My current self-help practice is a spin on "principle-centered living" as suggested in Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In that book, Covey suggests that the way to be effective—which he makes a point of distinguishing from being happy and being successful—is to center yourself on your principles. He starts the book by showing the pitfalls of having false centers:

If you are Spouse Centered: You are highly vulnerable to the moods and feelings of your spouse.

If you are Family Centered: Your feelings of self-worth are based on the family reputation.

If you are Money Centered: Your personal worth is determined by your net worth.

On the other hand, if you're "Principle Centered" then "Your source of security provides you with an immovable, unchanging, unfailing core enabling you to see change as an exciting adventure and opportunity to make significant contributions."

This sounds very seductive, and when I read that ten years ago, I felt deeply moved. However, I didn't know where to begin forming a list of principles. Stephen Covey also doesn't list any of his principles in his book.

I did some searching and found that Covey has a site where people can post their progress working through his practices:

Here's an example from one user:

Family (Wife and Kids) = I do not react to their weaknesses and I use proactivity to make them successful slowly.

Career = I work with plan and plan my work use courage to achieve my goals to full fill my materialistic needs.

That doesn't really make sense to me. They remind me of principles I started hashing out when I read Covey's book ten years ago. i.e. They all felt half-baked, leaving me with a temporary self-help high.

However, a year ago, I resurrected principle-centered thinking in a way that worked for me and has changed my life. My strategy has been to come up with a sentence that encapsulates a timeless rule.

What I did was develop a 6th sense for whether something is "meaningful." I was able to read potential principles, and I could feel this umpf in my chest that told me "this is meaningful." You can try this yourself too. Think of the last 10 movies you've seen, and one by one, ask yourself, "is this meaningful?" If you feel a deep-seated "yeah" inside of you, then that movie's meaningful to you.

You can use this meaningfulness test in any other domain. Is your job meaningful? Is your current relationship meaningful? Is the book or TV show you're into meaningful?

Now, if you use this meaningfulness test to create a sentence that every time you read it, you feel moved by it, then you have yourself a bona fide principle.

Here are three really powerful ones that I came up with for myself:

• All social interaction should be preceded by empathy. (As discussed here.)
  
  
• Happiness has less to do with where you are at than with what you do about it.
  
  
• Your rambling, passive, stream-of-consciousness thoughts are not what you really think.

Ever since I committed each of those principles to writing, they've changed me in reliable ways. Each one represents thoughts that I've always believed in somewhere in the back of my mind, but never combined into a strong position. That first principle, on socializing, made me immediately, and permanently more effective at socializing. That second one about happiness, made me permanently more optimistic about life. And that third one made me permanently less beholden by the chatter in my head.

Over the past year, I created a list of 390+ principles on all sorts of topics, including success, passion, relationships, and communications. I hope to eventually produce a book compiling these.

The way to come up with a principle is to think of a problem in your life that you feel you've solved half-way. What can you say about it that is meaningful? What could you say to yourself that would unify you and give you a full and confident response?