About punctuality: not being punctual means disrespecting another person’s time. It means egotistically putting yourself above someone else. I think it’s one of the worst forms of disrespect out there. I also believe that people who aren’t punctual with others, aren’t punctual with themselves, which to me means that they lack something like a mature character that comes with self-respect and respect for others. Once you understand the logic of punctuality, you’ll realize that it’s the gateway drug for so much more. If you get to the level of achievement consisting of a balance of being punctual with others, and thus, also with yourself, you’re on a fast track to self-respect and self-love, too. Not that it’s a linear relationship. It’s much more like a somewhat hierarchical network of interconnected attributes that’s best shown in the absence of punctuality. If you disrespect yourself by not being punctual with yourself, you probably also are in a love-hate relationship with yourself, and of course subsequently with others, too. I’m writing so much about the network node “punctuality” because it’s the most actionable in the network, objectively measurable, and from experience, the one strongest correlated with happiness and general life success. The happiest people I know also are the most punctual. Punctuality to me seems like the beginning of a beautiful chain, leading from basic decency to giving a fuck or truly caring about things, then respect, reliability, making yourself useful, all the way to love. All of those terms apply to both, yourself, as well as for others, in a way that’s going well together.

Of course, instead of starting with punctuality, we could all start with self-love, too, or loving others – and both need a balance between each other - but because that’s more abstract than punctuality, it’s not as easy to immediately implement.

Because I believe self-love and the capacity to love others, animals, or nature, goes hand in hand, you can practice love on many areas. My favorite mental models often are the non-obvious approaches, stuff that’s influencing your shape of mind throughout the day, stuff that really clicks. One such mental model is the idea of dating yourself. Just like with being punctual with yourself, which is a form of loyalty and reliability with yourself, if you simply think of some portion of your time that you spend with yourself in a different manner, namely as a date, this creates an upward spiral. Once you get it, punctuality looks like the same thing as health, self-love and love for others.