The first principle is attention.

Most bad work begins before the work begins. It begins when the room is too loud, the incentive is too cheap, or the ambition is borrowed from somebody else's calendar.

Attention is not a productivity trick. It is a moral choice about what is allowed to become real in your life. What you repeatedly notice becomes the raw material of your taste.

The work gets cleaner when the inputs get cleaner. Less performance. Fewer premature claims. More time spent staring directly at the thing until it stops pretending to be simpler than it is.