How to tell if a personal principle is too vague to follow
You write a principle, read it back, and it sounds right. "I take care of my health." "I show up for the people I love." Nothing about the sentence is false. The trouble is that a week later, on the one day it was supposed to matter, it did not say anything at all — you did not consult it, because there was nothing in it to consult. Vagueness is invisible while you are writing and obvious the moment you actually need the principle to do something.
The question that actually diagnoses it
Most people check a principle for vagueness by rereading it, which does not work, because a vague sentence sounds exactly as convincing as a specific one — arguably more so, since vague language borrows the emotional weight of the value without the friction of committing to anything. The question that works is different: if someone else watched you for a single day, could they tell you, without asking you anything, whether you kept it or not? Not whether you seem like a healthy person in general. Whether, today, specifically, yes or no.
"I take care of my health" fails this immediately — an observer has no idea what to look for. "I move my body for at least twenty minutes and I am in bed with the lights off by midnight" passes — they could watch you and answer.
Five words that are almost always hiding the vagueness
"More" and "less"
"I want to work less" and "I want to spend more time with my kids" both name a direction without naming a line. More than what, measured how, checked when? Without a number or a boundary, "more" can absorb almost any amount of effort and still feel unmet — which is exactly what makes principles like this quietly exhausting rather than useful.
"Present"
"Present" describes an internal state, not something anyone — including you — can point to from outside. You can feel present and still check your phone every four minutes; you can feel distracted and never touch it. The word is honest about the ambition and useless as an instruction.
"Healthier", "better", "balanced"
These are comparatives with no fixed point. Healthier than what — last year, last week, the version of you having a bad month? A comparative needs a stated baseline to mean anything, and almost nobody writes the baseline down, so the word quietly comes to mean "however much I currently feel is good enough," which moves with your mood.
Not every vague principle is wrong — it might just be unfinished
This matters because the fix is not always to abandon the principle. Vagueness at the level of the sentence and vagueness at the level of the value are two different problems, and confusing them makes people throw out good values because the first draft of the sentence was soft. If "I want to be more present with my family" is actually pointing at something real — noticing you reach for your phone reflexively at dinner, or that you answer work messages while your kid is talking to you — the value survives. What needs to change is not the value, it is the sentence: attach the two or three specific things that would count as living it, and the vagueness disappears without the principle changing shape.
A worked rewrite
Vague: "I want to be a better partner." Nobody can argue with it, and nobody, including you, can act on it.
Specific: "I put my phone in another room during dinner, and if something bothers me, I bring it up the day it happened, not a week later." Same value. The sentence just stopped hiding it.
Notice the rewrite did not make the principle sound more impressive. It made it smaller and more checkable, which is the trade every specific principle makes and the reason vague ones feel better to write and worse to keep.
Why vague principles fail on exactly the day you need them
A principle exists to do its work under pressure — tired, rushed, annoyed, tempted to cut a corner. That is precisely the state in which you have the least spare capacity to interpret an ambiguous instruction. "Be a better partner" requires you to improvise, in the moment, what that means for the specific disagreement you are having — exactly the kind of judgment call pressure degrades first. "Bring it up the day it happened" requires no interpretation at all; you either did or you did not. A vague principle asks more of you exactly when you have less to give, which is backwards, and it is why vague principles tend to survive calm weeks and quietly disappear during hard ones — the only weeks that were actually testing them.
A short self-check
- Read the principle. Could someone who does not know you point at a moment today and say yes or no?
- Does it contain a comparative — more, less, better, healthier — with no stated baseline?
- Does it name an internal state (present, mindful, calm) rather than something you did?
- Could you fail it today and not notice you had?
- If a stranger asked "how would I know," could you answer in one sentence, not a paragraph?
A principle that fails two or more of these is not wrong, in the sense of pointing at the wrong thing. It just is not finished. The value survives; the sentence needs two or three behaviours attached to it before it can do anything.
CreedOS's templates already come with the behaviour standards for the value they cover, and the AI drafting tool does the same job starting from a rough thought you type in — a struggle, a half-formed principle — turning it into a title and a short list of specific, observable behaviour standards. You can rewrite every word it produces; the point is only to skip straight to a checkable first draft instead of starting from a sentence that felt right when you wrote it and said nothing a week later. It's free, with no in-app purchases.