I mentioned at the end of yesterday's "Work Should Feel Wrong" entry, one of a series on my personal principles, that today's principle is the hardest of the bunch to describe.

Roll the clock back to my college years (hey, it's not that far...) and visit one of my Calculus study sessions with Brian. For whatever reason, Brian always went to class and needed help with the homework, and I never went to class and helped him with his homework. Be that as it may, it was during one of these sessions that we discovered this principle - more of an axiom - about the number zero and it's strange properties.

Because I'm lazy, I enlisted Brian's help via instant messenger this afternoon to reflect on the nature of the zero rule. He describes it thus:

Anything that so routinely invokes exceptions, special rules, or straight up melt downs in logical and procedural systems, despite a cool and easy going veneer on commonality, must have a sinister and malicious plan.

Here's his example. If you multiply 3 × 50 you get 150. And you can easily reverse that, where 150 ÷ 3 equals 50. But try that with 0, and it's a whole different scenario. You can't get back to where you started, and you've got nothing but an exception to an otherwise very nice, orderly set of rules.

The problem with zero is that it's such an innocuous looking thing that completely changes the game.

Interestingly, this rule seems to rear its head most often when there is zero of something, or something conspicuously missing that seems like it should be present. I am completely without examples of this, because it's one of those things that you only recognize when you realize you're in the midst of it, and you must react immediately or face the consequences of irrecoverable zero-based doom.

As with the Tetris Principle, you can really only grasp this if you're living it. I can't completely teach it to you.

And with a whimper, so ends my personal principle series. I hope you enjoyed these last six posts. I wish that people would look through these and think what seemingly mundane "rules" they follow and submit a few of their own in the comments, or in a post on their own blogs. It would be fun to trade them and exchange related stories.

I'll now return you to your regularly scheduled blog drivel.

By now you should know that I've been posting a list of personal principles for the past few days. Yesterday's was about moving forward every day. Today's is about getting the most out of work.

I remember growing up always being encouraged by my parents to reach for the stars. There wasn't anything they discouraged me from when thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up.

It started at an early age, when I wanted to be an astronaut. Now before you laugh, I put some actual planning into this. I had a kind of path to my goal sorted out -- I would enter the Air Force Academy to be an aeronautical engineer, become a pilot, and eventually fly the space shuttle. All of this came to a crashing halt when, in preparation for my future years of touring the stars, I took a drafting class in high school and found myself in a remedial math class on fractions for the vo-tech crowd.

There's nothing wrong with vo-tech, and nothing wrong with remedial math, but when I was taking Advanced Placement Honors Calculus at the time, remedial fractions broke my delusions of getting ahead in aeronautics in high school. Nonetheless, my parents were still encouraging.

I don't know why, but I remember many days when Dad would come home from the cookie factory, and he'd tell me, "Do what you love." I kind of understood that at the time. It seemed like a simple concept. But it's really not.

I'm not even sure my dad understood it the way I understand it today. Today, I don't think about doing what I love. I do love the field in which I work. I think that's part of my problem sometimes - feeling like a dancing monkey, putting on my show whether I want to or not, just as long as they're cranking the music box. But that's obviously not the solution or the today's rule.

What I'm talking about is getting work to feel like it's something so involved, so fun, so engrossing that they shouldn't be paying you to do it. Think of maybe one of those effortless days when you start in the morning, and before you know it it's dark outside, and you're high on the activity of work itself, and you're feeling sad that you're going to stop.

Maybe I'm the only one of us having those days? I hope not. If I am the only one, then you're doing something wrong. I don't have those days every day, but I know I can, and that's pretty important.

So that's the nature of this rule: Push yourself to be in the flow.

It's hard to quantify. It's harder even to say how this should be done. I know there are a lot of books on "flow", which describes a kind of altered state of being. "The Zone," some people call it.

As they say, recognizing that it happens is the first step to repeating it. I recommend that if there's any place you do get into the zone, it should be work. When marrying this concept with what my parents always told me about doing what you love, I think there's an endless amount of happiness to be found in doing what amounts to basic subsistence.

Sure, it's a simple rule, simply described, but sometimes those are the best. If you have a problem with that, or you want to applaud it, the comment form is there for your submission.

Tomorrow's principle is the most esoteric and mystical of the bunch. I've been struggling all week with how to even present it, but whatever -- I wrote it down, and it's one of the oldest ones, so I have to pitch it whether I fail or not. It's called, "Zero Is Bad." I'll probably be cursed just for saying it aloud, too.

I took a break yesterday from the principles to play some Rock Band 2. I hope you did something to rest yourself, too. But today continues from Sunday's revelation of the Tetris Principle on to "Move Forward Every Day."

If you come by here or read the site's feed often at all, you'll notice that I complain a lot about not having any time to get anything done. I assume that this is a characteristic that many creative people share, since there always seems to be at least one - usually more like 50 - big project that you're always talking about getting done, or simply looming out there, taunting you...

Sorry, I was just distracted by those three novels I want to write.

It's not a simple matter of budgeting time. There are plenty of systems that will help you do that. If you look at GTD, it even quantifies this particular rule pretty well with its "next action" idea. But that's still not the full picture, even if there's some implication of it there.

I had an interesting conversation with Roz last week after the PANMA event on SEO. I complained, as I always do, about the "Just Do It" attitude that a lot of the Philly tech folks have.

Basically, their thought (and I clearly don't get it - although I have many reasons/excuses for this, but all require a separate post) is that if you have an idea, you just do it. Get it done and reap the rewards. You can't wait around for someone else to do it, and you can't waste your time dawdling while you have your idea to implement. Also, there seems to be some implication of doing the thing as fast as you can to get an iteration out of your head; get it down on paper/in code and decide then whether it needs more refinement or what have you.

And to that I say, "Bah!"

I have nothing short of 20 ideas that I could implement now. And at least 5 of them are world-changing (at least in my mind). But I've got other things to do. Primarily, keeping a roof over my head, and making sure that my kids don't grow up into street thugs because I didn't read to them or teach them how to play well with other kids.

So how do I balance what I can do with what I must do? This is that rule.

Roz says, "Do something small every day." And that's cool, but it doesn't quite cover it, I think, in much the same way that a "next action" in GTD doesn't cover it. I need to make sure that the small thing that I'm doing is actually going to move forward one of my goals. And at the same time, the "something small" doesn't really have to be small, if I have the time to do something big.

This principle says, just make sure that whatever you're doing, no matter how big or small, is something that is moving you forward. This rule doesn't suggest that everything you do needs to be in accordance with a goal, just that every day you try to do something that is goal-oriented that moves that goal forward.

It's pretty simple, and it doesn't solve the inevitable problem of coming up with more great ideas than I can ever complete alone (some people would say to just give those ideas away, and that's a good plan), but it hopefully will have the result of at least leaving me feeling more fulfilled with what I do day-to-day.

If you have thoughts on this principle or have implemented something similar yourself (to good or ill), please comment. Otherwise, stick around for tomorrow's review of the next rule, "Work Should Feel Wrong."

Yesterday's principle on being picky was part of a series I'm writing on some unrefined personal principles; some general rules that I follow day-to-day. As I mentioned yesterday, today's is my favorite of the bunch.

I went to college at the University of Pittsburgh in Johnstown. It's kind of like the ski lodge remote campus that you see in the National Lampoon movies. Really, the dorms looked just like ski lodges. I mentioned before that I was a DJ in school, and one of the perks in my second year (since, the year we before basically turned the radio station from a bumbling classic rock joke into a burgeoning modern/alternative contender) was having the opportunity to live in "Radio House" - basically a fraternity house for people involved in radio.

These houses (one for the guys, one for the girls) were arranged like smaller dorms. Two rooms on the first floor shared a bathroom, as did two rooms on the second. Two guys/girls to a room, with a shared kitchen and living space on the first floor. The guys across the hall from my roommate and I had this running abuse going with a girl who idolized my roommate. Suffice to say, these are the humble origins of the Tetris Principle.

Rather than get into the horrible things we did to Kristy on a regular basis, and the bet I made with Tom across the hall on her behalf, let me talk about the circumstances upon which of one of these wagers took place.

Concerning Columns, a Game for the Sega Genesis

We played a lot of Sega Genesis in college. One of the games I liked to play most was a game called "Columns". In Columns, columns of three squares (styled like gems) would fall from the top of the game board. As they fell, you could move them from side to side with the controller, or press a button to rotate the colors of the gems -- not their vertical-horizontal orientation, but the order of the gem colors.

By placing enough like-colored gems next to each other, they would be removed from the board, and the gems on top of them would fall. Sometimes the gems that fell would line up other sets of similarly-colored gems, resulting in a cascade of point accumulation. Depending on how well you arranged things, you could achieve many of these cascades, each one adding multiplicatively to your score.

One thing that we did a lot with Columns, besides making bets on who would next deal with Kristy, was compete in inter-room time trials. This was a specific mode of the game that gave you only a certain amount of time to get the highest score possible. At the shortest time setting, using typical strategies to win the game just didn't work. The more you try to plan things to line up, the more time you take, and the less successful you are.

That's when we discovered a particular strategy that not only worked well for the time trials, but became the basis for today's principle.

Build It Up, Wreck It Down

Columns is a tad esoteric. But I bet pretty much everyone has played Tetris. Some Tetris clones even have a time trial mode just like Columns. Tetris has a similar characteristics to Columns that people may find easier to understand, and "The Tetris Principle" just sounds better than "The Columns Principle". Maybe it's just me.

Anyway, if you want to score big in Tetris, you can't simply continuously build endless series of single completed rows at the bottom of the board. What you need to do is build the board up so that there's a hole in it that is one block wide and four blocks tall. Eventually, with a little luck or a little planning, the 1×4 piece that fits in that slot will fall, and you'll score the highest bonus available in the game.

As such, it's impossible to build a 4-row Tetris if you don't have any blocks on the board. That's the key to the principle: You need to have stuff to work with already if you want to be really successful.

Applying the Rule

The application of this rule can vary widely. Sometimes, it can be about starting with a blank slate. When writing, for example, sometimes just getting a bunch of random junk out onto the blank sheet results in something better than if you sit there and plan it out. It's not just that you have material to work with, but also that by accumulating what you have, you can subsequently produce a plan of attack that results in success.

This principle is neat because it hits me almost every day when I code. I just start doing it. I often have a plan for what I'm going to do in advance, but sometimes it's just good to get anything down and refine it, then drop in that final column and watch the whole thing light up.

Another neat thing about this principle is that it implies risk. It takes guts to stack up four rows of blocks and leave that narrow little hole. And sometimes that specific piece never comes. You need to either know how to handle it with a lesser piece (hey, that happens), or take a bigger risk and stack it another set of four higher. It's a matter of comfort and experience with what you're doing that tells you how far to take it.

What I like best about this principle is that when you learn it, you see applications for it everywhere. It's hard to explain. Just keep it in mind the next time you're out to dinner or doing yard work, and perhaps you'll see what I mean. If you do, or if you just have a related thought you want to share, please do comment - I want to hear from you.

Tomorrow's rule is something a lot of people have been telling me lately -- sort of. They're saying it differently, and I've put just a slight adjustment in to correct it. I hope to see you then for "Move Forward Every Day".

Today's entry is next in line of my personal principles, after yesterday's rule, "Give Love Freely".

This principle starts with bananas.

A few years ago, I loathed bananas. Couldn't stand the smell, much less the taste. I don't know why, but that's just the way things fell out. But in discovering that I didn't like bananas, it turns out there were a lot of other foods that I don't like:

Nuts. Strawberries. Soup. Watermelon. Anything flavored with lemon.

Wow. I'm really picky. What the heck, Owen, don't you like anything? Sure, I like stuff. In fact, I just don't like these things as much as I like other things. What I'm saying is that since I'm being given the choice, I'd rather not waste my time with things that I know I don't like, no matter what other people think of them.

This is much different from avoiding new things. In fact, it's almost the opposite, since I usually love trying new things. But if I've done something, there's got to be a really good reason for me to re-try it if I didn't like it in the first place. When given this world full of pleasures, why torture myself with things that other people insist I should like that I know I don't?

Obviously, this whole principle isn't solely about foods. A great example of the extension of this into the software development aspect of my world is Java. I simply hate Java. I've never had a good experience with it. As a result, I just won't touch it any more. Mind you, this isn't an irrational reaction on my part - I've coded in Java and used Java applications plenty. But I've come to a higher-level conclusion that Java is to be avoided, so I do, and I don't care what anyone else says.

In yesterday's principle, I mentioned that giving love freely even applies to people that you know wouldn't return it. This is where an important interaction between the rules begins. I hope to have no reason to be near the people that wouldn't return my positive energy. If I have to deal with them, then be positive. Otherwise, I remain picky about who I spend my effort on.

There's only so much time in this life, and I'm sure not going to go through it being miserable because I have to eat food I don't like, use tools that ruin my day, and deal with people that make me angry no matter how positive I am with them. Following this rule gives me plenty of opportunity to enjoy things and people I like, which is what it's all about. And in those rare instances where I can't get that -- I keep a positive outlook, give love freely, and hope that my mind is changed.

Speaking of which, I don't dislike bananas so much any more.

This rule is less about creating long lists of things to dislike, and more about having permission to avoid the things you do not like that everyone thinks you should. I think as a result of following this rule, I spend a lot more time enjoying the experiences I have, and seeking out new things to try, which I also enjoy.

This principle feels soft, like it needs work. I think I'm following it pretty well, although I don't know that I've described it very well. Hey, I said in the beginning that they needed refined. Anyway, take it or leave it, there it is. Make it yours.

Nonetheless, tomorrow's principle is not to be missed. It's my favorite principle of them all, and if you take one principle away from this whole list, tomorrow's will be the one that never fails and applies to almost anything I can think of. Don't miss it.