“We all have principles that we live by that are either positive or negative. Most of these principles come from the society we live in and the circle of people we have around us. I believe a majority of these principles we adopt, are picked up subconsciously and are not thoroughly checked to see whether they are beneficial for our well-being and journey through life. With that being said, evaluating our society as a whole, it’s a no brainer that our core principles as a nation are a downfall for humanity and as individual beings.
The 10 principles I am sharing are principles that have enabled me to achieve personal growth, as well as financial growth.
They are not in any particular order.”

Enjoy…

1. Treat and value yourself the way you want others to treat and value you.

You cannot expect someone to treat or value you any more or better than how you do with yourself.
What you believe of yourself is what you openly invite others unconsciously to come into your life and demonstrate to you. Now, this doesn’t mean that when you are being “the you” who has great self-value, everyone in your life will treat you as so, but what it does do, is set standards of how you expect to be treated. Now if these standards are not met, you will have a lot more control over being able to disconnect with those who are not living up to these standards. As for those who have very little self-value, they will leech on to people who value them more than they value themselves and will struggle a lot with disconnecting with them if the relationship changes for the worst.

2. Take from the experience, don’t allow the experience to take from you.

To take is to gain, to be taken from, is to lose.
I believe within every experience, regardless of perceived as good or bad, the one thing that is always available to be taken is knowledge/wisdom that influences personal growth.
There is something to learn from every experience, the more challenging or traumatic the experience, the deeper the wisdom. When one allows the experience to take from them, which 9 times out of 10 are the negative experiences, they become attached to the emotional pain of the experience and allow it to affect their lives long after the experience is over. But when you take from the experience, you’ll eventually perceive the experience as a blessing in disguise because the knowledge/wisdom not only enabled personal growth but also allows you to help others who may go through a similar experience.

3. If what you’re doing doesn’t enable your growth, happiness, survival, or uplift others, then what are you doing it for?

This doesn’t need a long explanation. If what you consciously choose to do isn’t creating or enabling you to reach a form of happiness, personal growth, or keep you alive without self-harming or putting your life at risk, then it may be time to take time out and evaluate your life.

4. What you don’t have, you cannot give.

If you don’t have any money to your name, then how is it possible to lend money to someone without borrowing it from someone else and then having to owe them money that you don’t have?
This is the same with love. How can you love someone without having love for yourself first?
How can you teach something you have not attained for yourself?

P.S. You wouldn’t seek advice from someone who has only ever been a thousandaire to learn how to become a millionaire, would you?

5. Your Perception is the master key.

Your life is based on your perception of it. How you view every experience, will ultimately determine the decisions you make in regard to it. For example; someone could find out they have cancer and decide to follow the concept of believing their life may be coming to an end or become very fearful which in the end paralyzes them from being able to live a life of joy and happiness. Or, they can go down the route of believing that this is a warning, that for too long they have not been living a life of purpose, a life in which they thrive and not purely just survive and decide to engage in their dreams and become healthier physically, mentally and emotionally.
There is no right or wrong way, but I assume what we perceive as right, will be the path that is more beneficial to us in the long run.
Another important message I must give you is the perception of how you see yourself is probably as crucial, or even more crucial than how you see life. If the perception of yourself is filled with unhappiness, then for most parts, you won’t be happy about life. But if the perception of yourself is a positive one, then you will be more attuned to finding the positives in all experiences, even the ones that are crap.

6. Live to thrive, not just to survive.

Take a look at your life, is all that you do purely to just get by and survive with some enjoyable experiences in between? or is it what you do for the purpose of thriving?
From my point of view, a lot of people’s focus is purely on surviving, but when you take a closer look at life, you recognise that survival is 2nd nature and instinctual to our core being, meaning, we will always automatically do what we need to, to survive.  Whereas thriving takes conscious effort which is the purpose of our higher intelligence as a species. In other words, if you are living a life where you are mostly just trying to survive, then technically, nothing separates you as a human from the rest of the animal kingdom. Because when you look at their ways of living, you can see it is predominantly based around surviving, food, shelter, and reproduction.

7. The harder the journey the more inspiring the story.

The more shit you go through, the more wisdom you can attain. The more wisdom you attain, the more personal growth is available to you. Maybe you go through a lot of challenging times because there are lessons you need to learn that you keep missing. Maybe you go through challenging times because there is something you want to achieve and life is testing or preparing you for it. Or maybe you go through challenging times a lot because you were destined to help others by utilizing the wisdom attained through your past experiences. Let’s face it, who inspires you the most? The guy who had nothing and achieved it all against the odds? Or the guy that had everything handed to him? Yes, we wish it was always easy, but we are never inspired by those stories. So my point is if you keep going through what you deem as shit, maybe it’s for a greater purpose of helping others.

8. Don’t wait for the Opportunity, Create it!

They are going to be things that you may want to achieve where the opportunity seems like it is nowhere to be seen. I believe the bigger your desire, the more you will have to work for it, and working for it means, creating your own opportunities to attain it. I’ll give you an example; After discovering performance capture acting whilst working on the film Legend Of Tarzan, I wanted to drive my career down that path, but at that stage, I knew nothing about how to get into it. Apart from the creative director on Tarzan advising me to look up motion capture studios and emailing them, I had no other resources. It took me 2 years before I got my first audition and it didn’t come about by me just sending emails. After almost two years of sending emails, I started to think about how else could I get in contact with these studios. By this time I had learned that the motion capture industry was quite closed, meaning, it is usually the same actors that get hired for a majority of the work, but even knowing that didn’t stop me from being persistent. It wasn’t until my friend told me to join LinkedIn (the social platform for professionals), where I was able to get my first audition as a performance-capture actor.
I joined LinkedIn straight away and started messaging actors, graphic animators, and individuals that worked at the studios I use to email. A lot of people were kind enough to respond, but it wasn’t until I got a response from the President of the Imaginarium studio, was I able to get my foot in the door. He put me in contact with one of their casting director and within weeks I had my first audition for the first Planet of the Apes video game, Final Frontier. I made it to the final round but wasn’t successful. A year later, I was hired to be part of the second planet of the apes’ video game, Crisis on the planets of the apes VR by the same director of the first game, and since then, I have been working as a performance-capture actor.
There are more parts to this story but I gave you the short version, the point is, from knowing no one who worked as a performance-capture actor or within that industry, I had to find ways to create my own opportunities to be able to achieve my goal. And with the industry being quite closed, I don’t believe the opportunity would have ever reached my doorstep if I didn’t.

9. Change the way you speak, take control of your language.

unless you are unable to speak due to an injury or disability, language is something you will use more than anything else in your life. It will be your main source for communication, one of your main routes for learning, and most importantly, it will play a major part in developing your perception and philosophy about life. With that being said (written lol) how you speak is a reflection of your mental programming. For example; here are some negative phrases I’ve heard and you’ve probably heard many people say regularly. “I am broke”  “I can’t afford it” “Life’s too hard” Life’s against me” “Life’s a bitch”  “I hate my life” “ I wish I was like how I use to be” “Im depressed” “People always take my kindness for a weakness” I could go on. These statements combined with an emotion and said regularly becomes a program within your subconscious mind. The subconscious doesn’t know right from wrong, or what’s real and what isn’t, that’s why you can have a horrid dream and you wake up sweating and heart beating yet all this time you were in bed. Now whatever becomes a program, becomes a biological blueprint for your brain to continuously find the equivalent to it to be able to have the same or similar experience. This is why when people love or want to buy a particular car, they notice them a lot more than they use to, and that’s because of the program they created about that car. So if you continue to make negative statements as the above, then your brain will focus on finding ways/situations/experiences where those statements can be repeated. This is why it is important to pay attention to how you speak and feel when you say things, the stronger the emotion during what you say, the stronger the programming.

Here are 3 examples of what can be said instead of the negative statements I mentioned earlier.

• I’m Broke/I can’t afford it/It’s too expensive: I don’t have the spare money right now to do that / My money is tied up in other things.
• Life’s too hard/Life’s A Bitch: Life can get challenging at times but I’ll handle it.
  (what is your interpretation of the word challenge? Do you know anyone who can grow by only doing what they find easy? Do you rate A boxer for fighting someone who may be a real challenge, or easy?)
• I hate my life: Things in my life are not going so great, what can I do to change that?

10. Stop complaining about something you can or can’t change.

Just think about it, to continuously complain about something you cannot change, how does that resolve, or achieve anything in the direction you want? and to complain about something you can change, why are you complaining instead of putting in place the things you need to, to change it?
A lot of people seem to focus on the problem, rather than put all that energy into finding the solution. What is kept in the mind which no longer exist, will always cause a form of disharmony, but this is also true knowing something can be changed but not doing what needs to be done to change it.

Thank you for giving me your time.
I hope at least one principle can be of good use to you.
~ Ace Ruele