[matell]

it seems to me the five principles - responsibility, perseverance, excellence, creativity, courage - are actually surface terms describing deeper motivation, which is our constant drive to improve our "mental model".

in our brain, we have a "mental model" of the world. it is imperfect, yet allows us to make predictions. Our goal is to improve this model (aka simulator, prediction engine) over the time. We seek for indicators which tell us if our mental model is improving or not. One of the indicators is money one our bank account, our praise of some master.

I'd be grateful if anyone of you can point me to some literature which describes the approach I outlined above. I use the expression "improve my mental model", but I guess philosophy is using some other (more established) term.

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I am not trying to deal with the question why we actually strive to improve our "mental model" :) though I like the idea that it leads to "less suffering".