The biggest ideas usually fit in small words. “Be fair” and “show up” have built entire lives.

Weight and length are not the same thing. The instructions people actually live by tend to be short, because short survives being remembered under pressure, and nobody recalls a paragraph at the moment they need it. The complexity lives in the doing, not the saying. A plain phrase can carry decades of behaviour behind it.

Try reducing something you believe to three or four words and see whether it still holds. If it collapses, you may be holding a preference rather than a principle. If it holds, you now have something portable enough to use on a bad day.