Introduction
Welcome to The Rules of Everything. It’s a pretty grand sounding title, eh? So… everything? OK, these aren’t all the Rules there ever are or could be, but they do cover pretty much every area of life – your life, my life, everyone’s life.
Rules? What are Rules with a capital R? Well, nearly 20 years ago I wrote a book called The Rules of Work, which covered 100 or so of the most important unwritten Rules that are essential for your career, but no one tells you. Attitudes and mindsets you need to follow. I’m one of life’s people watchers and these were all principles I’d observed during my working life, and which I’d copied successfully myself. Eventually I left the full-time corporate world to pursue other things, including writing. That was when it had dawned on me that other people might be interested in these hidden Rules, so I began to write them down … and The Rules of Work was born. A few of them are unexpected or surprising, but most of them are common sense when you think about it. However most of us don’t think about it in the hurly-burly of everything else, which is why bringing them all together in one book seemed a good idea. They’re more of a reminder than a revelation.
The Rules of Work was way more successful than I ever imagined – it turned out that an awful lot of people could see the value they could get from it, and I was delighted when I started to hear from readers whose careers had taken off once they too started to practise the Rules. So I wrote The Rules of Management. From there the series built up, through Life, Wealth, Parenting, Love… and there are now ten books in the series which, between them, really do cover pretty much everything.
So now seemed like the obvious time to put together the best of the best. Regular Rules readers know that it’s well worth investing in a book that gives you 100+ Rules about a key part of your life. But not everyone is a parent, or works in management, or is aiming to be really wealthy, and ten books is a big investment when the topics aren’t central to your life at the moment. However, that doesn’t mean you don’t want to learn any of those Rules. So here we have the top ten Rules from each book brought together in one volume so you have an overview of the Rules of everything.
I’m sensing you want to know who decides which are the top ten Rules from each book? I wanted to know that too, when I decided to bring together this compilation. So I asked the obvious people – the readers. All those Rules Players who have been buying the books over the years, not just in the UK where they were first published, but around the world. I hear from people in Iraq, Thailand, Brazil, the US, Uganda, India, Europe … so I looked at their messages and posts, and I asked all the readers who follow my Facebook page to tell me what their very favourite Rules were.
Once the votes were in and counted, I had my top ten Rules for each book. Oh alright, it wasn’t quite that straightforward and I had to curate it a bit. There wasn’t always an obvious cut-off at ten, for example. There might be six or seven standout Rules for a particular book, followed by half a dozen that all got the same number of votes, so I had to make a decision on which of those to include. Also, I wanted to bring you a good cross-section of each book, so where all the top votes fell in the same section of the book, I selected a couple from elsewhere. For example, most people’s favourite Rules in The Rules of Love are from the categories about finding love, or about romantic partnerships. However there are also sections on family and friends and so on, so I’ve respected the overall balance towards romance but I’ve given you the odd popular Rule from those other sections too. The Rules of Everything needs to give you a useful selection of Rules in itself – that’s the whole point – so I had to take this into account. This selection is very much focused on readers’ favourite Rules, but with a bit of curating to make it as useful a volume as possible.
For the benefit of any regular readers who know about these things, I would add that I haven’t included Rules from the extra sections that have been added to the books. More recent editions have an extra ten Rules on a related subject – for example there are ten Rules of happiness at the end of The Rules of Life, and ten Rules to follow at the end of The Rules to Break. It was too confusing to include these because only people who have bought later editions have seen them, and of course they’re only tangential to the subject of the book.
There are ten sections here, one for each of the individual books. I did think about what order to put them in but, in the end, the order of publication seemed as good as any. So I started with The Rules of Work and went from there. Within those sections I defaulted at ordering the Rules in the order they appear in the book itself, but I’ve tinkered with this where a better order presented itself, for example putting related Rules next to each other.
I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed putting this together and finding out which are the Rules that have most struck a chord with readers over the years. If you want to share your favourite Rules with me – either from my books or Rules you’ve observed yourself (I don’t have a monopoly) – please get in touch via my Facebook page.
Richard Templar