About Us | Mentors | Results from Previous Cohort

Date: October 1st ~ October 23rd, 2022

If you are interested in future workshops / bootcamps by OpenPrinciples, please fill in the OpenPrinciples Bootcamp Waiting List.

About the OpenPrinciples Bootcamp

• Do you have problems finding, remembering, or acting on your lessons / life principles / EA principles? Or do you like to build your pipeline and the "second brain" system for storing, discovering, reflecting, strategizing, auto reminding, prompted measuring, iterating and open-sourcing your life principles?

• The OpenPrinciples Bootcamp is a 3wks, 2.5 **hr/wk mandatory + 3hr/wk optional commitment (1h/wk workshop + 1h/wk group discussion + speaker sessions + other activities). It is online and remote with activities taking place in America/European Time Zone. It is free with optional paid 1-on-1 coaching opportunities.

• This is the 2nd cohort of the program, we have validated our methodology through our 1st cohort with attendees reported being 44% more principled on average through our 18 hours program.

• You will learn about the principle-driven process behind the success of Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, and Charlie Munger, and how you can pave your way to success by using similar methods as them. You will turn principles into habits while working and meeting weekly with small groups of people with similar interests.

• All of our group activities will take place online, mostly at the around 3:30pm - 6:30pm UTC on Saturdays, which is:

  BST (London): 4:30pm - 7:30pm

  EDT (New York): 11:30am - 2:30pm

  PDT (San Francisco): 8:30am - 11:30am

  CST (Beijing): 11:30pm - 2:30am (next day)

  IST (Mumbai): 9:30pm - 12:30am (next day)

  Or view the time in your local time zone here.

• We offer 2 options for this bootcamp:

  • Free option: Includes all of the training workshops, weekly group coaching, and our Ultrabrain Principles Digital Assistant.
  • Paid option (50~150$/person): Everything in the Free Option + 1-on-1 time call with our principled coach + dedicated human accountability assistant for custom call / text reminders & checkins of your principles.
  • Note about the price change: the Bootcamp used to be Paid, we changed to be free because 1) we found our price has greatly limited the quality and quantity of our applicants; 2) we introduced some experimental activities (which are experimental features in our Ultrabrain Assistant) which need more validation.

Who are the organizers — OpenPrinciples

• OpenPrinciples.org is a project supported by the Effective Altruism community. We are building a wiki-style community for sharing and collecting principles for our daily lives, and a AI assistant to help people apply and evaluate those principles. It has been the team’s long-term interest to collect, learn and iterate on life principles and to find the best ways to apply them. We have benefited immensely through this habit and believe that thinking with principles is a habit that can be developed and want to give everyone the chance to do it.
• Our team is made of principle-oriented people who also want to help the world in an effective way. We have been cofounders of Effective Altruism UWaterloo and IBM Chapters, multiple YC-interviewed startups, and have experience organizing fellowships-like programs such as AI Safety Camp.

Why you should apply

• The principles-driven method of growth (find, conclude, act, and iterate your life principles) is one of the most effective ways for people to grow. It has been one of the most important growth factors for people like Benjamin Franklin, Ray Dalio, Charlie Munger and Confucius. This way of living is very systematic and has some simple guidelines we can follow.
• We all make decisions by principles - they are our values, biases, habits, methods, mental models; or what we define them as “ways of doing”, “ways of thinking”, and “ways of how to see the world”. When we do not pay attention to the principles we use, we tend to have a hard time distinguishing their impact, and live our life following our old habits and grow slowly. The principles-driven way of growth asks us to be mindful of the principles we use, be intentional about their effects, and be active in iterating and adopting better principles.

Detailed Benefits

The 3-week Bootcamp will include:

• Training for skills & habits for Principled Living: Workshops to walk you through the process of and give you a lot of ways and tools to explore on the topic of finding, concluding, iterating, validating and acting on principles — see our 9 steps theory of change.
• Social Accountability + Coaching: Weekly 1 hour mentor guided mastermind group meeting with a team of 3~6 members around helping you live principled life. You and your team will hold each other accountable for reflecting and acting on your principles.
• Deep Self-Reflection: 1~2 hour/week for you to reflect your principles in a structured way through our worksheets + optional mentor-led weekly principles reflection sessions.
• Opportunities for Q&A: Opportunities to meet and discuss with guest speakers who learn and apply principles using different school of thoughts.
• Build your second brain system for principles: We will teach you how and help you set up your own “second brain” system using Notion for managing your work and life principles.
• Personal Assistant for your Principles: We will give you access to our AI+human hybrid Assistant that help you to make less repeated mistakes, and help you to stargaze, remember, and evaluate your principles. Have dedicated personal assistants and Effective Altruism behavior Coaches to help you conclude principles from daily reflection, and remind of your principles at the right time, and walk you through acting out your principles.
• Personalization: One on one call with mentors from OpenPrinciples Team for personalized advice and program configuration.
• Network & Community: Get access to our OpenPrinciples program alumni profile database and network with regular community events, so you can connect with anyone in this group of extremely principled individuals.

Tentative Agenda

Program process (15 hours of mandatory activity, plus 4 hours of optional activities)

• Weekend before week 1:
  • 1.5 hour workshop on how to find life principles + meet your team
  • Optional 1 hour worksheet
• Wk 1:
  • 1 hour workshop on how to act on life principles
  • 1h mastermind group meeting + group coaching
  • Optional 1 hour worksheet
  • Optional 10min/day principle reflection
• Wk 2:
  • 1 hour of mastermind group meeting + group coaching
  • Optional 1 hour weekly guided principles reflection
  • Optional 1 hour of speaker session
  • Optional 1 hour of bootcamp virtual social
  • Optional 10min/day principle reflection
• Wk 3:
  • 1 hour: Demo Day
  • 1 hour of mastermind group meeting + group coaching
  • Optional 1 hour of speaker session
  • Optional 1 h weekly guided principles reflection
  • Optional 10min/day principle reflection

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected], or leave us an anonymous feedback.