prescriptive, leaving ample space for creativity. Take, for example, sports commentators. In the early days, they’d just say what came to their mind, until BBC announcer Seymour Joly de Lotbiniere revolutionized the role.

We can’t just pull our personal Simple Rules out of nowhere. To make sure that our rules are the right ones, we need to base them on a vast and reliable source of knowledge. That source? None other than our own personal experiences.

Every day we learn something new about how to get by in the world. In fact, we’ve been learning all our lives! Why not take what you’ve learnt from the past and turn it into some rules that’ll help you in the future?

If you’re eager to develop your own Simple Rules, there are three crucial steps to take. First, figure out the critical action that will help you achieve your goal.

For a company that wants to increase profits, the critical action could be to increase the one factor that leads to most profits. For example, the trading platform eToro has a special feature, eToro OpenBook, where expert investors share their trading strategies. Many investment novices go there for valuable advice. The expert investors whose advice has the greatest following achieve the rank of “Popular Investor.”

After a while, we can get so used to our Simple Rules that following them requires no effort at all. Of course, this is a very comfortable level to achieve. Sadly, it doesn’t last.

Even if your initial rules still work out somehow, you shouldn’t stop striving to improve on them. Rules that worked well once may become less than adequate if the situation changes. For instance, usually it’s a good rule to eat an apple a day but if your teeth enamel gets thinner, sugary apples suddenly aren’t so good to eat any more.