Fifteen Principles
About 1 minute to read
- Write down your best thinking while things are calm, so the firm can use it when they turn rough.
- Make good decisions easy to see and bad ones hard to hide.
- Spend your best hours on the foundation. The symptoms will keep calling anyway.
- Underwrite the deal as if the firm had no need to close it; a stranger reading the memo should be unable to tell whether the firm needed it.
- Give today’s work your full attention. The result arrives on its own schedule.
- Notice when you want a deal too much. Impatience with an objection is the signal to slow down.
- Decide on your own conviction, then commit.
- You are the firm’s biggest asset and its biggest bottleneck until it can run a month without you.
- Your team will hold the standard you actually keep.
- Small disciplines kept for years beat bursts of inspiration.
- Lead in three gears: clarity, drive and rest.
- Build the best version of your own firm. A bigger firm’s playbook was written for a bigger firm.
- A firm that knows what it is can let most deals go by.
- Hold steady while the market swings.
- Finish each cycle in a way that sets up the next one.
You are reading the working draft of 2 October 2026. Corrections and comments are welcome at chi@chiraghathiramani.com.