Some rules

Rules

Don’t follow rules slavishly. A rule, after all, gives a boundary to what you do.

Don’t be concrete about what you want to do at the outset of doing it. Having a fixed goal ripples backward through a process and cuts off possibilities for exploration. So, understand that there are different reasons for having tasks, some need goals, others do not. 

Don’t clarify what you are doing until the last possible moment, notice as much as possible about it.

Your work shouldn’t be a pleasing arrangement of stuff (or an ugly one). It should be more useful than that. It should have a purpose, be a mechanism for change.

Some rules from an NYT article 10/24/12... in principle: be happy

“We wake up late and always take naps. I don’t even open my office until 11 a.m. because no one comes before then.” He took a sip of his wine. “Have you noticed that no one wears a watch here? No clock is working correctly. When you invite someone to lunch, they might come at 10 a.m. or 6 p.m. We simply don’t care about the clock here.”

Leriadis also talked about local “mountain tea,” made from dried herbs endemic to the island, which is enjoyed as an end-of-the-day cocktail. He mentioned wild marjoram, sage (flaskomilia), a type of mint tea (fliskouni), rosemary and a drink made from boiling dandelion leaves and adding a little lemon. “People here think they’re drinking a comforting beverage, but they all double as medicine,” Leriadis said. Honey, too, is treated as a panacea. “They have types of honey here you won’t see anyplace else in the world,” he said. “They use it for everything from treating wounds to curing hangovers, or for treating influenza. Old people here will start their day with a spoonful of honey. They take it like medicine.”...

The couple were born in a nearby village, they told me. They married in their early 20s and raised five children on Thanasis’s pay as a lumberjack. Like that of almost all of Ikaria’s traditional folk, their daily routine unfolded much the way Leriadis had described it: Wake naturally, work in the garden, have a late lunch, take a nap. At sunset, they either visited neighbors or neighbors visited them. Their diet was also typical: a breakfast of goat’s milk, wine, sage tea or coffee, honey and bread. Lunch was almost always beans (lentils, garbanzos), potatoes, greens (fennel, dandelion or a spinachlike green called horta) and whatever seasonal vegetables their garden produced; dinner was bread and goat’s milk. At Christmas and Easter, they would slaughter the family pig and enjoy small portions of larded pork for the next several months...

Read the whole article for some great rules:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-people-forget-to-die.html?hp