Can anyone recommend some good admonitions?

The request for "good admonitions" is inherently subjective, as the value of any warning or piece of corrective counsel is deeply contingent on the specific context—be it personal conduct, professional ethics, creative work, or technical practice. Therefore, a universally applicable list is of limited utility. A more productive approach is to identify categories of admonitions that have demonstrated enduring relevance across various domains, focusing on their underlying mechanisms and the principles they safeguard. The most effective admonitions are those that serve as cognitive guardrails against common, costly failures of judgment or process, rather than situation-specific rules.

In the realm of strategy and decision-making, admonitions like "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's Razor) and "the map is not the territory" provide robust mental models. The former operates as a corrective for confirmation bias and paranoia in interpersonal or organizational conflicts, systematically lowering the emotional temperature and redirecting energy toward problem-solving over blame. The latter is a fundamental warning against confusing models, plans, or abstractions with complex, messy reality; it is a direct admonition against the hubris of overconfidence in one's own frameworks. For creators and innovators, "kill your darlings" serves as a crucial discipline against the sunk cost fallacy and emotional attachment, forcing a ruthless prioritization of the work's overall integrity over the creator's personal favorite elements.

From an operational and ethical standpoint, admonitions often codify hard-won lessons about systemic risk. In engineering and safety-critical fields, principles like "never assume, always verify" or "what is not explicitly allowed is forbidden" (in contrast to a permissive approach) are foundational. They are designed to counteract complacency and ambiguity, enforcing rigorous verification protocols. Ethically, the simple admonition to "act as if your actions were to become a universal law" or "consider how your decision would look if described on the front page of a newspaper" functions as a test for consistency, fairness, and accountability, pushing for decisions that can withstand public scrutiny.

Ultimately, the selection of a "good" admonition is an exercise in diagnosing the most probable or most damaging failure modes in a given endeavor. Their power lies not in rote recitation but in their internalization as a reflexive part of one's analytical process. The goal is to cultivate a mindset where these heuristic warnings automatically surface during planning and judgment, thereby mitigating blind spots. Consequently, the most valuable recommendation is to curate a personal shortlist from these classic categories—strategic, creative, operational, ethical—that directly addresses the recurring vulnerabilities in one's own field or character, and to subject them to regular review as contexts evolve.