the boringwork.

The Rules of Life by Richard Templar: Book Notes

Roman Kalugin

TL;DR

  • Richard Templar packs roughly 100 one-page «rules» for living with dignity, resilience, and better relationships. Most are common sense stated cleanly.
  • A handful of the rules line up with real evidence: gratitude, small acts of kindness, and reframing rather than ruminating.
  • The format is also the weakness. A hundred aphorisms with no argument dilute the few that matter, and «just stay positive» edges into advice you cannot test.
  • The happiness research that arrived after 2006 sharpens what Templar guessed at, and quietly refutes how large those gains actually are.
  • Verdict below, with a rating you can act on.
The Rules of Life by Richard Templar — cover

Verdict

This is a calm, readable reminder book, not a discovery. Templar collects the behaviours that stable, decent people tend to share and writes each as a short rule. Nothing here will surprise a thoughtful adult, and the author says as much. The value is in the reminding, not the revealing.

If you want the working core, you can get it from these notes and the linked research without buying 100 pages of aphorism. If you like a bedside book of short, sane prompts and read one rule a day, the format earns its place. As with most of the titles in our Book Notes, the tools matter more than the packaging. For most readers pressed for time, our rating is «Read our notes instead».

The big idea

Templar’s thesis is that a good life follows patterns, not luck, and that those patterns can be named. He calls them Rules: keep problems in proportion, take responsibility, stay curious, do not try to control the people you love, and carry yourself with quiet dignity.

The framing is deliberately modest. Templar presents himself as an observer who watched who ages well and who does not, then wrote down the difference. That honesty is the book’s best feature and its structural trap at once.

Key ideas

  • Keep your problems in proportion. Most of what we treat as a crisis is an inconvenience with adrenaline attached. Templar asks you to rank a setback against real loss before reacting. This is folk cognitive reappraisal, and it is the single rule with the strongest research behind it.
  • You are responsible for your own life. Blame is comfortable and useless. The rule is not that everything is your fault, but that your response is always your jurisdiction.
  • Stay interested. Curiosity is treated as a discipline, not a mood. People who keep learning keep their footing when circumstances shift.
  • Do not try to change people. In partnerships and friendships, Templar argues for independence over control. You manage your own conduct and let others own theirs.
  • Give without keeping score. Several rules point at generosity, small kindness, and attention to others as the texture of a good life rather than a transaction.
  • Count what you have. A recurring thread is deliberate gratitude and noticing what already works, instead of pricing what is missing.
  • Act with dignity under pressure. How you behave when things go wrong, Templar suggests, matters more than avoiding the wrong thing in the first place.

What holds up

Three of Templar’s threads survived two decades of testing, though smaller than the book implies.

Reframing beats ruminating. Webb, Miles, and Sheeran’s meta-analysis of emotion-regulation strategies found that cognitive reappraisal reliably improved emotional outcomes, while suppression and distraction did not (Psychological Bulletin, 2012). «Keep it in proportion» is reappraisal in plain clothes.

Gratitude does something. Emmons and McCullough ran the anchor experiment: people who listed things they were grateful for each week reported better mood, more optimism, and even more exercise than those who listed hassles (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003).

Kindness pays the giver. When people were assigned to perform acts of kindness for others rather than for themselves, the prosocial group gained more in wellbeing (Nelson and colleagues, Emotion, 2016). Templar’s «give without keeping score» has a mechanism behind it.

What doesn’t

The problems are with size, format, and the parts you cannot test.

The effects are real but small. When Cregg and Cheavens pooled gratitude trials, the benefit for depression and anxiety was modest overall and shrank to near nothing against an active control, suggesting much of the lift is expectation (Journal of Happiness Studies, 2021). Templar writes as if these habits reorganise a life. The data say they nudge it.

Circumstances resist willpower. The popular model that Templar’s optimism assumes, where a large share of happiness is under voluntary control, has been walked back by its own authors. Sheldon and Lyubomirsky revisited the famous pie chart and cautioned against reading it as a fixed budget you can simply spend into contentment (2021). We treat the ceiling on effort-driven happiness in our review of the happiness research.

The format dilutes the signal. A hundred rules of roughly equal visual weight hide the four that carry evidence among ninety-six that are taste, era, or filler. There is no way, inside the book, to tell «reframe your setbacks» from «dress well». Volume reads as authority and is not.

Unfalsifiable edges. Rules that reduce to «stay positive» cannot fail, which means they cannot be checked. Advice that survives every outcome teaches nothing about which outcome to expect.

Why the tools outlive the theory

Strip the aphorisms and three tools remain, each with a real mechanism. Reappraisal works because reinterpreting an event early changes the emotional response downstream, before rumination locks in. Gratitude works partly by redirecting attention toward what is already present, countering the way we adapt to and stop noticing our own good fortune. Kindness works because acting for others reliably shifts mood more than acting for yourself, and it builds the relationships that predict long-run wellbeing. You can practise all three without agreeing that life has 100 rules. Building them into a routine is closer to habit design than to inspiration.

Who should actually read it

Read the full book if you enjoy a short daily prompt and want a gentle, non-clinical nudge toward saner conduct. It works well as a bedside dip-in.

Skip it if you already reflect, already read on how you think, or want evidence rather than assertion. If you are looking for the academic case for these habits, Ben-Shahar’s «Happier» and the primary studies below are a better use of the same hour. And if you distrust round numbers of rules, note that the «add one more principle» genre shares this book’s habit of packaging old sense as new structure.

One thing to try

The shift: stop treating «be more positive» as a goal and pick one testable behaviour instead. Vague optimism cannot be practised or checked. A specific action can.

First move: tonight, write down three concrete things that went right today and one line on why each happened. It is the Emmons and McCullough protocol, it takes four minutes, and unlike a rule you can measure whether it changes your week.

Get the book

Find «The Rules of Life» on Amazon — as an Amazon Associate, The Boring Work earns from qualifying purchases (disclosure).

The boring bottom line

Templar wrote down what steady people already do, and a few of those things hold up under measurement. The trouble is that the good rules and the filler wear the same uniform, and the real effects are smaller than the confident tone promises. Keep the three that work: reframe, notice, give. Leave the other ninety-something on the shelf.

Sources

The Russian-language predecessor of this article (2009) is preserved in the archive.

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