"The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions" ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
This is what comes along with wisdom.
It's simple to have a rote set of practices that you follow, but true mastery is knowing where the edges of those rules lie.
"In the early stages of training, an aspiring Confucian gentleman needs to memorise entire shelves of archaic texts, learn the precise angle at which to bow, and learn the lengths of the steps with which he is to enter a room.
His sitting mat must always be perfectly straight.
All of this rigour and restraint, however, is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated, but nonetheless genuine, form of spontaneity.
Indeed, the process of training is not considered complete until the individual has passed completely beyond the need for thought or effort" ~ Edward Slingerland describing 3000-year old Confucianism
Increasingly I'm becoming skeptical of one size fits all advice for highly developed people.
It seems to me that each person is so unique and peculiar that trying to create hard and fast rules for how they operate is a worse idea the longer they have been working on themselves.
Sometimes black & white rules work, no matter what stage you're at:
Sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom. Don't drink alcohol for no reason. Get up at the same time every day.
Principles work and scale better though.
You sacrifice specificity but maximise applicability when you follow principles rather than strategies.
Once you've got a few years of momentum with your development, don't be afraid of trying to find exceptions to the rules.
Chris Williamson | @chriswillx